Tigers in the Snow

Tigers in the Snow

North Point Press, 160 pp., $27

There is a unique pain produced by any survey of mankind's long, slow extermination of the tiger. We have extirpated plenty of other animals, of course. But unlike, say, the passenger pigeon, we know we are destroying the tigers. And it's generally acknowledged that we probably shouldn't be.

It's just that we can't seem to stop it.

Peter Matthiessen's new book Tigers in the Snow examines the attempts of several scientists to study and protect the viable but threatened population of Panthera tigris altaica, the Siberian tiger. In January of 1992, four Americans, including Maurice Hornocker of the University of Idaho, joined forces with Russian naturalists to initiate the Siberian Tiger Project, a research and educational effort aimed at increasing understanding of this magnificent animal. Headquartered in Terney, on the west coast of the Sea of Japan, the project studies tigers in the Sikhote-Alin Biosphere Preserve, also called the "Predators' Preserve" because it is home not only to altaica but also to numerous wolves, bears, and lesser carnivores.

The Siberian tiger faces many of the same pressures that have decimated populations of big cats elsewhere: poaching for fur and for parts prized by traditional Asian medicine; destruction of natural habitat (this area of Siberia, the same depicted in Akira Kurosawa's beautiful film Dersu Uzala, is currently being "developed" by American, Japanese, and Korean logging interests); and competition for food and hunting area with an ever-increasing human population.

Such pressures have already led to elimination of the Caspian, Javan, and Balinese tiger. The South China and Sumatran races are close to extinction. While the Indochinese tiger and its larger cousins, the Bengal and Siberian, are hanging on, the news is never good. The Bengal population in the Indian preserve of Ranthambhore, for example, which was highly celebrated in the 1980s, was later shown to be greatly inflated and is now under severe pressure by poachers. Because its habitat is still so sparsely populated, altaica probably represents the last best hope of the species.

Matthiessen has always been at his best in dealing with the interplay of wild creatures, indigenous peoples (here, the Udege), and the relentless pressures of Western-style modernization. His unornamented prose contrasts sharply with its luminous subjects: the snow leopard (in the 1977 National Book Award winner of the same name), the great white shark (in Blue Meridian), and now altaica, brilliantly photographed for the book by Maurice Hornocker.

You won't see the face of one of these animals again without recalling the author's description of its "beautiful and terrifying mask of snow and fire." And this telling detail: Each tiger is marked above its eyes with a simple pattern of black that resembles a character of Hebraic script -- as if God had named each of these perfect predators himself.