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would ensue; shots would be fired. Escape and chase were possible. I like those things; I like being in confrontational situations.”
    But they didn’t pay the bills, so when Russia invaded Afghanistan, Trush volunteered to go. When it began at the end of 1979, the Afghan War was seen by many Russian men as an opportunity not only to serve the cause of socialism, but to grasp the coattails of their fathers’ glory in the Great Patriotic War (World War II). Though he already held the rank of lieutenant, Trush was refused because of his age. Instead, he spent fifteen more years in the mines where he earned a reputation for diligence and integrity that caught the attention of his bosses. In spite of his eligibility, Trush never joined the Communist Party; he had no illusions about the corruption rampant within it.
    In 1994, while working as a foreman at a coal mine in Primorye, Trush was approached by an acquaintance who worked in environmental protection. A new agency was being formed, and he thought that Trush, with his athleticism, pugnacity, and interest in hunting, might be a good candidate. Trush was intrigued and, in March of that year, he found himself in Vladivostok, standing before a short, barrel-chested man with a predilection for pipes and military finery; the man’s name was Vladimir Ivanovich Schetinin, and he was the deputy chairman of Primorye’s Ministry of Environmental Protection. Schetinin was in the process of creating something unprecedented in the history of Russian wildlife conservation.
    Tiger poaching is the most visible symptom of an environmental problem the size of the continental United States: Siberia’s forests represent an arboreal subcontinent covering 2.3 million square miles; altogether, they account for a quarter of the world’s total wood inventory and more than half of its coniferous forests. They are also one of the planet’s biggest carbon sinks, helping to mitigate one of the chief causes of climate change. While tigers were being stolen from the forests, the forests were also being stolen from the tigers, and from the country. The combination of a desperate need for hard currency, lax forestry regulations, and vast markets that lay only a border crossing away set loose a monster in the woods, which is wreaking havoc to this day. In the Far East, legal and black market logging (along with every shade in between) continues to jeopardize the habitat of tigers, humans, and the game that supports them both.
    The most valuable timber in the Far East grows in Primorye, and a person can be murdered here for showing too much interest in the means by which southbound railcars and freighters are loaded with the perfectly symmetrical cylinders of aspen, oak, larch, and poplar that the Asian market demands. Much of what China makes from this Russian wood finds its way into American big box stores. The reason chain store prices—e.g., $20 for a solid oak toilet seat—seem too good to be true is because they are. Stolen hubcaps are cheap for the same reason. In the Far East, paying protection money to the mafia and bribes to customs officials is cheaper than legitimate timber licenses and export duties. On a late night drive through the snowbound woods of the Bikin valley, it is not unusual to meet the black-market night shift—a Toyota van loaded with fallers and their saws, followed by a flatbed crane truck—heading in to work.
    Because Russia’s forests are so big and so vulnerable, some American scientists became concerned in the early 1990s when they realized that perestroika had opened the door to a run on Russia’s natural resources. A handful of journalists reported on this and, when they looked more closely, they noticed the tigers, which came as a surprise to many Westerners, who had no clear idea where “Siberian” tigers actually lived, or even what color they were. At the same time, Vladimir Schetinin and other local biologists and hunting managers realized that, in