Deep in the forests of Russia’s Far East, the last Siberian tigers are under siege by runaway logging and poachers who get paid $30,000 per carcass. One tiger decided to fight back.

By John Vaillant

Note: This article was adapted from John Vaillant’s new book, The Tiger, published in August by Knopp.

Yuri Trush has never seen a fellow human so thoroughly and gruesomely annihilated. It looks at first like a heap of laundry until one sees the boots, luminous stubs of broken bone protruding from the tops, the tattered shirt with an arm still fitted to one of the sleeves. Here, amid the twigs and leaf litter in the deep Russian forest, not far from his small cabin, is all that remains of Vladimir Ilyich Markov.

Trush is holding a video camera, and even as he films, his mind flees to the edges of the scene, taking refuge in peripheral details. He is struck by the poverty of this man — that he would be wearing thin rubber boots in such bitter weather. He contemplates the man’s cartridge belt — loaded but for three shells — and wonders where the gun had gone.

The previous afternoon, December 5, 1997, Trush had received a disturbing call: A man had been attacked and killed by a tiger, deep in Russia’s Primorye Territory. Trush headed a wildlife-investigation unit known as Inspection Tiger, which had been set up with funding (and pressure) from international conservation organizations to combat poaching of the endangered Siberian, or Amur, tiger, which lives in the forests of Russia’s Far East. Armed with cameras and broad police powers, Trush and his team dealt with a steadily increasing number of conflicts between tigers and human beings. Often, the tigers lost. Not this time.

The next morning, Trush and his men set out for Markov’s cabin in Kungs, Soviet-era military trucks similar to our Humvees. Markov was a resident of the nearby village of Sobolonye, and a man best known for keeping bees. Markov’s cabin lay at the center of a tangled skein of tracks in the snow, but two tracks in particular caught Trush’s attention. One set, human, traveled northward up the entrance road at a walking pace; the other, the huge paw prints of an Amur tiger, traveled south from the cabin in great bounding leaps. They approached each other directly, as if the meeting had been intentional — like an appointment of some kind. At the point where they met, the northbound tracks disappeared, as if the person who made them had simply ceased to exist.

The camera’s unblinking eye records the scene in excruciating detail: the rough cabin and the scrubby clearing in which it stands; the attacker’s path and the point of impact. Then it follows the long trail of horrific evidence — the pink and trampled snow, the severed hind foot of a dog, a single glove, and then a bloodstained jacket cuff — before halting at a patch of bare ground about a hundred yards into the forest. At this point the audio picks up a sudden, retching gasp. It is as if Trush has entered Grendel’s den.

The temperature is 30 below zero and yet, here, the snow has been completely melted away. In the middle of this dark circle, presented like some kind of sacrificial offering, is a hand without an arm and a head without a face. Nearby is a long bone, a femur probably, that has been gnawed to a bloodless white. Carrion crows flock in the trees overhead, and their raucous kvetching tells Trush that whatever murdered this man is still around; the kill is being guarded.

Trush’s hunting dog, a little Laika, is further down the trail, growing increasingly shrill and agitated. Her nose is tingling with blood scent and tiger musk, and she alone feels free to express her deepest fear — the tiger is there, somewhere up ahead. Then, there is a sound: a brief, rushing exhale, the kind one would use to extinguish a candle. But there is something different about the volume of air being moved, something bigger and deeper. This is not a human sound. At the same moment, the tip of a low fir branch spontaneously sheds its load of snow. The flakes powder down to the forest floor; the men freeze in midbreath, and, once again, all is still.

If Russia is what we think it is, then tigers should not be possible there. After all, the nearest jungle is 2,000 miles away. The Siberian tiger is known locally — and formally — as the Amur tiger, and it lives, in fact, beyond Siberia. Once considered part of Outer Manchuria, Primorye is Russia’s southeasternmost territory: as densely forested as any jungle, a wilderness of rugged mountains and old-growth taiga. Protruding conspicuously from Russia’s vast bulk, Primorye is embedded in China’s eastern flank like a claw or a fang, and it remains a sore spot to this day. Its capital, Vladivostok, is closer to Beijing than to Moscow.

Of the six surviving subspecies of tiger, the Amur is the only one habituated to arctic conditions, with a burlier build and much heavier coat than its sleek tropical cousins. There is no creature in the taiga that is off-limits to the tiger; it alone can mete out death at will. Amur tigers have been known to eat everything from salmon and ducks to adult brown bears. They are extraordinarily versatile, able to survive in temperatures ranging from 50 below zero to 100 above, and to turn virtually any environment to their advantage. Though typically forest dwellers, Amur tigers may hunt on the beaches as well, using sea fog as cover for stalking game. One young male was observed subsisting exclusively on harbor seals, going so far as to stack the carcasses like logs for future use.

One of the many negative effects of perestroika and the reopening of the border between Russia and China has been a surge in tiger poaching. Between 1992 and 1994 alone, approximately 100 tigers — roughly a quarter of Russia’s wild population — were killed. Most ended up in China, where their organs, blood, and bone are much sought after for use in traditional medicine. Some believe the tiger’s whiskers will make them bulletproof and that its powdered bones will soothe their aches and pains. Others believe its penis will make them virile, and there are many — from Tokyo to Moscow — who will pay thousands of dollars for a tiger’s skin. A whole carcass can bring up to $30,000, a fortune in a region where jobs are scarce to nonexistent.

While tigers were being stolen from the forests, the forests were also being stolen from the tigers. The combination of a desperate need for hard currency, lax forestry regulations, and vast markets just across the border in China set loose a monster in the taiga that is wreaking havoc to this day. In the Russian Far East, legal and black-market logging (along with every shade in between) continue to jeopardize the habitat of tigers, humans, and the wild game that supports them both.

In many ways, Inspection Tiger’s mandate resembles that of detectives on a narcotics detail, and so does the risk: The money is big, and the players are often ruthless individuals who tend to be well armed. In Primorye, life is cheap for man and animal alike, and corruption is widespread at every level of government. Over the years, Trush has made busts involving powerful executives, high-ranking police officers, and members of parliament, all of whom can be dangerous enemies for a person to have.

Trush, however, is well suited to this work because he can be dangerous too. He stands about 6-foot-2, with a broad chest. His eyes are colored, coincidentally, like the semiprecious tiger’s eye, with black rings around the irises. They peer out from a frank and homely face framed by great, drooping brows. Though frail and sickly as a boy, Trush grew into a talented athlete with a commanding presence and a well-developed expertise in karate, aikido, and knife handling. Referring to a former colleague who went bad and whom he tried for years to catch, Trush told me, “He knows very well that I am capable of beheading him with my bare hands.”

But this latest adversary would prove deadlier than any poacher.