this technique in a how-to article that, had it been written today, could
have been titled: “Turn Your Ten-Footer into a Twelve-Footer!” Such
practices, combined with the trophy-hunting mind-set, the exotic locale,
and a dearth of reliable recording equipment, created fertile ground for
mythmaking. But when all is said and done, the record breakers, like so
many of the best stories, always seem to come secondhand.
In spite of this, sincere attempts were made to fix these cats in real
space. Ford Barclay, writing in The Big Game of Asia and North America
(1915), the last in a deluxe four-volume compendium of hunting
information from around the world, estimated the length of a tiger shot in
the Vladivostok area to be thirteen feet, five inches, nose to tail. Barclay
also interviewed the famous British taxidermist and author Rowland
Ward, who assured him that a skin sold in London, also from that area,
“must have belonged to an animal that measured 14 feet.”^3 That is
roughly the length of a compact car. If this is accurate, it would make the
Amur tiger the longest (if not the heaviest) carnivorous land mammal
that ever lived. Ward, a conscientious and detail-oriented man, wrote The
Sportsman’s Handbook to Practical Collecting and Preserving Trophies,
which went through a dozen editions between 1880 and 1925, the peak
years of big game hunting. Ward saw and stuffed scores of tigers
throughout his long career, and his size estimate should be judged
accordingly. However, if such behemoths once roamed the boreal jungles
of the Far East, they do so no longer. Baikov and Barclay, both hunters
themselves, were making their audacious claims when tiger hunting was a
cresting wave, about to break forever.
Tigers, it must be said, have taken a ferocious toll on humans as well. In
India, some legendary man-eaters killed and ate scores of people before
being hunted down. A number of these cases have been documented by
the famous tiger hunter and conservationist Jim Corbett. It would be
impossible to accurately tally the tiger’s collective impact on humans