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A True Story of Vengeance and Survival
Knopf
September 2010
On Sale: August 24, 2010
352 pages
ISBN: 0307268934
EAN: 9780307268938
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
It’s December 1997, and a man-eating tiger is on the prowl
outside a remote village in Russia’s Far East. The tiger
isn’t just killing people, it’s annihilating them, and a
team of men and their dogs must hunt it on foot through the
forest in the brutal cold. As the trackers sift through the
gruesome remains of the victims, they discover that these
attacks aren’t random: the tiger is apparently engaged in a
vendetta. Injured, starving, and extremely dangerous, the
tiger must be found before it strikes again. As he re-creates these extraordinary events, John Vaillant
gives us an unforgettable portrait of this spectacularly
beautiful and mysterious region. We meet the native tribes
who for centuries have worshipped and lived alongside
tigers, even sharing their kills with them. We witness the
arrival of Russian settlers in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, soldiers and hunters who greatly
diminished the tiger populations. And we come to know their
descendants, who, crushed by poverty, have turned to
poaching and further upset the natural balance of the region. This ancient, tenuous relationship between man and predator
is at the very heart of this remarkable book. Throughout we
encounter surprising theories of how humans and tigers may
have evolved to coexist, how we may have developed as
scavengers rather than hunters, and how early Homo sapiens
may have fit seamlessly into the tiger’s ecosystem. Above
all, we come to understand the endangered Siberian tiger, a
highly intelligent super-predator that can grow to ten feet
long, weigh more than six hundred pounds, and range daily
over vast territories of forest and mountain. Beautifully written and deeply informative, The Tiger
circles around three main characters: Vladimir Markov, a
poacher killed by the tiger; Yuri Trush, the lead tracker;
and the tiger himself. It is an absolutely gripping tale of
man and nature that leads inexorably to a final showdown in
a clearing deep in the taiga.
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