The Koreans were much admired by the Western hunters who
encountered them, in large part because they were still using matchlock
rifles and pistols. Based on designs dating from the fourteenth century,
these medieval Chinese weapons depended on a fuse to light the
gunpowder, which allowed for only a single shot at suicidally close range.
As one historian put it, “Those who missed ... rarely lived to regret it.”^7
When they weren’t defending their king, members of the guild pursued
man-eaters and other troublesome tigers and leopards. Their devotion to
the practice was almost cultlike, one of their prime objectives being to
acquire a cat’s potency and courage through the act of killing and
consuming it (though, when they could, they sold body parts to the
Chinese as well). Yuri Yankovsky, a famous Russian tiger hunter,
reportedly witnessed one of these rituals sometime around 1930: “Before
long we came upon a startling scene.^8 A Korean wearing the conical blue
felt hat of the Tiger Hunters’ Guild was leaning against a tree, holding in
his hand an old-fashioned matchlock.... [Another] was kneeling on the
ground, drinking blood from a bowl which he held against the throat of a
dead tiger.”*
This notion of self-enhancement by consumption cut both ways,
however, and it was believed that a tiger could also make itself stronger
by devouring both body and soul of a human being. Once consumed, the
victim’s soul would become a kind of captive guide, aiding the tiger in its
search for more human victims. As fanciful as such reasoning may sound,
there is no question that the strength and knowledge gained from eating
humans will inform and influence a man-eater’s subsequent behavior.
Relatively speaking, the tigers’ appetite for us pales before our appetite
for them. Humans have hunted tigers by various means for millennia, but
not long ago there was a strange and heated moment in our venerable
relationship with these animals that has been echoed repeatedly in our
relations with other species. It bears some resemblance to what wolves do