In an old Vietnamese myth about how the tiger got its stripes, a man tries to show the great cat who's boss by lashing it to a tree and setting the tree on fire.

But the tiger is so powerful and so inured to pain that it strains against the flaming rope until it breaks free, its brush with extinction evident only in the black marks seared on its fur.

So, too, it turns out, with the real tiger.

As recently as the early 1990's, researchers were convinced that the largest and most sumptuously pelted of the world's cats, an animal more feared, revered, fetishized and lionized than the lion itself, was about to go up in smoke.

Once the tiger abounded throughout Asia, from eastern Turkey to the Sea of Japan, from Siberia in the north to Indonesia in the south.

But humanity's expanding numbers, and its lust for land, tiger body parts and the prey on which the tiger feeds, had taken such a huge toll that by 2000, many biologists gloomily predicted, the wild tiger would effectively be extinct.

But now, like a furred phoenix rising or a creature cognizant of its nine-lifetime warranty, the cat has come back.

Far from disappearing, the tiger in some parts of its range is practically thriving, its numbers measurably greater today than just a few years ago.

Though conservationists who have long battled to save the tiger warn against complacency and emphasize that the tiger is still endangered, they admit to an unusual sensation these days: optimism.

"We're all encouraged, which is very different from how we felt five or six years ago," said Ginette Hemley, vice president for species conservation at the World Wildlife Fund. "We won't be able to save the tiger everywhere, and we've learned that we cannot ever drop our guard again, but in some areas there's been some real progress."

Researchers and conservationists from around the world gathered last month in New York for a three-day conference called "Saving the Tiger: Assessing our Success," held under the aegis of the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs the Bronx Zoo.

At the meeting, researchers presented data indicating that tiger populations are better off now than they were earlier this decade in eastern Siberia, Nepal and some areas of India.

For example, in the Ranthambhore forest south of Delhi, popular among ecotourists eager for a glimpse of tiger, a 1993 census found at most 20 tigers left in the region's 318 square miles.

The latest tally, which has yet to be officially released, suggests that the figure has doubled and is still rising.

Even in countries where biologists feared that the tiger was doomed, including Sumatra, Burma, Thailand and Cambodia, scientists at the meeting reported encouraging signs of resilience.

"We had such a surprise," said Dr. John Seidensticker, the curator of mammals at the Smithsonian Institution's National Zoological Park in Washington.

"We thought Sumatra was a loss, but it turns out that even with its enormous political turmoil, which is often accompanied by increased poaching, there are pockets where survey data show there are good levels of tigers, more than we expected to be found."

The tiger is by no means faring well everywhere.

In the mangrove swamps of Bangladesh, where biologists had thought tiger populations were relatively healthy, new survey results indicate fewer than the predicted number of cats.

And across its entire range, the tiger is still quite scarce.

Dr. Peter Jackson, the chairman of the Cat Specialist Group of the World Conservation Union in Switzerland, estimates that there are 5,000 to 7,000 tigers left in Asia. Nobody knows how many tigers dwelt on the continent originally, for there were no efforts to track tiger populations until about 1972, but the number a century ago was probably at least 10 times greater than today.

Nevertheless, that the mighty tiger is holding its own in many pockets heartens biologists and offers a refreshing counterpoint to the dirges in conservation circles, with their bleak refrains of a world peopled solely by weedy species like squirrels, crows, roaches, rats and people.

The biologists attribute the tiger's recovery to several factors.

For one, many Asian countries have begun cracking down harshly on poachers, who in the early 1990's were killing tigers willy-nilly, mostly to obtain tiger bone, a popular ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine.

For another, conservationists have succeeded in gathering critical information about tiger biology, hunting practices and reproduction rates to advise governments on how best to save the great cats.

That advice varies from region to region, but one theme predominates: the best way to save the tiger is to save the tiger's prey: the deer, wild cattle and wild pigs that tigers eat, said Dr. K. Ullas Karanth, "like hamburgers."

"If you manage the prey species well, the tigers will take care of themselves." said Dr. Karanth, a conservation zoologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society, who is based in Bangalore, India.

To guarantee that there will be enough prey to support tigers, he added, a country must set aside some places where humans are not allowed to hunt, and hence where prey animals can always find haven to breed.

"For a while, it was very popular to talk about 'sustainable use,' the idea that you could have human use of a tiger habitat and still have tigers," Dr. Karanth said.

"But our prey data have shown that we need to have nested within these sustainable use areas some truly protected places."

Asked if it was likely that protected areas could be set aside for the long term in countries as populous as India, Dr. Karanth said: "I'm 51 now. When I first started going into the Indian forest, at age 18 or 19, I thought soon there would be no more forests.

But there are more protected areas and more tigers now than when I had given up hope as a young man."

"If you can do it in India," he said, "you can do it anywhere in the world."

Nor do people living in the tiger's range need to be convinced of the cat's worth, Dr. Seidensticker said, or told why saving the tiger is the right thing to do, morally, ecologically and economically.

"I remember talking to a Government official in Bangladesh a number of years ago, who said to me: 'You don't have to tell me that we should save the tiger. Of course we should save the tiger.

Just tell me how we can do it,' " Dr. Seidensticker recalled.

In India, he said, the tiger is considered a national treasure, and not for nothing do other countries in the tiger's domain call themselves, sometimes wistfully, "Asian tigers."

That the tiger hangs on suits its metaphorical heft, which, like the fortissimo timber of its roar, has carried far, wide and deep.

The powerful Hindu goddess Durga rode a tiger mount, while Siva, the god of destruction and reproduction, sat on a tiger skin.

In the Chinese calendar, every 12th year is the year of the tiger, and it is considered a lucky, powerful year to be born (that means you, 1998 babies).

The Romans loved the tiger, identifying with its deadly might, and brought them from Turkey as mascots.

The Emperor Nero kept an entire stable of them, and Bacchus, the god of wine, was depicted in mosaics as riding a chariot drawn by tigers.

William Blake mused in a seditious nursery rhyme about the "tyger, tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night." Many other tigers have infiltrated children's consciousness, as Winnie the Pooh's strong, foolish friend Tigger; cartoon Calvin's stuffed animal, Hobbes, and a well-known spokesbeast for Sugar Frosted Flakes.

The symbolic value of the tiger is flamboyant enough that, several years ago, a shareholder stood up at a corporate meeting for Exxon, which long urged drivers to put a tiger in their tank.

The tiger has been so accommodating as logo and sound bite, the shareholder said, that it's time to give something back to the tiger.

As a result, Exxon, with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, began a Save the Tiger fund in 1995 that will dispense $9 million over eight years to various tiger preservation programs, to which conservationists, ever strapped for cash, responded "Gr-r-eat!"

For all the tiger's cultural presence, the animal proper is devilishly difficult to find in the wild.

It lives largely in dense forest underbrush, where its striped pattern keeps it well camouflaged, so well that at least one renowned tiger researcher admits he has never seen a tiger in the wild. Other tiger biologists have spotted their subjects repeatedly, yet they say it always feels as good as the first time.

"Even finding their tracks is exciting," Dr. Jackson of the Cat Specialist Group said.

"And when you see the tiger itself, it's an awesome sight."

Only in the Sunderbans, a swampy forest that straddles India and Bangladesh on the Bay of Bengal, do people hope not to see tigers.

Living in the Sunderbans are about 250 tigers notorious for being man-eaters, and every year they kill a dozen or so people who venture into the forest to collect wood or fruit. Recently, people have had some success in preventing attacks by wearing hats with eyes painted on the back, for tigers rely on the tactic of surprise, ambushing their prey from behind.

Apart from the Sunderbans, though, tigers have learned, after centuries of being hunted, to shy away from human beings.

They prefer meatier meals in any event, the better to support their massive bodies.

Tigers vary in size depending on where they live and what subspecies they are.

The largest tigers are the Siberian males, which may be nine feet long and weigh more than 500 pounds.

The smallest tigers are the Sumatrans, with males of 250 pounds and females 50 pounds lighter.

Coats also vary from one subspecies to the next.

Siberian and Himalayan tigers live in cold climates and relatively open spaces, and so they have long, thick, relatively light-colored fur, while the tigers that live in the tropics have short, dark fur.

Every so often a Bengal tiger is born with almost white fur, the result of a recessive genetic trait. These rare specimens have an otherworldly glow and a magician's reputation.

Whatever the hue, all tigers have an almost magical capacity for hunting.

An adult can pull down a wild bull two or three times its size, puncturing the prey's throat with canine teeth bigger than your index fingers. Tigers, which have extraordinarily keen vision, can hunt by sunlight or darkness, and researchers have been surprised to find tigers hard on the trail in the heat of midafternoon, when many creatures are taking siestas.

A tiger is a semisolitary cat, living and hunting alone most of the time, but not averse to occasional congregations.

Young males disperse at adolescence, but a daughter will often continue to live near her mother for much of her life, inheriting the mother's territory when she dies.

Females are not the only doting parents.

Recently, males have been observed eating, playing and traveling with their cubs.

They have reason to look after their young: an interloping male will often try to kill the resident cubs, his hope being that, by doing so, he will put the mother tiger back into heat and have a chance to mate with her. And tigers do mate and breed readily, which is why, scientists say, they can rebound from near-extermination when given half a chance.

In seeking to allow tigers to take care of themselves, conservationists have joined forces lately with purveyors of traditional Chinese medicine.

One reason tigers hit bottom in the early 1990's, researchers said, is that the explosive growth of the Chinese economy led to an equally strong demand for products used in traditional Chinese medicine.

Tiger bone has long been a staple item in preparations to treat arthritis, rheumatism and other muscular aches and pains.

Rather than excoriate traditional Chinese medicine as superstitious hogwash -- an approach doomed to fail, given the enormous popularity of Chinese medicine -- conservationists have approached experts in the discipline to see if there were alternatives to tiger bone that could be promoted. They have discovered, through examining traditional texts, that one option is to substitute the bones of an Asian rodent called a sailong, which is common in China.

One way to make sailong bone desirable might be to charge more for it than tiger bone ever commanded. It worked for fake fur, didn't it?

- Back to Tiger Page