When Russians like the Yankovskys went hunting for tigers at the turn of
the last century, they would plan to be away for weeks at a time, covering
ten to twenty miles a day through mountainous country. In Russia, at
least as far back as the late nineteenth century, four men have been
considered the minimum for a tiger hunting expedition. The same went
for tiger catching, a seemingly lunatic enterprise, which fell out of favor
only in the early 1990s. Tiger catchers, equipped with little more than
hunting dogs, tree branches, and rope, would track down and capture live
Amur tigers, usually for zoos and circuses. For obvious reasons, they
preferred to go after cubs, but full-grown tigers have also been caught
this way. Needless to say, these men were largely self-taught, and the
learning curve would have been unforgiving in the extreme. Their
courage inspired one tiger biologist to write, “No, the bogatyri [mythic
Russian heroes] have not died out in Russia.”^12
One of the last and most famous of the tiger catchers was Vladimir
Kruglov, who learned the trade from an Old Believer named Averian
Cherepanov. Cherepanov’s method capitalized on one of the tiger’s
greatest weaknesses: its low endurance at speed. A tiger can walk for
days, but it can only run for short distances. For this reason, tiger
catching was always done in the winter, preferably in deep snow, which
shortened the chase dramatically. Once the dogs scented a tiger, they
would be set loose to chase it until, too tired to run further, the animal
would turn and fight. With the dogs holding the tiger at bay, the men
would approach with long, forked tree branches and—somehow—pin the
animal down. Then, in a quick and carefully choreographed operation,
they would immobilize the tiger’s paws and head, hog-tie it, and stuff it
in a sack. This, of course, is easier said than done. Nonetheless, in 1978,
Kruglov used the stick and rope method to—literally—bag a tigress
weighing more than three hundred pounds. He is one of the only human
beings in the history of the species to grab wild tigers by the ears
repeatedly and live to tell about it. “I have never let anyone else handle
the ears,” he explained to Dale Miquelle in 2001. “You know, the ears are
her steering wheel. You can turn off her teeth with the ears.”