As much as these accounts may differ from one another, there is, running
through them all, the common theme of dogs and meat—the two things
humans and tigers are most likely to have conflict over in the forest. In
this sense, the incident was a textbook case, and is completely consistent
with the behavior of all the creatures involved. Markov for his part was
certainly familiar with tigers and with the local lore, both native and
Russian, but the only tiger attacks he is likely to have known much about
were two local incidents, both of which were spontaneous retaliations to
human attacks. In the mid-1980s, a woman from Yasenovie had her arm
mauled after she tried to chase a tiger out of her barnyard with an axe; the
man who came to help her was also injured before the tiger was shot. On
the Bikin River, in 1996, there had been another incident in which a
native man named Evgeny Nekrasov shot at a family of tigers from his
boat, whereupon the tigress jumped into his boat and attacked him. He
survived only because his partner, who was also in the boat, shot the
tigress and killed her. That same year, about a hundred miles to the east,
on the Pacific slope of the Sikhote-Alin Mountains, two poachers were
killed and eaten within days of each other by a tiger whose right foreleg
had been crippled by a snare.
According to Evgeny Suvorov, a journalist and author from Primorye
who has studied the subject exhaustively, the mid-1990s were bad years
for tiger attacks. In 1996, at least five people were killed, and several
more were seriously injured. Some of these attacks were provoked, but
others clearly weren’t. In his book Zapovednoye Primorye, Suvorov
quotes the following verse by a game warden who had to face this
uncertainty on a daily basis:
I’ve read a tiger’s not dangerous,^10
They say the tiger won’t attack
But one thing’s not clear to me.
Has he read this, too? Does he know?In Primorye, between 1970 and 1994, there were six recorded tiger
attacks that were classified as “unprovoked”; in four of them, the tiger