Environment : Prowling Toward : EXTINCTION : Wanted for their luxurious pelts and supposed healing powers, two of Russia’s big cats are disappearing quickly. The real villain is economic chaos.

The footprint in the wet, black soil was fresh, from the night before. The game warden bent down, brushed the imprint with his fingers and squinted, trying to judge how old the animal was, and its sex.

The mark in the mud, near a stream where cold water rushed over smooth brown stones on its way to the Sea of Japan, was yet another defiant sign of life from Panthera pardus orientalis, the Amur or Far Eastern leopard.

As few as 30 of the spotted predators may still survive today in the wild. It’s the most endangered of a score of subspecies of Asian leopard, believed by biologists to be the big cat closest to extinction. And it is a living--or dying--metaphor for the state of many types of wildlife in post-Communist Russia.

Market economics and an end to the fortress mentality of Soviet days have heightened the threat to the survival of the Amur leopard.

“It’s the most catastrophic situation of an animal that I know,” Viktor G. Korkishko, 39, the game warden and biologist who has devoted most of his adult life to the Amur leopard, said after a day spent hiking the trails of this nature preserve in Russia’s Maritime Territory with a reporter.

Another great predator native to Russia’s Far East, Panthera tigris altaica, or the Ussuri tiger, the biggest and most powerful of the world’s felines, is in perilous straits as well. And experts worldwide are marshaling their efforts to help.

The Ussuri Tiger Project, run by the University of Idaho’s Hornocker Wildlife Research Institute, was formed five years ago and has now taken up the cause of the leopard.

“Its numbers are even fewer, which is why we’re more worried about it,” said Howard B. Quigley, incoming director of the institute, based in Moscow, Ida.

Economics is a big part of the problem, compounded by the freewheeling anarchy that has accompanied the end of state-run socialism.

“These days, a man who kills a tiger can tell himself, ‘I’ll live well for a couple of years, along with my family,’ ” said Anatoly V. Lebedev, deputy chairman of the ecological commission in the Parliament of Russia’s Maritime Territory.

The numbers speak for themselves. A tiger pelt now sells in Taiwan for $3,000, Lebedev said--in Russian terms, the staggering fortune of 3 million rubles.

He estimates that the Ussuri tiger population has been reduced to a scant 250 to 300 and that last winter alone, no fewer than 50 animals were slain.

In a bitter paradox, the cats were safer in totalitarian times, when the borders of this region hard by the People’s Republic of China were sealed. Now, Chinese merchants throng the markets of Vladivostok, a one-hour trip by hydrofoil across the Amur Gulf from the leopard habitat centered on Kedrovaya Pad.

There, anything can be bought and sold.

Among Chinese, the tiger’s bones, whiskers--virtually every part of an animal that can attain a whopping 845 pounds--are prized ingredients for stimulants, aphrodisiacs and other folk remedies.

Not surprisingly, the Ussuri tiger is believed to be extinct in China. “The Chinese kill everything on their side of the border,” Lebedev said simply.

The Amur leopard is also prized in the Orient for its supposed healing powers, and killing one can mean an illicit windfall for a hunter. An advertisement in a Vladivostok newspaper recently offered one of the animal’s pale, dotted skins for sale for $3,000.

“Massive poaching started about two years ago,” Lebedev said in his Vladivostok deputy’s office. “It was due to economic chaos, to the sudden eruption of freedom into our lives.”

It seems like a practical joke of nature that the world’s largest tiger and its northernmost subspecies of leopard came to dwell in the forests of Russia’s Far East. The landscape here is unique, a bizarre blend of Siberia and the subtropics and the closest Mother Russia gets to a rain forest.

In this verdant, hilly country less than 15 miles from the Chinese border, tropical-size Maack’s swallowtail and Schrenck’s Purple Emperor butterflies flit; twisted Amazon-like liana vines hang from black firs, oaks, ash and cedar; purple rhododendron bloom, and the ground under the trees is blanketed with ostrich feather ferns.

In winter, however, the temperature drops to a very Russian 30 degrees below zero. The birds that summer here migrate to Borneo or the Philippines, and the snow falls thick.

This patch of 69 square miles of protected land is administered by the Far Eastern Department of Russia’s Academy of Sciences. Here, a score of game wardens, other employees and their families live in rustic one-story wooden cottages.

They must now get by on a budget that has fallen to $200 a month. “With the disastrous conditions that the Maritime Territory is in, the animals suffer first,” Korkishko said.

The Moldovan-born wildlife biologist has worked at the reserve for 17 years. His wife, Katya, 41, from the European Russian region of Bryansk, is a botanist. They have a son, 2, and a daughter, 15, who lives with her grandparents in Moldova where schools are better.

The Amur leopard, which reaches about 90 pounds in weight and needs to eat about a tenth of that in meat daily to survive, is a classic case of what wildlife biologists call a “vestigial population,” with an alarmingly shrinking gene pool.

Only 29 to 31 of the Amur leopards are now left in Russia, down from 100 to 150 several years ago, Korkishko said. Information is scant about how many, if any, survive in North Korea and China, but the total is not expected to top 50.

Leopard trapping officially stopped in the Soviet Union in 1965. But even a ban on hunting has not protected the population. It is now up against a simultaneous loss of habitat, forest degradation, blocking of deer migration routes from China, a general decline of all prey populations, poaching and trophy hunting.

Russia’s tiger has an additional problem. It lives on the eastern fringes of the world’s vastest forest, the Siberian taiga, believed to contain up to one-third of the world’s trees. Intensive cutting began in the 1950s and ‘60s, driving many of the tigers to the Bikin River and other areas.

What conservation laws exist in today’s Russia are often flouted. In fact, in the Far East, game wardens and foresters have been among the most energetic poachers.

In the face of official indifference and general economic ruin, Korkishko has been enlisting support overseas for a plan he thinks might give the endangered leopard a chance of survival. If the scheme succeeds, the Russian Far East will get a major tourist complex and conference center with the predator as the centerpiece.

He wants to mate zoo animals with their cousins from the wild in an outdoor “leopard nursery” with breeding “pens” of 1,200 to 1,400 acres rich in prey animals such as deer, badger, raccoon, dog and Manchurian hare. Offspring will be used to “refresh the blood” of captive animals or be released into the wild.

Korkishko also wants to expand the habitat since Kedrovaya Pad, the smallest of the Maritime Territory’s half-dozen nature reserves, can accommodate only a limited number of leopards. He is trying to increase the protected habitat to include a valley to the northwest.

To make his vision a reality, Korkishko has launched the Far Eastern Leopard Fund and is soliciting outside help in the design and usage of natural parks. He has some trouble attuning his thinking to world realities: At one point, he had been planning to pay the park’s executive director $100 a month.

A rucksack on his back, a revolver on his hip, Korkishko pauses during a ramble though the Kedrovaya Pad Reserve and points to a tree. About four feet from the ground, a few pale yellow hairs are stuck to the bark of the Manchurian birch.

Like a house cat rubbing against the sofa, an Ussuri tiger has had itself a good scratch. Like the leopard’s paw print, the tuft is a stubborn sign of life.

“People are not just citizens of one country but dwellers on this earth,” Korkishko said when asked why outsiders should worry about the plight of Russia’s big cats. “The vanishing of a species is a tragedy of not just a single people, but of all mankind.”

LIVING DANGEROUSLY

The Amur leopard and Ussuri tiger are not the only endangered animals within the former Soviet Union. The “Red Book of the U.S.S.R.” lists 245 species mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, mollusks and insects threatened. Some examples.

These species were already endangered in 1983, but they have suffered further since the fall of Communism.

* 1 Goral antelope

Appearance: a husky, grey animal with a singular skinny antler curving back from the middle of the forehead

Habitat: Coastal areas of the Maritime Territory on the Chinese border

Threat: Hunted for its meat

Last official count: About 1,000 in 1977

1993: 500 (est.)

* 2 Markhor goat

Appearance: Famous for spiral antlers

Habitat: Central Asian mountains in Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan

Threat: Poached for antlers’ asthetic value

Last official count: 900 in 1983

1993: 450 (est.)

* 3 Caucasian leopard

Appearance: Orange with small, black dots, white underside

Habitat: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Dagestan, Maritime Territory, mostly in mountains

Threat: Hunted for skin

Last official count: 100 in 1983

1993: 50 (est.)

* 4 Cheetah

Appearance: Sleek and skinny. Similar to Caucasian leopard in coloring with small black dots

Habitat: Central Asia, coastal Turkmenistan, southern Kazakhstan, eastern Caucasus mountains

Threat: Hunted for skin

Last official count: 50 by the end of the 1960s

1993: 10

NEWLY ENDANGERED

These species are among the most endangered because of loss of police and legal protection, outdated fines and other problems caused by the breakup of the Soviet Union.

* A Sevan trout

Appearance: Either silver with small, black dots or brown with large, balck or red dots

Habitat: Lake Sevan in Armenia

Threat: Overuse of Lake Sevan by hydroelectric plants threatens the habitat. The fish is an expensive delicacy.

Last counted: 900,000 in early 1970s

1993: 450,000 (est.)

* B Asian black bear

Appearance: black with white chevron on chest

Habitat: Maritime Territory

Threat: The gallbladder is used in Asian medicine. The price of a single organ can buy a poacher a used Japanese auto, four earns a new one.

Last counted: 2,900 to 3,200 in 1973

1993: no change

* C Saigak antelope

Appearance: About three feet tall with camel-like nose and two foot-long spikes

Habitat: Steppes of Kazakhstan and Russia

Threat: Horns of males are used in Eastern medicine. They bring $500 per kilogram, averaging $200 per animal.

Last counted: Never done, but believed to formerly have numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Their meat was sold in Moscow grocery stores.

1993: Male population have dwindled dramatically, drawing the attention of the World Wildlife Fund.

* D Blackston’s keystone fish owl

Appearance: Mocha brown with dark, thin streaks

Habitat: Old-growth forest by the Bekin River in the Maritime Territory

Threat: A South Korean lumber company has contracted to clear-cut that old-growth forest.

Last counted: About 700 in 1983

1993: Unchanged

GONE

Jankovski’s bunting

Appearance: Rust-colored body with dramatic black and rust stripes on white head

Habitat: Near Lake Hassan in Maritime Territory

Threat: Extinct

Last official count: 8 in 1965

1993: None known

Sources: All 1993 information according to Prof. Vladimir E. Flint, head of the Russian Scientific Research Institute for the Protection of Nature. All other data according to the Red Book of the U.S.S.R. published in 1983. Compiled by Moscow Bureau researcher J. Andrew Stanford.