could understand. “A hunter can only rely on himself,” he said. “If
anything happens, there is no one to help him, and all of us who live this
way have a very advanced intuition. We also carry the experience of our
ancestors in our heads: that’s how a man functions in taiga. The tiger is a
hunter, just the same as a man is a hunter. A hunter has to think about
how to get his prey. It is different for boar and deer: if leaves or cones
fall down from a tree, that’s what they eat; there is no need to think.
Tigers think.”
Clark Barrett, a professor in the anthropology department at UCLA and
an expert on predator-prey dynamics, describes the deer’s advantage as
the anywhere but here principle: all a prey animal needs to do is be
anywhere the predator isn’t—it doesn’t matter if it’s a foot away, or a
hemisphere—and it will live another day.^9 The predator, on the other
hand, must be exactly where its prey is, and at exactly the same moment,
or it will starve. Thus, for a predator, mastery of both time and space—in
addition to a thorough understanding of terrain and prey behavior—are
crucial. Pack hunting, of course, increases the odds enormously, but
unlike the wolf or the lion, the tiger is a solo stealth hunter and, thus, has
a far more challenging task. Possessing neither the endurance to run its
prey down, nor the numbers to surround and harry it, the tiger’s method
must instead resemble that of the lone assassin: it must insert itself
almost intravenously into its prey’s umwelt—an umwelt, it must be
noted, that has evolved over millions of years to be exquisitely sensitive
to the presence of felid predators. Making matters still more difficult is
the fact that tiger prey typically travel in herds. With their dozens of
eyes, ears, and nostrils, and their decades of collective tiger-evading
experience, a herd of deer or boar can be as vigilant and jumpy as a
Secret Service detail. In order to subvert this, the tiger must embody a
contradiction: this large, pungent, extraordinarily charismatic animal
must achieve a state of virtual nonexistence while operating inside the
sphere of its prey’s highly attuned senses. Witnesses, native and Russian
alike, agree that there is something almost metaphysical about the tiger’s
ability to will itself into nonbeing—to, in effect, cloak itself. In the Bikin