tiger is the latest, most exquisitely lethal manifestation of this creative
impulse. The indigenous peoples of Primorye—the Udeghe, Nanai, and
Orochi—have always understood and acknowledged the tiger’s
supremacy, and some clans claimed the tiger as a direct ancestor as much
to placate it as to share its power. There appears to be no ritual of tiger
killing here (as there is for bears), but there are many stories of tigers
taking human wives—and husbands—and of tigers killing humans who
dared to challenge them. The tiger, as indigenous peoples know it, is a
consummate hunter and the undisputed lord of the taiga, possessing the
ability to change shape or disappear at will. Shrines were erected in the
tiger’s honor, and some of these remain; hunters would lay their weapons
down and beg forgiveness if they crossed its path. The native population
is now small and dilute, having suffered from the same imported diseases
and depredations that wreaked havoc on their North American
counterparts. Nonetheless, many veteran Russian hunters learned much of
what they know about Primorye’s taiga from their Udeghe and Nanai
counterparts, just as the famous Russian explorer and author Vladimir
Arseniev did from Dersu Uzala, a Nanai hunter and trapper who enjoys a
potent legacy here to this day.
Vladimir Arseniev was the son of an illegitimate former serf who did
for Primorye what it took the combined efforts of Lewis and Clark and
James Fenimore Cooper to do for the American West. Arseniev, who was
born in St. Petersburg in 1872, volunteered for the czar’s army at
eighteen and became a career military officer, bandit fighter, and
ethnographer. Between 1900, when he was reassigned from Poland to the
Far East, and his death in 1930, he led nine major expeditions during
which he explored and mapped much of Primorye, in addition to the
Commander Islands and the Kamchatka Peninsula. A subtext of these
missions was to assess these regions’ vulnerability to Japanese attack.
Throughout his life and travels, Arseniev took a keen interest in
indigenous culture, and he kept careful records of the flora, fauna, and
peoples he came across. In the process, he conceived a literary style that
managed to blend hard science and high adventure with subtle
ron
(Ron)
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