Guests
by John Vaillant, September 3, 2010 10:37 AM
Thanks for checking out the Powell's Blog this week. Today's my last day as the guest blogger, and I thought I'd finish up (surprise, surprise) with an episode from The Tiger. Some of the weirdest encounters we had in the Russian Far East had nothing to do with tigers or poachers or dubious dumplings. My translator and I spent a lot of time in transit between interviews, and some bizarre conversations were had: one fellow asked why we'd come all this way — didn't we have tigers in Canada? Another explained that global warming was caused by rockets blowing holes in the ozone layer; a third claimed that the former Soviet Union had covered 75% of the world's land area. Because so much of life in the Far East is governed by a kind of whimsical rigidity — a combination of leftover Soviet bureaucracy and free market chaos — sometimes even simple interactions left us feeling as if we'd wandered into an insane asylum. To this day, the Russian Far East is a place where neither political correctness nor eco-speak have penetrated, and patriotism is vigorous and impassioned. On an early-21st-century Sunday in downtown Vladivostok, more than sixty years after the Red Army took Berlin, two grandsons of that heroic generation — pink-cheeked family men out for lunch with their wives and young children — invoked the legacy of World War II with a ferocity few Westerners could muster. After reasserting Russia's indispensable role in the defeat of the Nazis, and brushing aside the contributions of the Allies, one of these young men went on to say: "If you stand with us, we will protect you with all our Russian soul. But if you are against us (a finger was jabbing now), we will fight you with all our Russian soul. We will fight you to the end!" The speaker looked at his mate, and their eyes locked in solidarity; then they laughed, embraced, and knocked their heads together so hard you could hear the crack of bone on bone. Thanks for reading. For more info, visit: thetigerbook.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JohnVaillant Twitter:
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Guests
by John Vaillant, September 2, 2010 10:44 AM
In order to write any sort of in-depth book, you're going to have to do a substantial amount of research and legwork, and then distill it all in quiet seclusion, kind of like a bootlegger. In the case of The Tiger, most of this research and legwork took place in the Far East. Getting visas to China and Russia isn't all that hard, but once you get there, you are going to have to communicate with armed men interested in personal details, and you'll need to find the bathroom. In my case, I also needed to have frank conversations with people who'd had life-and-death encounters with tigers, some of whom were also breaking the law on a regular basis. The catch is that traveling in the Far East is like suddenly coming down with a wicked case of dyslexia. Nothing makes sense anymore and your alphabet is useless. English, despite its international popularity, has yet to catch on tiger country, even in academic circles. So I needed a translator. Good translators are like magic keys — into a culture and into its stories, and they deserve a lot more credit than they usually get. The relationship between researcher and translator can be compared to the one between Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay: Hillary may have had vision and backing and good technique, but he never would have summited Everest without Norgay's local knowledge and tremendous courage. However, people like this are hard to find — in any profession. Because translation is generally considered a white-collar job, very few translators outside of war zones are willing to sleep on the ground, on the bus, in cabins with strangers, or in firetrap hotels where the only posted rules are "No Smoking and No Fighting." Even fewer are willing to put up with this for weeks on end. This posed a serious problem for me because the story I was after was hidden in one of the last places on earth where tigers still roam free and wild (yet another deterrent to finding a translator). Early on in my search, I sent a sort of Hail Mary email to the Slavic languages department at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. About three days later, I got a reply from Nanjing, China, from the son of a professor in the department. The writer was a Canadian who had grown up a mile or two from where I live. His name was Josh Stenberg and he was 26 years old. He said he was fluent in Mandarin and decent in Russian. He also spoke Spanish, Italian, German, Swedish, and French, along with a little Hebrew, and was currently working on Indonesian. He'd won a scholarship to Harvard and graduated in three years. He had conducted the research for his undergraduate thesis in Khabarovsk, an obscure Russian city that lay just 150 miles from the village — and the tiger — I was wanting to write about. Josh wanted an excuse to go back to the Russian Far East, he said, and his job in Nanjing happened to be ending shortly before I wanted to travel. I had never received an email like this before, and my response still baffles me: "This'll be my backup," I said to myself, and kept on looking for a "real" translator. What was I thinking? I don't know. I chalk it up to nerves. I searched for weeks, exploring all the usual channels, along with some unusual ones. The strongest candidate I came up with was a big game hunting guide, but I needed my subjects alive. Then Josh came back to Vancouver, and we had an exploratory coffee. Maybe it was the caffeine that brought me to my senses; in any case, I finally grasped my good fortune. As quickly as red tape would allow, we got our visas and flew to Beijing, where we boarded a northbound train, headed toward Primorye and the remote wilderness famously described in the Russian classic Dersu the Trapper, which was also the basis for Akira Kurosawa's Oscar-winning 1975 film, Dersu Uzala. To see a short story by my translator, Josh Stenberg, go
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Guests
by John Vaillant, September 1, 2010 10:48 AM
One of the most important teachers I had regarding tiger behavor was an amazing video clip of an attack by a Bengal tigress in northeast India's Kaziranga National Park. In this clip, wardens on elephants can be seen trying to shoot the tigress with a tranquilizer gun until, finally, she gets fed up. What is significant about the tigress's response to this harassment is her mode of attack: when a cat is hunting for food, it typically attacks from behind, using the element of surprise. But when a tiger is attacking an adversary — driving off a competitor or fighting an enemy — it usually approaches head-on, as this tigress does (and as The Tiger did). One of many things that really impressed me about this video was how the tigress emerges from the long grass like a shark swimming up out of the depths — and then erupts — flying over the top of the elephant — jumping "as high as it needs to." You can watch it here. By stopping the motion of the video as incrementally as I could, I was able to scrutinize every stage of her amazing leap and impact, paying particular attention to the interplay of paws, jaws, and tail. Then I tried to assemble everything I'd read, heard, and seen (see yesterday's blog entry) into word-pictures that would be clear to people who'd never seen or thought much about attacking tigers. The analogy I came up with to describe how a tiger organizes itself into such a deadly weapon was a basketball team (see p. 27 in the book). In fact, there is a postscript to this video that I found even more amazing than the attack itself. You can read it here. I was very moved by the female elephant's response to the tigress — her clear intention to subdue the cat, but not to kill or injure her. I couldn't help wondering if the elephant's response would have been different had she and/or the tigress been male. It has also inspired me to read The Jungle Book again with fresh
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Guests
by John Vaillant, August 31, 2010 10:00 AM
One of the things that drew me to the story that became The Tiger was the way in which a solitary wild animal was able to make a modern community, equipped with cars, TVs, telephones, and firearms, revert to a Stone Age mindset almost overnight. If we're familiar with tiger attacks at all it's likely because we've read stories about man-eaters in India — serial attacks on seemingly helpless villagers living in very primitive circumstances. The Russian village of Sobolonye, profiled in The Tiger, is much more familiar to the Western reader; the inhabitants (and the victims) are Caucasians with both feet firmly planted in the industrialized world. Furthermore, the vast majority of the men and many of the women who live there are experienced hunters. And yet, in the space of one week at the turn of the millennium, this tiger was able to strip away the fragile veneer of civilization and human superiority and replace it with a kind of ancient, elemental terror. This was possible because, as one Chinese saying puts it, "The tiger's progress is as silent as the moon's." When I was in the Far East, I was told repeatedly that if a tiger has targeted you, you will never see it coming. Should you have the misfortune to witness an attack like those experienced around Sobolonye, it has a way of undoing your confidence in the known world. Things you've taken for granted become unsteady, menacing, and magical — in a bad way. Children know this feeling well, but most adults have worked hard to forget it. I wanted to understand more fully what this experience is like and, in order to do so, I had to learn a lot about how tigers operate. In the zoo, you can get a feel for a tiger's mass and "heavy grace," but zoo tigers tend to move very slowly, if at all. It's hard in that context to get a sense of how invisible — and how fast — tigers can be when they're sufficiently motivated. After the Siberian tiger attacks at the San Francisco Zoo on Christmas day, 2007, a noted tiger expert was asked how high a tiger can jump. His answer, "As high as it needs to," touches on an essential truth about tigers. While I was in Russia, I interviewed several survivors of tiger attacks (all of whom were experienced hunters and woodsmen) and, in each case, the victim had time to take only a single step before the tiger was on him — and that was after the tiger had alerted him with a roar. Dodging or escaping was simply out of the question. The only reason these men survived is because the tiger was not fully committed to killing them, or because a third party intervened. The tiger featured in this book, however, was fully committed, every time. After reading The Tiger, an editor at Publisher's Weekly came away convinced that I had actually been present for these events. I was not, but in order to reconstruct them so vividly, I did three things: 1. I read a lot about how tigers hunt, fight, and kill. Key sources were George Schaller's classic, The Deer and the Tiger, and Richard Perry's wonderful compendium of tiger lore, The World of the Tiger. There are other good sources, too, and many of these are included in The Tiger's bibliography. 2. I interviewed attack survivors extensively, along with hunters, wardens, and scientists who had either been present during attacks, or had closely examined their aftermath. Tiger attacks are rare in Russia, but when they occur, they are taken very seriously by the authorities. As a result, the inspectors charged with investigating this animal's attacks treated the evidence forensically, as one would a murder, so there was a lot of data to work with: in addition to interviews, notes, maps, and diagrams, there was extensive video footage of the scenes. I also visited the sites. Amur tiger attacks are easier to reconstruct than those by other tiger subspecies because the Amur's environment (the Russian Far East) is often covered in snow. If you know how to read them, the tracks tell the whole the story. The level of detail that can be gleaned from these frozen records is extraordinary. 3. I also watched an amazing video. More on this tomorrow. For more info visit: thetigerbook.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JohnVaillant Twitter:
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Guests
by John Vaillant, August 30, 2010 11:19 AM
Hello! Powell's has been kind enough to hand me the mike this week. The occasion for this indulgence is The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, which came out a few days ago. It's a relief, really, because the suspense has been killing me. This was a three-and-a-half year trip: from the realization in Banff, Alberta, that, holy cow, this story is completely out of hand, I have to write it, to Beijing, Vladivostok, and into Primorye, the Siberian tiger's last stronghold. And, finally, to this moment: all of us here together, packed into this little blog. The Tiger is set in Russia, in the dead of winter, during the chaotic aftermath of perestroika. Near Russia's far eastern border with China, a Siberian tiger is hunting, and a man is hunting, too. The man is a poacher, desperately poor, and he shoots the tiger and wounds it. The injured tiger remembers this man, follows him home, trashes his stuff, and kills his dogs. Then it lies down by the poacher's door and waits. But that is only the beginning; things get weirder and scarier from there. As the inspector who was sent in to investigate this case said to me, "There are many people who don't believe this actually happened. They think it's some phantasm of my imagination. But it was real. There are the facts." A lot of people have asked me how I came across this story, and it was thanks to the Banff Mountain Festival where I saw a documentary called Conflict Tiger. I didn't know much about the film going in — something about poachers and Siberian tigers — but I was hooked from the opening shot: a wide-angle panorama of snowbound forest paired with this shrill, skirling soundtrack. About 15 minutes later I felt — and this is precisely what I felt — a bolt of recognition to the forehead: sudden, exhilarating and terrifying all at once. Thematically speaking, I had visited this country before in my first book, The Golden Spruce. But that true story of humans and nature in collision didn't have a tiger in it. The film lasted an hour, and I was riveted to my chair, squirming as quietly as I could. As soon as I got home, I called the director, Sasha Snow (his real name), and liked him immediately. We work in different media, on different continents, but it was clear that we were tuned to the same frequency. He encouraged me to go to Russia myself. Since then, we have become friends, to the point that he is now making a documentary of The Golden Spruce. I was captivated by Snow's film, but I was also left with lingering questions. I wanted to know more about the poacher, Markov, who did not survive to be interviewed, but who left family, friends and tantalizing clues, and I wanted to know more about the tiger's other victims. I also wanted to know more about the inspector, Yuri Trush, the man charged with solving these reciprocal crimes against nature and who, in so doing, got caught up in them himself. And I wanted to try to understand this tiger: its strange and spooky sentience, its frightening capacity for absorbing bullets and holding a grudge, and its apparent preference for only the most dangerous adversaries. What drives an animal like that, I wondered, across the years and miles, through Arctic cold? Finally, I wanted to understand the desperate circumstances that set this serial tragedy in motion. So I flew and drove and rode and walked and pestered and sat and listened and read and wrote until, finally, a couple of years later, I felt confident that I had the goods, and that you would have The Tiger. For more info, visit: thetigerbook.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JohnVaillant Twitter:
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