Sensationalized literary tales of true animal attacks are anachronistic in this era of vanishing wilderness and collapsing ecosystems. Man is the predominant aggressor in our relations with bears, sharks and tigers. But animal attacks still capture tabloid front pages for good reason. Below their surface, there’s something deeply moving that’s rarely acknowledged — more acutely so when that animal is a tiger.

A ripping, gripping tale in its own right, John Vaillant’s The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival enters the world of a particular Siberian tiger, the remote community it terrorized and the handful of conservation officers who now stand guard against poachers and the tiger’s looming extinction. From this departure point, the Governor General’s Award-winning author of The Golden Spruce illustrates the distinctly entwined natures of man and beast. This eons-old relationship illuminates hope for the endangered super-predator and the collapsing ecology of Russia’s Far East.

Vaillant approaches the tiger attack in question not as incident but as phenomenon; a vast dissection of two colliding natures, ours and theirs, as pointed out in the following interview.

You describe the Russian Far East as relatively lawless, dangerous, heavily poached and logged. It seems a miracle that tigers exist there at all.

But it’s thanks to the Russians. Primorski Krai was Chinese territory in the 1850s. There’d be no tigers today if that had stayed in Chinese hands. There’s a lot of intact habitat. The [Chinese] border is open now, and the combination of post-Perestroika chaos with an open border is tough on natural resources.

You describe wealthy Russian hunting parties in SUVs shooting from their windows at anything that moves.

Its really chaotic, like the Wild West; people on the train shooting at buffalo out the window in 1865. There are analogous scenes playing out today in the Russian Far East.

You write that the tiger strikes a deep resonant chord with humans, that its nature has informed ours. Can that deep connection be positively tapped?

Amur tigers, the Siberian tiger, is one of the most popular attractions in zoos because they’re so powerful and so beautiful and because they resonate. The tension is, we’ve gotten so far away from living harmoniously; we’re not hunter-gatherers anymore who’ve learned how to negotiate a truce with the predators around us.

You call the tiger a canary in a coalmine. If we can’t manage to save this one species, this one region, how can we take on issues like global climate change?

People have said tiger conservation is a test and if we pass then we get to keep the planet. This kind of bugs me, but there’s some truth to it. It’s a barometer of health for the entire ecosystem. If the system can support a top predator like a tiger, it implies everything else is in place. We’re tied to that system whether we like it or not. Whether its an oil well blowing back in your face or a tiger attacking you after you’ve shot it, nature will reward you for your incompetence.

An overt or underlying call to action on the state of global ecology is a trend in books. How much is The Tiger a product of that ethos?

I didn’t come into this consciously. Islamic fundamentalism is not the story of our time. The oilsands is more so in the sense of: How do we balance our needs with the planet’s capacity to carry us? We’re finding those thresholds right now, and the future’s going to be determined by how ably, how artfully, how humbly we can collaborate with the planet. It’s got to be more like a business partner than an easy mark. One of the reasons the indigenous people in Russia’s Far East don’t have conflict with tigers is the tiger needs its space, its prey. They don’t get in its way.

Are you comfortable playing both the journalist-storyteller and the ecological advocate?

I wouldn’t even call it advocacy. I’d call it common sense. I’m not going to dump my garbage in my living room. My job as a journalist, a storyteller, is to tease apart these different threads that make this very complex tapestry we’re all trying to puzzle through.

The analogy I would draw is what if the tarsands went belly up? And what if there was a market for grizzly bear skins in the U.S.? Wouldn’t a segment of the Fort McMurray population start hunting grizzly bears trying to survive? It’s completely irrational and shortsighted, but we need to understand these different points of view. I don’t think it’s helpful to villainize or otherize. We’re all stuck here together.

You say the tiger’s downward spiral could easily be reversed. Do you have real hope for the tiger?

I don’t have the stomach to write a eulogy for the tiger. I can’t accept that as a possibility. Partly because Russia, of all countries, has pulled the Amur tiger back from the brink of extinction twice. And if the Russians can do it, anybody ought to be able to do it. It makes me hopeful. I met the people over there and saw their dedication, their courage and their methods. It’s totally possible.