The last book that I truly loved reading was John Vaillant’s book The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival.
The story is set in the Russian taiga (boreal forest) village of Sobolonye near Vladivostok, Russia’s secretive Pacific port, an area unknown to Westerners, especially those of us living in the Americas. The focus of the book is a huge Siberian tiger that, wounded by a hunter, remembers his scent and goes looking for his dwelling. Once he finds the hunter’s cabin he destroys it and waits in the ruins for the hunter to return. The man will be his first human kill.
This is a page turner of a book, and I loved reading it. The author brings this tiger to life in many ways that are both terrifying and hypnotizing. The people who inhabit the forest with the tiger are also made real. Their lives are brutally hard, little changed from how it was during Stalin’s dictatorship, but their present terror arises from an unexpected source. The villagers had always respected the tiger and understood that, as long as they kept that respect and didn’t annoy him, the tiger would leave them alone. Now that he was killing their fellow citizens and eating them, the villagers knew that someone amongst them had broken the covenant that had existed for so long. They also knew that peace would not return until the tiger had satisfied his need for vengeance or had been killed.
The story is true and the people in it are real, which made the experience of meeting them in the book even more enthralling. John Vaillant quickly captures your interest with the story and the manner in which he tells it.
“As they progress, man and dog alike leave behind a wake of heat, and the contrails of their breath hang in pale clouds above their tracks. Their scent stays close in the windless dark, but their footfalls carry and so, with every step, they announce themselves to the night.
“There are no streetlights in Sobolonye, and the sun was keeping winter hours, so darkness of a profound kind set in around five in the afternoon. People stayed indoors. If they had to go out, they only did so armed, even to the outhouse. Inside, by their massive Russian stoves, people paid close attention to the barking of their dogs and any augury a change in timbre – or a sudden silence – might contain. Daylight, fire, weapons, and wild animals were now determining the shape and schedule of the villagers’ lives. It was as if the clock had just been turned back a hundred years – or a million.
