By John Ballard
Michael Wade linked this. It prints out to five pages in small font but reads like a thriller.
Why you don�t want to meet a Siberian tiger in the woods
The first thing that strikes one about the Siberian, or Amur, tiger is its sheer, overwhelming mass. This is a seriously burly animal that can weigh more than a quarter-ton, measuring more than 10 feet nose to tail. (Imagine a grand piano, with teeth.)
Long isolated from its feline relatives, Panthera tigris altaica is a unique subspecies of the familiar orange-and-black-striped cat, perfectly adapted to the snowy mountain forests where it resides. In order to survive the arctic conditions of a Russian winter, where temperatures can drop to 50 below, Amur tigers are insulated with thick, dense fur.
In snow, their paw prints are as big as hats and pot lids. Amur tigers also have the largest skulls of any tiger subspecies, with fangs as long as your finger and teeth that can shatter cow bone.
In spite of its size and weight, an Amur tiger can leap over a basketball hoop or spring across a residential street in a single bound, and it can drag a dead moose for 50 yards through thick forest.
In the Amur tiger�s world, wolves are snacks, and its only rivals, other than human poachers, are Russian brown bears, which are similar to grizzlies and themselves stand 10 feet tall.
Tigers often kill and eat bears, but the bears win about half the time. Amur tigers are not particularly fast animals � though they�re a lot faster than you. Their key to success, as the Far East�s ultimate predator, is stealth. Big as they are, they can disappear themselves with a totality that can be described only as spectral.
That sets the stage. The article is a narrative description of what happens when one of those poachers -- there is no good way to say it -- gets poached.
This rare species is estimated to be down to 450, declining by poaching at the rate of 30 per year.
It's hard to know who to root for, the animal or the poacher.
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.
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The tiger had eaten Markov over a three-day period, but that had been days ago, and, once again, the animal was ravenous. This would not have been quite so serious had it been a different season, but the temperature was ranging from 25 to 45 below zero. The amount of meat required to keep something the size of a tiger as much as 150 degrees hotter than the world around it is prodigious � on the order of 40 pounds per day. Between his injuries, the brutal cold, and the hunger gnawing in his gut, the tiger was being pressured from all sides. Winter was only just getting started in the taiga, and without a significant kill, the tiger�s thermal clock was in grave danger of running down. He could freeze to death before he starved.
As he moved down the valley toward Sobolonye, every step was painful. In the tiger�s left forepaw was a deep, fresh laceration through the pad � possibly sustained when the tiger destroyed the outhouse. Far worse, though, was the wound to his other leg. A small handful of pea-size buckshot had raked his right paw and foreleg, separating it at the cubital joint (the equivalent of our elbow). Trush believed that Markov had shot the tiger at close range from inside his cabin � at some point prior to the night when he was killed. A factory-load shot from that distance would have shattered the tiger�s leg and crippled him fatally, but Markov�s homemade shell, possibly compromised by condensation, had succeeded only in making the tiger extraordinarily dangerous to humans.
The damage to the joint was hindering the tiger�s ability to hunt. Over and over again, he caught fresh scent, stalked game, and set up ambushes that, a week earlier, would have produced life-sustaining results. Now, the boar and deer were getting away. The tiger�s speed, agility, and jumping distance were off � not by much, but margins in the taiga are tight to begin with: With a missed kill, an inch might as well be a mile. It was slowly dawning on the tiger that his only viable prey was human beings. In a sense, Markov had succeeded in bringing the animal down to his level, forcing it to violate its own rules: Now the tiger had become a poacher too.
Following the Takhalo River now, the tiger made its way toward a crude shelter constructed of branches and covered in tar paper that belonged to a local hunter. He broke in, found a mattress, and hauled it 50 yards across the frozen river. There, on the opposite bank, he spread the mattress out under a spruce tree, lay down on it in plain view, and waited.
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