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.

Although a tiger’s canines may be nearly an inch thick at the base, they still break surprisingly often, and they don’t grow back; these losses can be crippling and are one reason wild tigers may turn to livestock killing and man-eating. As menacing as they appear, tiger fangs are actually delicate instruments— literally, bundles of nerves and

When we look at nature, we are only looking at the survivors. Stephen Budiansky, If a Lion Could Talk

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.

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.”

most early attack reports are anecdotal accounts collected by travelers and, with the exception of the German lepidopterist whose remains were identified only by his butterfly net and jacket buttons,

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 1955, when I was still a student, some militia came to my cousin’s grandmother. Someone must have snitched on her and told them she was a shamanka because they took away her drums and burned them. She couldn’t take it and she hanged herself.” The drum is the membrane through which the shaman communicates with, and travels to, the spirit world.

bentwood maple pack frame, Udeghe-style.