from the mountains of east Tennessee. Caldwell, a Methodist, soon
realized that tigers were not only present and plentiful but that they were
eating his converts. And yet, much to his dismay, his parishioners seemed
to venerate these beasts almost as if they were sacred cows. Armed with a
carbine and the 117th Psalm, Caldwell began shooting every tiger he saw,
only to find that the large striped cats he and his coolies brought out of
the hills were greeted with skepticism. Elders in his village claimed they
lacked certain tigerish attributes, but the subtext seemed to be that if this
foreign devil had been able to kill them then they couldn’t possibly be
real tigers. “Father’s first two kills were immediately discredited on this
score,” wrote his son, John, in his memoir, China Coast Family.^6 “The
sages announced to the assembled crowds that these were not tigers at all,
but some other evil animal masquerading in tigers’ guise.
“According to the wisdom of the sages, the Chinese character [Wang:
] meaning ‘Lord’ or ‘Emperor’ must be found in the markings of the
forehead of a tiger if it be a tiger of whom the devils and demons are
afraid. Another of Father’s early kills, a magnificent male of which he
was very proud, [was also] disqualified.... They announced that the
animal could never have been born of tiger parents, but had come out of
some strange metamorphosis from an animal or fish living in the sea.”
Up north, Manchu peasants endowed the tiger with similarly elusive
and ineffable qualities, as did the Udeghe and Nanai, who would
sometimes go so far as to abandon a village site if tigers were active in
the area (which may help explain the rarity of attacks). But in Korea,
when the Buddha, luck, and shamans all failed, there was still one place
left to turn, and that was to the Tiger Hunters Guild. Long before the
Russians started hunting tigers in the Far East, members of the Tiger
Hunters Guild had made a name for themselves as the boldest hunter-
warriors in Northeast Asia, and their feats of daring are legendary. The
so-called guild, a military organization that came into being during the
late Joseon Dynasty (1392–1897), included both hunters and professional
soldiers. In addition to their other feats, they are credited with repelling
attacks by French and American forces in 1866 and 1871, respectively.