Werewolf on the Moon

You want to touch big animals, animals not touched by your peers Woe is not you You have the polar bear in Franz Josef Land, the white whale in the Sea of Okhotsk, You have the brown bear, leopard & Amur tiger in Ussuri, the Far East, so east, like a talon it hooks Heilongjiang, claims that edge of Pacific, that swath of maritime lands & a maritime state — Primorsky Krai, home to Vladivostok, the ancient Manchurian forest, its corresponding duck, a short North Korean river- border changing course, redrawn when the bank sloughs off, its markers slipping, washing away — Tumen, sputtering into the Sea of Japan There is an awareness of islands — Oshima, Okushiri, Hokkaido — tucked into the brain of every organism Volcanics, large to small, they perforate the waters northeast to Kamchatka (& that is so far your countrymen send their misbehaved children to so-called corners in their houses) Perhaps you can stand on that shore facing inland & gaze out over the spray of those white whales of yours, the expanse that comprises your jurisdiction Now, what’s the first thing you know is there, but can’t see for mist, et al: Khabarovsk Krai, whose coat of arms is a bear holding a coat of arms of a bear & a tiger holding a blue & yellow coat of arms, inverted Y, tiny crown afloat, big bear pinching his canoe-shaped tongue between his teeth — & what tumbles from there but Black Dragon, scrawling from Inner Mongolia to Tartar Strait, true, for all its bordermaking, to its roots From it & all its names, names for everything: for islands, for fables, the provinces it traces, for gruesome late-Mongol conquerors & the surrounding biology You think about it now & again, thumbing a leatherbound natural history, gift from a pandering South American delegation ripe with stories about their jaguar, the early explorers who called it tigre In the world, there are 9 subspecies of tiger, all eastern, 3 of them extinct Amur is classified as merely endangered & concentrated in Ussuri State Nature Reserve, where you are known because you shot one It is somewhat a farce There is no state — not since Bolshevik word set foot there — only a river bearing the name & you commissioned the research: to study everyone with a name on the Red List of Threatened Species, to house data online at programmes.putin.kremlin.ru, to visit them all & each visit to carry an air gun & a satchel of tranquilizer darts, to shoot, to topple, to affix the GPS collar, to caress the fur (in the case of the whale the skin) & muse to scientists about the big, sleepy oaf: Would she remember, or eat you, or both?