The lady and the tigers: is New Jersey any place to keep a pack of wild cats?

On January 27, 1999, a tiger went walking through the township of Jackson, New Jersey. According to the Tiger Information Center, a tiger's natural requirements are "some form of dense vegetative cover, sufficient large ungulate prey, and access to water." By those measures, Jackson is really not a bad place to be a tiger. The town is halfway between Manhattan and Philadelphia, in a corner of Ocean County -- an easy commute to Trenton and Newark, but still a green respite from the silvery sweep of electric towers and petroleum tanks to the north, and the bricked-in cities and mills farther south. Only forty-three thousand people live in Jackson, but it is a huge town, a bit more than a hundred square miles, all of it as flat as a tabletop and splattered with ponds and little lakes. A lot of Jackson is built up with subdivisions and Wawa food markets, or soon will be, but the rest is still primordial New Jersey pinelands of broom sedge and pitch pine and sheep laurel and peewee white oaks, as dense a vegetative cover as you could find anywhere. The local ungulates may not be up to what a tiger would find in more typical habitats, like Siberia or Madhya Pradesh -- there are just the usual ornery and overfed pet ponies, panhandling herds of white-tailed deer, and a milk cow or two -- unless you include Jackson's Six Flags Wild Safari, which is stocked with zebras and giraffes and antelopes and gazelles and the beloved but inedible animal characters from Looney Tunes.

Nevertheless, the Jackson tiger wasn't long for this world. A local woman preparing lunch saw him out her kitchen window, announced the sighting to her husband, and then called the police. The tiger slipped into the woods. At around five that afternoon, a workman at the Dawson Corporation complained about a tiger in the company parking lot. By seven, the tiger had circled the nearby houses. When he later returned to the Dawson property, he was being followed by the Jackson police, wildlife officials, and an airplane with an infrared scope. He picked his way through a few more back yards and the scrubby fields near Interstate 195, and then, unfazed by tranquillizer darts fired at him by a veterinarian, headed in the general direction of a middle school; one witness described seeing an "orange blur." At around nine that night, the tiger was shot dead by a wildlife official, after the authorities had given up on capturing him alive. A pathologist determined that he was a young Bengal tiger, nine feet long and more than four hundred pounds. Nothing on the tiger indicated where he had come from, however, and there were no callers to the Jackson police reporting a tiger who had left home. Everyone in town knew that there were tigers in Jackson -- that is, everyone knew about the fifteen tigers at Six Flags Wild Safari. But not everyone knew that there were other tigers in Jackson, as many as two dozen of them, belonging to a woman named Joan Byron-Marasek. In fact, Jackson has one of the highest concentrations of tigers per square mile anywhere in the world.

Byron-Marasek is famously and purposely mysterious. She rarely leaves the compound where she lives with her tigers, her husband, Jan Marasek, and scores of dogs, except to go to court. On videotapes made of her by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, she looks petite and unnaturally blond, with a snub nose and a small mouth and a startled expression. She is either an oldish-looking young person or a youngish-looking old person; evidently, she has no Social Security number, which makes her actual age difficult to establish. She has testified that she was born in 1955 and was enrolled in New York University in 1968; when it was once pointed out that this would have made her a thirteen-year-old college freshman, she allowed as how she wasn't very good with dates. She worked for a while as an actress and was rumored to have appeared on Broadway in Tom Stoppard's play "Jumpers," swinging naked from a chandelier. A brochure for her tiger preserve shows her wearing silver boots and holding a long whip and feeding one of her tigers, Jaipur, from a baby bottle. On an application for a wildlife permit, Byron-Marasek stated that she had been an assistant tiger trainer and a trapeze artist with Ringling Brothers and L. N. Fleckles; had trained with Doc Henderson, the illustrious circus veterinarian; and had read, among other books, "The Manchurian Tiger," "The World of the Tiger," "Wild Beasts and Their Ways," "My Wild Life," "They Never Talk Back," and "Thank You, I Prefer Lions."

The Maraseks moved to Jackson in 1976, with Bombay, Chinta, Iman, Jaipur, and Maya, five tigers they had got from ...