The tiger - John Vaillant

Summary: It's December 1997, and a man-eating Siberian 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. An absolutely gripping tale of man and nature that leads inexorably to a final showdown in a clearing deep in the taiga.

Booklist Reviews

Set in Russia’s Maritime Territory, Vaillant’s story concerns a tiger of the endangered Amur subspecies that killed three hunters in 1997. Expanding from the incidents’ central facts, Vaillant’s narrative explores humans’ relationship with predatory animals in general, with the Amur tiger as the specific example. Literary, folkloric, and scientific sources combine into a deeply sensitive depiction of the tiger’s adaptation to its forested, mountainous, and wintry environment. As he recounts how Russians such as the hunters in question also attempt to extract a living from the taiga, possibly including illegal poaching of the tiger, Vaillant posits the tiger’s thoughts about the competition, inferring its intelligence from a conservation warden’s investigation into the cases of the unfortunate hunters, who were felled in ambush-style attacks. Interest in Vaillant’s work, which climaxes in the warden’s pursuit of the deadly tiger, will partake of humans’ instinctual fear of large carnivores, the modern imperative to preserve them from extinction, and readers of Vaillant’s The Golden Spruce (2005), a positively reviewed, deep-drilling work, also about the nexus between humans and the natural world. Copyright 2010 Booklist Reviews.

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