Like its majestic and terrifying subject, John Vaillant's book moves with subtlety and grace, commands a vast terrain - and has the power to shake the observer's soul. A prize-winning wildlife writer living in Vancouver, Vaillant crossed the Pacific to study the trail of havoc, dread and death left in the winter of 1997 by one of the 450 or so Siberian – or Amur – tigers left wild in the rich forests of Primorye, near the Chinese border in Russia's lawless Far East. Stealthy, imperious, invincible, the Amur is top cat, indeed reigning monarch, among the "surreal menagerie" of this weirdly scrambled "threshold realm". Here, where the sub-Arctic and the subtropics meet, the tiger pairs "the agility and appetites of a cat with the mass of an industrial refrigerator".
In that harsh December, as post-Soviet privations had worsened the plight of the loggers, trappers and drifters who eke out a living from this "boreal jungle", a 500lb, six-year-old male that could "manifest as powerfully and invisibly as the wind" roared out of his "cool blue solitude". Near a rickety cabin, he felled and dismembered a mediocre poacher and bee-keeper named Dimitri Markov. Vaillant spares us no details of what (little) remained in the snow.
This was the opposite of normal Amur behaviour. Not only did it look like an almost psychotic attack, in tiger terms, but somehow a kind of personal vendetta as well. After a failed ambush elsewhere in the forest, the troubled – perhaps traumatised? – animal struck another lonely poacher with equal ferocity.
For some reason this tiger had "crossed over into a realm" of intimate hatred for "the world of men". Its fury broke all the laws of its kind and locale. Vaillant calls it a "weretiger". As it killed, it left "a kind of signature". Why?
Vaillant reconstructs the operation that forest ranger Yuri Trush and his colleagues in the "Inspection Tiger" anti-poaching unit mounted to defend the village of Sobolonye. For this mission, the tough but idealistic team became old-fashioned trackers again, not post-perestroika eco-guardians. He also digs down to the tangled roots of this tiger's freakish pursuit of a new prey.
If you expect from The Tiger a simple boys'-own – or comrades'-own – romp about intrepid Russian marksmen tracking down a stripy monster of the deep, cold woods, think again fast. What unfolds, in a richly layered story that (again, like its thick-furred hero) partners cunning with sublimity, is a tragedy in several acts and with multiple dimensions. It combines a wilderness adventure, written with a nerve-jangling flair for suspense, an enquiry into the breakdown of a precious eco-system and, not least, a lyrical elegy for the lost mutual respect between human settlements and this fabled creature of "beauty, charisma and mythic resonance".
For a covenant had been broken. An implicit pact had let the region's indigenous people live in peace with tigers as they shared the forest's gifts. This "contract", embedded in the long co-existence of Panthera tigris with the similarly versatile, clever and predatory species Homo sapiens, went beyond the tribal people's lore of "If I don't touch her, she won't touch me". The tiger, that "enormous canary in the biological coal mine" whose health means the health of its entire habitat, stalks these forests not as a tyrant but a "bountiful provider". It leaves much of its kill for the "countless smaller animals" lower down the food chain - human hunters included.
In one of many learned asides that tether the tiger's fate to evolutionary history and ecological crisis, Vaillant suggests that early human groups scavenged in the wake of big fierce cats. So much (if you accept this thesis) for the macho "hunting hypothesis", with spear-chucking warriors facing down sabre-toothed rivals. In this alternative view, our ancestors flourished as "Paleolithic Wizards of Oz". Puny but smart "masters of illusion and psyops", we learned to thrive in the wake of much stronger, often feline, beasts.
So the peoples of the Far East – and the cannier Russian immigrant hunters who joined them – came over the ages to cohabit with, and even revere, the tiger in the woods. Vaillant amasses startling evidence for each species' acute sensitivity towards the other. He uses it to challenge a familiar cliché: that to imbue non-human animals with knowledge and intention about others – a "theory of mind" - must carry a charge of "anthropomorphism".
But what happened to wreck this warily intense truce between neighbours? From the 19th century, Russian interlopers with heavy-duty firearms inflicted as much ecological damage on the Wild East as their American counterparts did on the Wild West. Vaillant draws some eye-opening comparisons. After the Revolution, the toxic Marxist ideology of "dominion over nature" licensed further plunder - although a handful of brave Soviet-era scientists and foresters fought for conservation. Then poaching to serve the lucrative market in tiger body-parts for Chinese medicine moved, after the Soviet collapse, from minor irritation to organised menace. To flog a tiger corpse over the border became "like selling a briefcase of stolen cocaine". Illegal logging in Yeltsin's let-it-rip Russia further impoverished the tigers' home.
Classic crime stories often show how a perfect storm of social threats can bear down on a vulnerable individual to trigger a horrific act, or sequence of acts. Vaillant expertly colours in the wider context. He diagnoses the acute stress that previous stand-offs with the hapless Markov might have caused in this perpetrator. And, with breath-catching verve and velocity, he traces Trush and his team of woodland detectives as they close in on a quarry maddened by "hunger and revenge". Whatever its signal virtues as eco-fable and chase narrative, The Tiger also counts as a supreme example of true-crime writing driven by wide-angle empathy and compassion. Some readers may choose to shelve it, not among cosy wildlife yarns, but with Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.
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