Kruglov died in a freak accident in 2005. After surviving more than
forty live tiger captures, not to mention the gauntlet of other hazards that
take Russian men before their time, Kruglov was killed at the age of
sixty-four when a tree fell on him. His legacy lives on in the form of the
thirteen-thousand-acre Utyos Rehabilitation Center for Wild Animals in
southern Khabarovsk Territory, which he founded in 1996, and which is
now managed by his son and daughter. Few foreigners have attempted to
bag live game in the Far East—for good reason—but a British explorer
and sinophile named Arthur de Carle Sowerby recounted the following
live capture in his five-volume opus, The Naturalist in Manchuria
(1922): “When I got it it was in a paroxysm of rage, snapping furiously,
biting itself and everything that came within reach of its sharp teeth,” he
wrote without a trace of irony.^13 “I have always found this the case with
moles.”
In 1925, Nikolai Baikov calculated that roughly a hundred tigers were
being taken out of greater Manchuria annually (including Primorye and
the Korean Peninsula)—virtually all of them bound for the Chinese
market. “There were cases in [mating season],” he wrote, “when a
courageous hunter would meet a group of five or six tigers, and kill them
one by one, where he stood.”^14
Between trophy hunters, tiger catchers, gun traps, pit traps, snares, and
bait laced with strychnine and bite-sensitive bombs, these animals were
being besieged from all sides. Even as Baikov’s monograph was going to
press, his “Manchurian Tiger” was in imminent danger of joining the
woolly mammoth and the cave bear in the past tense. Midway through the
1930s, a handful of men saw this coming, and began to wonder just what
it was they stood to lose.
One of them was Lev Kaplanov. Born in Moscow in 1910, he was a
generation younger than Arseniev, but cut from similar cloth. In a letter
to a close friend, Kaplanov wrote that, as a boy in European Russia, he