and the Yankovskys retaliated accordingly.* Unlike the animist Udeghe
who were native to the region, or the Chinese and Korean Buddhists who
pioneered there, the Christian Russians behaved like owners as opposed
to inhabiters. As with lion-human relations in the Kalahari, the
breakdown began in earnest with the introduction of domestic animals.
But it wasn’t just the animals, it was the attitude that went with them.
These newcomers arrived as entitled conquerors with no understanding
of, or particular interest in, the local culture—human or otherwise. Like
their New World counterparts across the Pacific, theirs, too, was a
manifest destiny: they had a mandate, in many cases from the czar
himself, and they took an Orthodox, Old Testament approach to both
property and predators.
Accompanying this was a siege mentality that was exacerbated by the
real threats posed by bandits and predatory animals. In addition to killing
livestock, wolves really do kill people in Russia, and no one who had
made it as far as the Pacific coast was going to put up with them, or with
tigers either. They had been through too much already.
Over the course of sixty years, three generations of Yankovskys hunted
tigers in Russia, Manchuria, and North Korea, where some of the family
fled after the Russian Revolution. They began by hunting them in self-
defense and, in later years, they hunted for sport, sometimes working as
guides for other hunters. When they could, they sold the carcasses and the
buyers were invariably Chinese. Mikhail Yankovsky’s grandson Valery
participated in some of these expeditions and, in 2008, at the age of
ninety-seven, he still recalled them vividly. Like the long-dead veteran of
the Lancepupov Club, Valery Yankovsky offers a keyhole view into a
world that no longer exists. “The Russians were probably the most
aggressive tiger hunters out there, but after us it was the Koreans,” he
explained in a candid letter recalling his early days on the coast.^11
We hunted in winter, using dogs and carbines, never traps or
poison.* But tiger hunting was incidental rather than intentional; it
wasn’t a stable trade. When we had a tiger, Chinese apothecaries