The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

it is totally reasonable—righteous, even—to eat what you kill, whatever it may be. “I’ve tried tiger,” said Trush. “My whole family tried it. It’s quite unusual—slightly sweet, but I don’t care for it anymore—not since I saw a tiger eat a rotten cow in 2000. He ate the meat with worms and everything.”

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

In the 1970s, after the Damansky Island clashes, a joke began circulating: “Optimists study English; pessimists study Chinese; and realists learn to use a Kalashnikov.”

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

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

Mikhail Yankovsky was a descendant of Polish nobility who had fought on the wrong side of the Polish Rebellion of 1863. For his crimes, he was sentenced to eight years in Siberia, the first eighteen months of which were spent walking to prison. At that time, the railroad was still forty years away, and the road was barely passable—at any time of ye