would buy it from us whole; they were particularly interested in the
meat, heart, and bones. Of course, it was believed that the tiger’s meat
had supernatural powers; the heart, especially, was thought by all to
make one more courageous. We didn’t eat the meat ourselves, but I
did try it once in 1943—boiled and cooked with miso. It was fatty and
surprisingly tasty—a bit like mutton.
In Korea, tigers would occasionally kill people in the deep forest,
and when that happened the hunter’s family would abandon the area. I
have personally seen cabins there with the doors knocked in by tigers,
and I have heard of tigers digging up fresh graves, but I never
witnessed it.
The tiger’s character is very wily, cautious, and bloodthirsty; when
walking in a tiger’s tracks, you could always feel his presence, his
menacing danger. Once, my father was attacked by a wounded tiger,
and my brother saved him by shooting it. In those early days around
Vladivostok, they were the principal killers of livestock. [Like my
grandfather,] my father declared war against the tigers, and he bagged
seven of them on his own. They were our vicious enemies.Yankovsky’s is a worldview caught in amber. Although he was born in
the generation between Dersu Uzala and Ivan Dunkai, his experience of
tigers is so radically different that he might as well be describing another
animal. Even a hundred years later, Ivan Dunkai’s son Vasily’s
description of his relationship to the local tigers stands in stark contrast
to a Russian settler’s: “You know, there are two hunters in the taiga: a
man and a tiger,” he explained in March 2007. “As professional hunters,
we respect each other: he chooses his path and I choose mine. Sometimes
our paths intersect, but we do not intrude on each other in any way. The
taiga is his home; he is the master. I am also a master in my own home,
but he lives in the taiga all the time; I don’t.”
This disparity between the Yankovskys and the Dunkais is traceable to
a fundamental conflict—not just between Russians and indigenous
peoples, but with tigers—around the role of human beings in the natural
world. In Primorye, ambitious Russian homesteaders operated under the