It's December 1997, and a man-eating tiger is on the prowl outside a remote village in Russia's Far East. The tiger isn't just killing people, it's annihilating them, and a team of men and their dogs must hunt it on foot through the forest in the brutal cold. As the trackers sift through the gruesome remains of the victims, they discover that these attacks aren't random: the tiger is apparently engaged in a vendetta. Injured, starving, and extremely dangerous, the tiger must be found before it strikes again.Beautifully written and deeply informative, The Tiger is a tale of man and nature that leads inexorably to a final showdown in a clearing deep in the taiga.
The best way to describe this book is that it’s like a murder mystery but a tiger is the killer—and you know this from page one. Basically, a tiger goes a bit nuts and starts killing people in a remote area of Russia. Vaillant discusses Russian culture, economics, and politics; the relationship between hunters and tigers (in Russia compared to Asia); and the balance of life in the forest. Here’s a few crazy things I learned about tigers: they will remember you and track you if you piss them off, they fight and kill the Russian equivalent of the grizzly bear for fun, and they are the most lethal predator on the planet. If that doesn’t make for a good thriller, I don’t know what does. On top of that, you’ll painlessly learn a lot about Russia.
