launched, they become levers and stabilizers, supporting the larger
players. Once the prey is down, these same assault weapons can become
the most delicate scalpels and clamps, able to disembowel an animal,
organ by organ.
For all these reasons, there is no creature in the taiga that is off limits
to the tiger; it alone can mete out death at will. Amur tigers have been
known to eat everything from salmon and ducks to adult brown bears.
There are few wolves in Primorye, not because the environment doesn’t
suit them, but because the tigers eat them, too. The Amur tiger, it could
be said, takes a Stalinist approach to competition. It is also an
extraordinarily versatile predator, able to survive in temperatures ranging
from fifty below zero Fahrenheit to one hundred above, and to turn
virtually any environment to its advantage. Though typically a forest
dweller, Amur tigers may hunt on the beaches as well, using sea fog as a
cover for stalking game, and driving animals into heavy surf before
subduing them. One young male was observed subsisting exclusively on
harbor seals, going so far as to stack their carcasses like logs for future
use.
Unlike most cats, tigers are skilled, even avid, swimmers, and there are
hunters and fishermen on the Bikin River who have had tigers crawl into
their boats. Many encounters, including those observed by scientists and
captured on video, seem lifted from myth or fiction. The occurrence, and
subsequent recounting, of such incidents over dozens of millennia has
embedded the tiger in our consciousness. The tiger has been a fellow
traveler on our evolutionary journey and, in this sense, it is our peer. In
Asia, there is no recess of human memory in which there has not—
somewhere—lurked a tiger. As a result, this animal looms over the
collective imagination of native and newcomer alike.
Within every major ecosystem nature has produced, she has evolved a
singularly formidable predator to rule over it. In Primorye, the Amur