Chapter 8
1 “The entire winter life of a solitary tiger”: Kaplanov, 1941.
2 “Its massive body and powerful skeleton system”: Baikov.
3 “must have belonged to an animal that measured 14 feet”: Sowerby,
The Naturalist in Manchuria, Vol. 2, pp. 30–31.
4 tigers have killed approximately a million Asians: Matthiessen, p.
89.
5 “When the majority of people have no means”: Personal
communication, April 6, 2009.
6 “Father’s first two kills were immediately discredited”: Caldwell,
pp. 36–37.
7 “Those who missed”: Neff, April 18, 2007.
8 “Before long we came upon a startling scene”: Taylor, p. 77. In
1907, shortly after the Japanese occupied Korea, the Tiger Hunters
Guild was ordered to disarm. According to Kim Young-Sik, the former
editor of the South Korean Internet journal Koreaweb Weekly, the
guild’s response to this command was to assassinate the magistrate
who issued it and launch a guerrilla war against the invaders. Despite
being hopelessly outnumbered, this band of charismatic patriots, led
by the famous tiger hunter and general Hong Pomdo, carried on a
deadly campaign against the Japanese for more than ten years. Finally,
in the fall of 1920, after a series of particularly savage battles in which
the Japanese suffered heavy casualties, the high command in Tokyo
assembled three armies to crush the independence movement once and
for all. Hong and his allies were forced to take refuge in Manchuria
and Primorye where they found sympathy with the Russians, who had
suffered devastating losses against the Japanese while fighting for
control of Korea and coastal Manchuria in 1904–1905.
With the Kremlin’s support, Hong’s army was able to make cross-
border raids for another decade until the new Soviet leadership,
wishing to normalize relations with Japan, finally forbade them. Not
long afterward, Stalin’s increasingly repressive policies and paranoia
