JINTANG, CHINA—In a lifetime of herding, Liu Xiangqing had never seen cows so scared.

Normally at 6 a.m., they would be gathered together, contentedly chewing and grazing in the dawn light. But this June morning, they were scattered through the pine scrub, pacing, their ears alert. Liu took a quick head count and realized one was missing, a 2-year-old bull.

By the time the remains were located, the tail and thighs were missing, the entrails spilled in the dirt. There was a gash in the neck; claw marks raked down the torso.

It was a sure sign: the Siberian tiger was back.

“In my whole life, I’d never seen a real tiger, but I knew it couldn’t be anything else,” said Liu, 52, who grew up in this remote Chinese village wedged between the Russian and North Korean borders.

Once believed nearly extinct in China, the Siberian tiger is making a comeback, the result of a decade-long effort to restore its natural habitat by banning logging, hunting and trapping.

Although they weigh as much as 300 kilograms, Siberian tigers are elusive creatures that slink into the forest when humans approach. Villagers learn that a tiger has been on the prowl when they spot paw prints (or pug marks, as they are known) the diameter of melons. Or, as is happening more frequently in China, they discover that livestock is missing or mauled.

Four cows were killed in five days in May in another village near the border. One of the largest of Liu’s cattle, a nearly 600-kilogram bull, lost its tail to a tiger but fought back and lived.

In March, a farmer investigating a noise pointed his flashlight into the darkness and saw a tiger with claws dug into a cow. He chased it away by banging a metal bucket and setting off a firecracker.

In China, the number of Siberian tigers living in the wild has been listed in government statistics at between 18 and 22 for some years, said Li Zhixing, who has worked for decades on tiger protection.

Nobody knows the exact number, but Li believes there could be as many as 40 now and that the population is growing.

“I personally think the number of tigers has doubled in the last decade and that the area populated by tigers has become much larger,” said Li, 60.

Li credits campaigns to restore the degraded forests in China and Russia. The latter began tiger-protection efforts in the 1940s and has the largest population of Siberian tigers, between 400 and 900, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

But in recent years, China has caught up and might even be moving ahead in creating tiger-friendly habitat, Li said.

Although Chinese still buy illegal body parts of tigers — poached in India or killed in captivity — for traditional medicine, the wild tigers have not been hunted in China since the 1950s, Li said. The Chinese government also has sought to improve the public’s attitude toward tigers by compensating farmers for pilfered livestock. Liu, for example, expects to receive about $500 for the young bull killed in June. Chinese newspapers now contain a multitude of articles about tiger attacks on farms, further raising awareness.

Here in Jilin province, the Forestry Ministry has designated a wildlife preserve containing 108,700 acres of spruce, pine and larch forest, the favourite habitat of the tiger. In August, scientists released 37 deer into the preserve to attract tigers as well as leopards, another endangered species native to the region.

“If you want to protect tigers, you have to protect their food supply,” said Zhang Changzhi, a scientist with the World Wildlife Fund, which is sponsoring the project.

Tigers are endangered throughout the world: Their population in the wild has dwindled from an estimated 100,000 in the early 20th century to as few as 3,200 today. Siberian tigers, also known as Amur or Korean tigers, are among six surviving subspecies and are native to the boreal forests, or taiga, of China, Russia and North Korea.

Chinese have been amazed not only by the apparent growth of the tiger population but also by how far the felines have spread. It made headlines around China this year when tigers were seen near Jiamusi, a city 140 miles from the Russian border.

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“My father used to tell how he once helped Russians hunt tigers, but in my lifetime—and I’m almost 50—there hadn’t been tigers around here until now,” said Che Shiguo, a farmer from the outskirts of Jiamusi, in Heilongjiang province. He saw a tiger devouring a 3-month-old calf in August.

He screamed, and the tiger ran away.

“If not, I would probably have been eaten by the tiger too,” Che said.

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