Amur Tigers

[brotherbear]

Beyond the Ural Mountains...
Vandaga recalled that his relatives had expelled him from the tribe. The Nanai call the tiger amba, the Udege kutymafa. In olden times the two tribes hardly ever hunted this wild beast, which they revered as sacred.
Tigers lived close to human settlements, ate a good half of the musk-deer caught in the traps, carried off dogs and robbed the stocks of frozen fish. As a young lad Vandaga was scared of aiming his gun at a striped cat, for he believed that a hunter would be visited by misfortune as a punishment for attacking a tiger. But once, after the first snows, a tiger broke into the nomads' camp at dawn and carried off Vandaga's favorite dog. Then he saw red and followed the wild beast's tracks. The tiger was cowardly; when he heard the footsteps of a human being, he left his prey and hid. 
The young hunter stood by the body of his dog for a long time, crying and cursing. His grief drove him to make a bold decision. He put his loaded gun down beside the dog with a cord attached to the trigger and went back to camp. "If the tiger is a sacred animal," he reasoned, "the gun will not fire when he touches the cord tied to the trigger with his chest. But if it fires, the tiger is a forest thief who must be destroyed." 
All night long Vandaga dreamed that the tiger had broken his gun in a rage. What would he go hunting with then? 
In the morning he was almost beside himself with excitement when he visited the spot where his loaded weapon was tied to the dog. The tiger lay stretched out in the snow. Reply