There is strong evidence suggesting that this region was a refugium, one of several areas around the Pacific Rim that remained ice-free during the last glaciation, and this may help explain the presence of an ecosystem that exists nowhere else.

On the Bikin River, in 1996, there had been another incident in which a native man named Evgeny Nekrasov shot at a family of tigers from his boat, whereupon the tigress jumped into his boat and attacked him. He survived only because his partner, who was also in the boat, shot the tigress and killed her.

In addition to being delightful words to say, umwelt and umgebung offer a framework for exploring and describing the experience of other creatures. In the umgebung of a city sidewalk, for example, a dog owner’s umwelt would differ greatly from that of her dog’s in that, while she might be keenly aware of a sale sign in a window, a policeman coming

The one certainty in tiger tracks is: follow them long enough and you will eventually arrive at a tiger, unless the tiger arrives at you first.

Ordinary people were reluctant to retaliate against a predatory tiger for fear it would take offense, not to mention revenge, and so their day-to-day lives were shaped—and sometimes tyrannized—by efforts to at once avoid and propitiate these marauding gods.

A portion of the proceeds from this book are being donated to several organizations working on the front lines of the tiger protection effort in Primorye: In addition to supporting Yuri Trush’s work in Udeghe Legend National Park, Phoenix Fund, www.phoenix.vl.ru, based in Vladivostok, is currently assisting more than a dozen inspection teams in Pri

During the winter, it was so cold that the horses’ nostrils would become clogged with ice from their own breath, and drivers had to stop periodically to clear them in order to keep the animals from suffocating.

Vladivostok, which is home to more than half a million people, is just a two-day train journey from Beijing. The trip to Moscow, on the other hand, is a week-long, 5,800-mile epic on the Trans-Siberian. No other major city lies so far from its national capital; even Australia is closer.

“There are two categories of people when it comes to extreme situations,” said the leopard specialist Vasily Solkin. “One gets scared first and then starts thinking; the other starts thinking first and gets scared after the fact. Only the latter survive in the taiga.”