We rumbled out of Khabarovsk, passing workers gathered at the bus stops, their breath suspended in the air. We passed a shopping mall on the city’s outskirts, where a few months prior, a brown bear had wandered in. The bear was shot and bundled into the back of a white van, head hanging like a teddy without its stuffing. Aleksandr then described a boar that had recently rammed the doors of a Khabarovsk hotel. Each of Aleksandr’s stories implied that Siberia was teeming with wildlife, when a century ago, Dersu Uzala, the indigenous trapper who led Arseniev’s expeditions, warned of the environment’s demise: he gave it ten years before all the sable and squirrel would be gone.
Dersu Uzala belonged to the Nanai tribe, also called ‘the fishskin Tatars’ after their habit of using dried fishskins for clothes. In the late sixteenth century, Siberia’s population comprised almost a quarter of a million indigenous people living as nomads, fishermen, hunters and reindeer herders. The Nanai were one among around five hundred unique Siberian tribes. Belief systems were shamanist and animist.
Dersu Uzala, photographed c. 1906, acted as a guide for Vladimir Arseniev’s expedition, and twice saved his life. In 1975, the story was turned into an Oscar-winning film, Dersu Uzala, by the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa.
This mix began to change in the seventeenth century. Religious dissidents who refused to sign up to reforms in the Russian Orthodox Church fled east of the Urals to escape repression in European Russia. They formed ‘Old Believer’ communities, which still exist today. The process of Russian cultural assimilation among minorities picked up under Catherine the Great, with a rapid expansion in Siberian trade. Disease, brought in by the influx of outsiders, also spread into indigenous communities. By the middle of the seventeenth century, Russian settlers – as opposed to just convicts, who were only ever a small proportion of Siberia’s new population – were outnumbered by indigenous Siberians at a ratio of around three to one. By the end of the nineteenth century, that ratio had changed, with five citizens of Russian descent to one indigenous Siberian. With these demographic shifts – not unique to Russia, given what the Europeans were up to with their overseas colonies – Orthodox Christianity soon prevailed. Forced collectivization in the Soviet period, as well as a stringent ‘Russifying’ political ideology, then brought the last of Siberia’s indigenous outliers into line. Shamanism, banned by Lenin in the twenties, is no longer close to what it was before. With the old blood mixed up with the new, Slavic features are found in faces that look a little Korean, Mongolian, even Native American. Siberia’s original hundred-odd languages are disappearing. The Kerek tongue, spoken in the Far North, is close to extinction. There are more tigers left in Siberia than there are Itelmen-speaking people.
There had been fresh snowfall overnight in Khabarovsk. The further we drove, the thicker the drifts. By the time we turned off the road at the village of Durmin, the track was smothered. Marsh grasses arced under the weight, and seedheads nodded like silver pom-poms. In the solitude, it was hard to imagine the Russian taiga – the so-called ‘tipsy forest’, named after the skinny, deracinated trees – rustling with sable. This relative of the marten once thrived in the wooded belt between Russia’s grassy southern steppe and the northern tundra inside the Arctic Circle. From the mid-sixteenth century, sable was Russia’s ‘soft gold’, accounting for up to ten per cent of the state income, its silken fur, each dark chocolate hair tipped in silver as if sprinkled in morning frost, drawing bands of ruffian Cossack mercenaries. Answering to the Tsars, the Cossacks colonized Siberia so rapidly, they reached the Pacific within sixty-odd years of making their first incursion over the Urals.
Aleksandr spotted a field mouse on the road, which we just avoided running over. ‘Don’t look after the shrew, and we have big problems,’ he said, explaining how the natural chains are breached with every felling of an oak tree. When predator and prey lose their place in the world, tigers are forced to migrate into territory where they don’t belong. He told me to listen out for ravens, which cluster around a kill. He wanted to show me a nuthatch, which was his favourite bird. Between sharing facts about the forest, Aleksandr talked a little about politics – how the socialist idea was a good one, though other nations wouldn’t have stood it for so long. Russians have an ability to endure, he said, to test an idea from the beginning to its end. He described the vacuum that was created, and his disappointment, when the USSR disintegrated. He talked about the riverside cabin of his Siberian childhood, how it was surrounded by rolling wheat fields and mountains where he used to collect berries which his grandmother folded into yoghurt. A large basket took two hours to fill. It was on expeditions like this that he learned to observe the behaviour of animals, including hares, birds, roe deer, foxes and wolves. At the age of five, he spied on a family of cranes, hiding himself in the pond so that only his eyes and nose were above the water. But the cranes got angry and attacked him.
An eighteenth-century engraving of an indigenous Siberian fur trapper. The indigenous people were heavily exploited, earning a copper kettle in return for the equivalent skins they could squash inside the vessel.
Bit by bit, Aleksandr began to reveal his motivations for protecting a species he feared could no longer protect itself. It didn’t matter that he rarely found a tiger. Like the researcher Sooyong Park, who has written so eloquently about his years sleeping in hides waiting for Siberian tigers, Aleksandr was content looking for its tracks and trying to reason with the loggers damaging the habitat on which not just the tiger but also its prey depend. Aleksandr was fascinated by the tiger’s status in Russian culture. He described all sorts of superstitions around tigers – like the one about a priest who in Tsarist times wore a tiger skin under his cassock to avoid being bitten by the town’s stray dogs – and gruesome true stories. A few years ago, a good friend – a game warden – woke up to fresh tracks, recorded the sighting in his diary and then set out for another winter cabin. Along the way the tiger ambushed him.
Then Aleksandr grabbed my hand, squeezed it and stopped the van. On the ground ahead of us was a perfect line of pugmarks – each wide pad fringed with four round toes. As I cautiously stepped out of the truck and put my hand against the pugmark in the snow, the scale became real. The front paw pad measured nine centimetres at its widest point. A six-year-old tiger, said Aleksandr, and probably a male.
For another mile, the tracks followed a straight line then looped off the road, where the tiger had wandered off to add its scratch marks to a tree. Aleksandr said we mustn’t follow. If a tiger has prepared itself for an attack, there is no way a man can act quickly enough. Tigers are clever, with a capacity for premeditated revenge. They like walking in our footsteps, said Aleksandr, preferring the feel and efficiency of compressed snow.
We drove on at a crawl, until we came to the impression where the tiger had been sleeping and left its barrel-shaped belly pushed into the pack. Golden strands of hair were still embedded in the white. A few steps beyond, there were scarlet specks of blood, the stain so fresh that the colour was still bright with life. This would have been enough – to touch the blood from a Siberian tiger’s kill – until we turned another bend in the track. The tiger was sleeping, perhaps eighty metres distant, in the middle of the road. When he raised his head, I could see the dazzling stripes, the crystal snow falling off his back, the poise of his long tail, which had nothing to do with fear.
That night, I had difficulty sleeping. When a log hissed then snapped in the fire, I thought of the single bite it takes a tiger to break the neck of a deer. But it wasn’t fear that was keeping me awake; it was intoxication. Part of me wanted to leave Durmin and the discomforts of Siberian life – the anxious nights, the frozen meat hung up in the porch waiting for a clumsy hacking from the Uzbek cook – but a far larger