It also shows how the authorities which protect the tiger are caught up in a dangerous game - not just with the wild tigers but with the poachers who will resort to almost anything to catch their prey. I thought this sounded a bit far-fetched, until Vaillant reveals evidence to suggest that the tiger who killed Markov went out of his way to track him down.Īmongst other issues, The Tiger shows how perestroika and the reopening of the border between Russia and China resulted in a surge in tiger poaching during the early 1990s. There are other, more surreal, aspects, including the belief that tigers are vengeful creatures and will hunt down those who do them wrong - and that includes poachers who mess with their territory or steal their kills.

For instance, did you know that “the tiger is, literally, tattooed: if you were to shave one bald, its stripes would still be visible, integral to its skin”? Or that a tiger’s claw is “needle-sharp at the end, and bladed along a portion of its inside length about as close to a surgical tool as one can find in nature”? He charts in painstaking detail the way in which Markov’s death was investigated by the authorities and reveals how it sparked terror in surrounding communities.Īnd while he shies away from demonising Markov - the man, after all, met a particularly cruel fate - he does turn Yuri Trush, the lead tracker and head of (Russian governmental anti-poaching body) Operation Tiger, into a bit of a hero for whom it is difficult not to admire.īut mostly Vaillant writes a kind of love letter to the tiger, peppering his adrenalin-fuelled narrative with so many tiger facts it is difficult to keep track of them all.

What makes the book so extraordinarily readable is that Vaillant turns a conservation issue into a human interest story in which good men and bad men do battle over a beautiful but enigmatic animal. Image via wikipedia reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Part crime scene investigation, part natural history, part travelogue, it reads like a thriller with all the authority of a respected journal, and has earned Vaillant, a Vancouver-based journalist, a bevy of awards, including British Columbia’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction for 2010, and Globe and Mail Best Book for Science 2010.Īn Amur tiger, in captivity.

The book takes one particular incident - the death of Vladimir Markov, a poacher killed by the tiger in 1997 - and spins it out into a fascinating account of the Siberian tiger (also known as the Amur tiger), its biology and behaviour, and the conservation efforts that have been made to protect the species, which is endangered, in Russia. John Vaillant’s The Tiger is a gripping account of the hunt to find a man-eating tiger in Russia’s Far East - a place known as Primorye, which was once considered part of Outer Manchuria, on the border with China. Non-fiction – Kindle edition Sceptre 353 pages 2010.

The Tiger by John Vaillant