Survival and sustenance, high adventure in one of the most ecologically diverse regions in the world where both tropical and alpine conditions co-exist is the setting of this book. It is 1997 and the place is the very farthest Far East right above North Korea, to the east of China and bordered on the east by the Sea of Japan, a place called Primorye. The area is all Russian. This is where men and women escaped the ravages of boom towns that disintegrated almost as quickly as they were formed after perestroika (this word refers to Gorbachev’s political and economic changes to a freer market but not a stable one), men and women who would rather live off the land than try and amass paper money devalued to almost nothing overnight. The area was and is ripe in game, pine nuts, forests and the amur tiger, a god-like beast revered and feared. Unfortunately poachers from within and beyond the country had been killing this tiger to near extinction for its bones, organs, flesh and blood and its very spirit.
Drama abounds in this book and we meet unforgettable characters like Yuri Trush, a 6′ 2″ broad chested man whose prolific eyebrows frame his face. He’s tracking the 500-pound tiger who had once co-existed peacefully with men, often sharing fresh killed carcasses of other game with the men following in the tiger’s tracks. Yuri Trush is a man of all trades who is at home in the forbidding land among the animals who inhabit the crushing cold. Then there is the not-so-lucky Vladimir Markov whom we first meet as a corpse and only part of one who had been eaten by the amur tiger who appeared to deliberately and obsessively stalking Markov.
Liuty at Vladimir Kruglov's wildlife rehabilitation center-from The Tiger
Valliant often presents a current scene and goes back in immaculate prose to give us the background of the characters. He has an uncanny ability to draw his characters and the land with empathy no matter how depraved or unforgiving. The tension in the book comes from this literary and philosophical facility, offering few black and white answers to the old question of who is the hunter and who is the hunted and why. The only thing we know for sure is that living with tigers and poachers and lawless people in a land far removed from inspection is a life and death struggle for everyone. We can’t help but admire the tiger who can live in extremes from -50 degrees to 100 degrees F. The men who are sent to protect the tiger and other endangered species win our admiration, too, as they root out in sting operations among the poachers and desperadoes.
Throughout all of this is a fascinating history of Russia’s Far East explorers, the conservationists determined to prevent the annihilation of one of the earth’s most magnificent creations, while recounting Russian history in the time from the Bolshevik Revolution through Mao’s Cultural Revolution and including even the literary achievements of the men who wrote in and about this strange land.
The author has written for Outside, the New Yorker and National Geographic. He has an obvious talent for bringing individual adventure driven events in the Jon Krakauer mode into the warp and weave of a total cosmos (the Russian Far East) rendered in many different perspectives. If it weren’t for his amazing story and his ability to tell it, we might be overwhelmed with so much information. But the facts and the story flow and feed off each other (no puns intended here) as he welds animal and human lives together. His fine book begs the question: Do we anthropomorphize animals too much or too little?
-Pat
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