Tigers in the Snow - Hardcover

Matthiessen, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0865475768 ISBN 13: 9780865475762

Publisher: North Point Pr, 2000

Synopsis

Dramatic full-color photography complements a close-up study of the endangered Siberian tiger that describes the big cat's role in its environment and the joint efforts of Russian researchers and U.S. wildlife biologists to preserve the endangered animal. 25,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Matthiessen is the acclaimed author of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction. His accomplishments as a naturalist and explorer have resulted in more than a dozen books on natural history and the environment, including The Tree Where Man Was Born, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and The Snow Leopard, which won it. His equally distinguished career as a fiction writer has produced a collection of stories and eight novels, among them At Play in the Fields of the Lord, which was nominated for a National Book Award, Far Tortuga, and the Everglades trilogy, which includes his most recent book, Bone by Bone.

Reviews

Are tigers doomed? Between 4,600 to 7,700 remain in the wild, but their numbers are dwindling. Matthiessen's eloquent report on the fate of tigers--chiefly in Siberia but also in Indonesia, India, Thailand and China--explains what conservationists and governments are doing to save the tigers; compact reportage and natural history share space with poetic meditation on the significance and majesty of the big cats. To the graceful prose and attentive descriptions that mark his bestselling nonfiction (The Snow Leopard; In the Spirit of Crazy Horse; etc.) and his fiction (Bone by Bone, etc.), Matthiessen's new work adds a sense of urgency: the result is a marvelously effective brief in favor of tigers. Matthiessen begins and ends by recounting his trips to Russia (in 1992 and 1996) in which he sought the Siberian tiger, the largest and most majestic of surviving tiger subspecies. He spoke to Russian villagers, learned about poachers and antipoaching efforts, and watched the rare beasts roam the taiga, take down elk and give birth. The Sikhote-Alin wildlife reserve, an expanse of forested mountains and beaches as big as Yosemite, represents the great hope of Siberian tigers; there, Matthiessen met biologist Hornocker, codirector of the Siberian Tiger Project. The rest of the book surveys tigers elsewhere in Asia. Iranian tigers are already extinct; Thailand, fortunately, maintains a "system of protected areas, well staffed and funded, where most of its tigers are already sheltered." As Matthiessen learns from filmmaker and "tiger partisan" Belinda Wright, India's efforts to save its tigers have foundered, in part because they fail to solicit, or to reward, indigenous people's assistance; worse yet, Indian authorities can't bring themselves to catch and prosecute poachers, even when Wright goes undercover to nab them. Hornocker--who pioneered radiotelemetry, the practice of tracking big cats via radio collars, on which the Siberian project depends--contributes the volume's 60 spectacular black and white photographs. Some capture the scientists and villagers as they follow tiger prints over thick snow or dig themselves out of a rugged winter. In other shots, the tigers--black and white themselves--pose amid birches, romp across tundra, sniff the air as for prey or lean protectively over a tranquil cub. Invigorated by Matthiessen's potent prose, these photos celebrate the majesty, and highlight the plight, of one of nature's most magnificent beasts. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Hunting and loss of habitat reduced the world's tiger population from about 100,000 at the beginning of the 20th century to around 5,000 at the end of it. At least three of the eight species of Panthera tigris are effectively extinct in the wild. And although the tiger "rivals the African elephant and the blue whale as the most majestic and emblematic creature," its ways are little known "because of its crepuscular and covert habits." Matthiessen, in his 19th nonfiction book, tells the sad tale of the tigers. He treats in particular P. t. altaica, the Siberian or Amur tiger. Hunted almost to extinction, it began a recovery after the Soviet Union established in 1936 the Sikhote-Alin Reserve some 300 miles northeast of Vladivostok. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the tiger has come under siege again. Matthiessen describes a countervailing effort, the Siberian Tiger Project. It is a Russian-American research venture established in 1992 to study the creature's habits in order to provide a strong scientific base for recommendations to government authorities on how to save the tigers. Will they survive? Maybe not, with global corporations moving to exploit the Russian Far East. Says Matthiessen: "Without intervention and protection (while the businessmen come to their senses), efforts to save rare species such as the Amur tiger and the Far Eastern leopard will be in vain."

EDITORS OF SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

One of the most recognizable animals on Earth, the tiger comes in eight distinct subspecies. The largest variety--the Siberian, or Amur, tiger--is the focus of this book. Matthiessen is no stranger to the study of animals in their natural habitats, having given us more than two dozen memorable works, including The Snow Leopard, on the subject. Here he recounts the research projects that started in 1990 when Maurice Hornocker, director of the Hornocker Wildlife Institute, and others first made a trip to tiger country in the Russian Far East. Matthiessen describes the difficulties the expeditions encountered in gathering data on a very elusive species in a harsh environment, with powerful foreign cultural forces at work. His very readable, engaging text is accompanied by more than 60 equally impressive photographs by Hornocker. Essential reading for everyone interested in wildlife and the preservation of endangered species, this is highly recommended for public libraries.
---Edell Marie Schaefer, Brookfield P.L., WI
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The beautiful wild region known as the Russian Far East curves south along the Sea of Japan like a great claw of Siberia, from the vast delta of the Amur River to the North Korean border, and its coast range - the Sikhote-Alin - extending southward some 600 miles between the Ussuri River and the sea is the last redoubt of Panthera tigris altaica, the Siberian or Manchurian tiger, which ranged formerly throughout northeastern China (or Manchuria) and the Korean peninsula, and west as far as Mongolia and Lake Baikal. In the past century, its range has been reduced almost entirely to the Amur- Ussuri watershed, and today the most appropriate name for the largest of the world's great cats is the Amur tiger.

The Sikhote-Alin, at latitude 40 to 50.5 degrees, is a range of mountains rarely more than 6,ooo feet high. Its forest is temperate pine-and-hardwood taiga with fir and spruce at higher altitudes, subsiding as it descends in the north into boreal conifers of spruce- muskeg tundra (the original taiga, or "land of little sticks," refers to those stunted spruce; today the term is used more often as a rough equivalent of "wilderness"). Here the brown bear, lynx, wolf, and sable of the north cross tracks with the black bear, tiger, and leopard of the broad-leafed forests farther south, in an astonishing mammalian fauna-unlike any other left on earth. Ussuria or Ussuri Land was all but unknown to the West until early in the twentieth century, when it was explored by Vladimir K. Arseniev, a young army lieutenant, geographer, and naturalist who made three expeditions there between 1902 and 1908 in order to map the wild Primorski Krai, or Maritime Province. Arseniev was subse uently described as "the great explorer of Eastern Siberia" by the Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who expressed astonishment that this region of the Asian land mass had remained less known than the wildest Indian countries of North America.

Traveling on horseback and on foot, Arseniev was guided by a man named Dersu, an indigenous hunter-trapper of the Tungus-Manchu tribes (Altaic Tatar peoples related to the Tibetans and Mongolians and also to those ancient hunters who traveled east across the Chukchi Peninsula and Beringia to North America). As a young man, Dersu had survived a terrible mauling by a tiger; he was exhausted and near death from loss of blood when his wife found him in the taiga after days of tracking.

Like all aboriginal hunters, Dersu feared the tiger's immense strength and ferocity but also revered it as the very breath and spirit of the taiga. These Tungus peoples considered it a near-deity and sometimes addressed it as "Grandfather" or "Old Man." The indigenous Udege and Nanai tribes referred to it as "Amba" or "tiger" (it was only the white strangers---the Russians-who translated that word as "devil"). To the Manchurians, the tiger was Hu Lin, the king, since the head and nape stripes on certain mythic individuals resembled the character Wan-da - the great sovereign or prince. "On a tree nearby fluttered a red flag," Arseniev wrote, "with the inscription: 'San men dshen vei Si-zhi-tsi-go vei da suay Tsin tsan da tsin chezhen shan-lin,' which means 'To the True Spirit of the Mountains: in antiquity in the dynasty of Tsi he was commander-in-chief for the dynasty Da Tsin, but now he guards the forests and mountains.' "

Because the tiger protected the precious ginseng root from the Manchurians, Dersu would never shoot at Amba, and he entreated Arseniev not to shoot him, either. (Indigenous peoples throughout southern Asia avoided killing tigers, all except man-eaters, and even then might hold a ceremony of regret in which it was explained to other tigers how their kinsman had erred and must now forfeit its life.) Arseniev and Dersu, exploring Ussuri Land in every season, had many encounters with Amba, to whom they lost their dog, and one day the lieutenant expressed regret that he had never actually laid eyes on this secretive presence. Dersu cried out, "Oh no! Bad see him! Men [who] never see Amba ... happy, lucky men ... Me see Amba much. One time shot, miss. Now me very much fear. For me now one day will be bad, bad luck." (In keeping with the conventions of the era, Dersu's speech was rendered in the same pidgin English spoken to white sahibs by Indian scouts, African bearers, and other trusty na ive guides in memoirs from all around the colonial world.) Amba pervades Arseniev's journals, an imminent menace that the doughty Russian begins to dread. "We stood there silently a few minutes in the hope that some sound would betray the presence of the tiger, but there was the silence of the grave. In that silence I felt mystery, and fear."

In Arseniev's time, the tiger was already under heavy pressure from foreign hunters. Both Russians and Manchurian Chinese claimed these remote hunting grounds, which were rich in the precious ginseng root and the lustrous fur of the large arboreal weasel called the sable; these invading strangers, and the Koreans, too, ignored the rights of the indigenous peoples, who were mainly discounted as tazi by the Russians (from the Chinese da-tsi, or "foreigners" - that is, "others") despite their long prior habitation- at least 6,000 years, according to the carbon dating of petroglyphs found along the upper Amur, which include representations of the great northern tiger that in other days was found there, too.

Edition details

• Publisher: North Point Pr
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0865475768
• ISBN 13: 9780865475762
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 185