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.”

What is amazing—and also terrifying about tigers—is their facility for what can only be described as abstract thinking. Very quickly, a tiger can assimilate new information—evidence, if you will—ascribe it to a source, and even a motive, and react accordingly.1 Sergei Sokolov is a former hunting inspector who now works as a researcher for the Insti

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.

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

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.

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 bloo

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.

“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.”

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.”