The old man advanced two or three steps into the room.
This time he pointed down at number 47.
The girl stepped closer to her dog, as if to protect him. Without thinking about what she was doing, she lifted the skull up and rested it on her head.
She was holding it in both hands. Over her head.
“See,” the girl said. “Kind of spiritual, right? Kind of religious?”
“Very amusing.” The old man chuckled.
Number 47 sat like a good dog.
“You are going to put that on, are you?” the old man said in Russian.
“What were you saying about Forty-seven?” the girl shot back in Japanese.
“As it happens, number forty-seven is the child of this Belka. Is that not right, old boy?”
The old man turned to look at Belka. The old dog barked in reply.
“He is old, but he still had what it took, luckily. We made it just in time.”
“Forty-seven is related to that old shit? Is that it?”
“I have the feeling we are getting through to each other. You understand me, little girl? You, with the skull of that great dog over your head, like a dog-clan shaman. Do you understand what I am saying? Seven puppies were born. A new generation. One of them will be our Belka. Or Strelka, if it is a bitch. That will be the name of the leader. Once they graduate from number to name. And number forty-seven may be the one, the next Belka, it looks to me. The possibility is there. There is a good chance.”
“He does look like him, come to think of it. Are you saying that old shit is his dad?”
“He is Belka,” the old man said, nodding at the old dog, to the girl.
And right away, the girl replied, “BEL-kah.”
“That is right. And you know what? I had a feeling. In this new litter there is no bitch who is fit to be the next Strelka. Number forty-seven might be the next Belka, but there is no Strelka—not, at any rate, among the dogs. None of them will take that name. And you know why not? Because—” For the third time he pointed, this time at the girl. “Because I am giving that name to you.”
Hey, dick, the girl, X years old, barked. She glared at the old man. Don’t fucking point your finger at me.
“Because you are Strelka,” the old man said, chuckling.
He had given the girl a dog name.
1958–1962
(Year 5 Anno Canis)
Dogs, dogs, where are you now?
1958. Still the world was divided along the same lines. Every patch of ground across the surface of the earth had been categorized as belonging to one of two ideologies. Either you were communist or you were capitalist. Or else you wanted to be one or the other. Except for you, dogs—you belonged to both sides.
First of all, four dogs entered communist territory. Three became Chinese. Originally American, these purebred German shepherds were captured on the Korean Peninsula by the People’s Liberation Army. They had been the pride of the US Army, part of the military dog elite: Jubilee, News News (aka E Venture), and Ogre, siblings by different mothers. They had been fathered by Bad News, which meant that their grandparents, on their father’s side, were Masao and Explosion. That was their lineage. And now they were Chinese. The last of the four dogs belonged to Kita’s line. But while his lineage could be traced back to Kita, a Hokkaido dog, his blood was far from pure; he was an Arctic mongrel, a “hybrid breed.” A wolfdog. And so far, he belonged to no nation. He was on Soviet land and was destined eventually to become a Soviet dog, but for now, in 1958, he still had no experience of the thing we call a nation.
Anubis, there you were on the Eurasian continent.
On that vast expanse of land, in Soviet territory.
But this was the Arctic. You hadn’t yet left Far East Siberia, though it was only a matter of weeks before you would. Already you had moved away from the coast of the East Siberian Sea, crossing the Kolyma River. You, Anubis, were pulling a dogsled. And in a little more than a year—between December 1956 and the beginning of 1958—you had passed from your fourth master to your fifth, and from your fifth to your sixth. Why? Because there was something wrong with you. It had nothing to do with your abilities; you were extraordinarily capable. Your senses were more acute than those of any ordinary dog, and you could anticipate all kinds of danger before they appeared. You identified passable routes faster than your masters, dashed easily over the most arduous terrain. You were a magnificent sled dog. The problem, Anubis, was that the dogs you ran with feared you. Most of the dogs in Far East Siberia were Russian Laikas. You weren’t at home in that environment. Or rather, you were—but only at first. In the beginning, things went smoothly. Because people trusted you and you communicated well with them. Because you always tried to do your duty. The problem was that face of yours…your mien. You were nothing like the others. You were no ordinary dog. Something in you was decidedly different.
You were, it almost seemed, half beast.
Because you were.
And so, for no apparent reason, the other dogs were struck with fear. WHAT’S GOING ON? they asked. WHY IS THIS ENEMY AMONG US? He smelled like a wild wolf, and their master had ordered them to watch out for wolves. He smelled just like the members of those other packs, the ones that lived on the outskirts of human territories, watching for a chance to slip in and take down a reindeer or some domesticated animal. His features were half wolf. And so—WHAT’S GOING ON? Eventually, hard as they tried to keep in line as they pulled the sled, they lost the rhythm. They fell out of sync, and the sled capsized. Other times, they might get so spooked that they would ignore their master and his whip and start running on their own. Because they were afraid, every one of them. Of him. Of you.
Anubis. It was your fault.
But you didn’t let it bother you.
As the dogs scrambled for food, you bit them, ever so calmly. You bit them as if you were their leader. You liked dried fish. You liked reindeer meat that had been boiled with barley and allowed to cool. You ate seal meat. You devoured…the peace.
That, Anubis, was your problem.
So your masters let you go. They made the trip from one town to the next, and when they headed back, you were no longer hitched to the sled. They traveled from a town to a village, and left you—only you—behind. They would never abandon you; they passed you on to a new master. “He’s a good dog,” they all said. “He just doesn’t get along with my team. I don’t know what it is. So you can have him,” they said.
You kept moving.
You crossed Far East Siberia, from one village to the next, from a village to a town, from a town to a town, from a town to a village.
Heading west.
To a village further west.
To a town further west.
Purely by chance, you kept tracing a path west across the Eurasian continent, skirting the mountains that marked the southern border of the Arctic Circle. You crossed from Chukchi lands to Koryak lands, then on into Evenk territory. You had a fifth master, and then a sixth, and after that you didn’t count. Neither, Anubis, did you care at all what ethnicity (what “traditional ethnic minority”) your successive masters belonged to.
THERE’S THE ARCTIC OCEAN AGAIN, you thought. Yes, because you had once been a dog of the Arctic Ocean. You had lived on the ice, on one of those “drifting” observation stations. For about a year, from the time you were three to sometime after your fourth birthday, you had been carried by the tides across the Arctic Sea.
I HAVEN’T LEFT THE ARCTIC OCEAN, you thought. And it was true—you were still within the Arctic Circle, still following the shore. Limning the ocean’s edge. Circling.
Circling west.
You had set out from the shores of the East Siberian Sea, which is part of the larger Arctic Ocean. Though in that season, there w
as no border between water and land. You had traveled for a little over a year, until you found yourself gazing out at another sea, also part of the Arctic Ocean, but with a different name. The Laptev Sea, to the west of the Novosibirsk Islands.
Then, Anubis, sometime in 1958, you left Far East Siberia.
Anubis, Anubis, where are you now? You were on the Lena Delta, in the port town of Tiksi. There, around you, the waters of the Lena River flowed. The second largest river in the USSR, 2,650 miles long—it ended in this port, fanning out into an enormous delta as it streamed into the Laptev Sea. And what, Anubis, were you doing here?
Pulling a sled, of course.
Only now you were pulling it in a different direction. You were no longer heading west. You moved along a north-south axis. It was winter, and the Lena was frozen over—a perfect way to travel. The river had been transformed into a well-equipped sledding route. That’s where you were running. That’s where you were made to run. The thick pads on your feet hit the frozen river, forelegs and hind legs, crossing the ice. The Lena River had two sources: one in the Baikal Range, the other in the Stanovoy Range. Both lay south of the Laptev Sea, the Lena Delta, and the port town Tiksi. In the interior of the Eurasian continent. And so you could tell, Anubis—you could sense it. SOMETIMES, I MOVE AWAY FROM THE ARCTIC OCEAN. You moved for a time along a north-south axis. Up and down the frozen Lena, up and down, with Tiksi as your base.
Midway along the Lena was the town of Yakutsk, capital of the Yakutia Republic, one of the members of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic within the Soviet Union. Half the town’s inhabitants were Yakuts. Your new master was one of them. Not that you, Anubis, cared who your master was. In the beginning, in Tiksi, you had a different master. Then one day your master changed; he was someone else now, only with the same face.
These two men were twins. In their late thirties. The younger brother lived just outside Yakutsk and worked as a fur hunter, using supplies provided by the kolkhoz. He could never fulfill his quota, however, and so he lived in wretched poverty. The older brother had been granted a transport license that made it possible, in an age when ordinary people, ordinary Soviets, were forbidden to travel from town to town or region to region without an “internal passport,” for him to run his dogsled up and down the Lena, from the lower reaches to the middle. He carried goods. Only specialists could do this kind of work, and the pay was good. Needless to say this was before snowmobiles became common in Siberia, when it was hard to move things fast, and he did such consistently excellent work that he had been officially recognized for his service. In short, the older brother succeeded. And his younger brother seethed with envy. So one day, when they met in Yakutsk after months apart, the younger brother secretly killed the older brother. Clubbed him to death. He buried the body in the forest, near the hut he stayed in when he went hunting. And he became his brother. He made the older brother’s privileges his own and went back to the port town Tiksi.
No one noticed.
People’s comings and goings were strictly monitored in Tiksi, which was home to a base, but the evil younger brother was easily mistaken for his good older brother; they let him right in without subjecting him to a security check or anything.
The dogs didn’t know what was what. It was precisely on occasions like this, however, that you showed your mettle. You, Anubis, helped the younger brother. You were too skilled a dog. Your new master was an amateur—though as a member of a tribe of nomadic horse riders he was used to driving horse-drawn sleighs, and he had ridden in dogsleds a few times—but you could divine his intentions, you knew in advance what it was he wanted you, your team, to do. You subjugated yourself to his will. And you led. The other dogs feared you, and because they recognized a crisis, they obeyed you. You appraised the situation, Anubis, and they fell in line.
Rather than let your stupid master’s flimsy orders play havoc with them, they recognized your authority.
The pack cohered.
The team functioned as a team.
You terrified the other dogs because you were a wolfdog. But still, a dog is a dog. Once the hierarchy was established, terror bred obedience. You inspired fear in the other dogs, not as a wolfdog, but as the leader of the pack. That, at any rate, was how they themselves, subject to their fear, understood the situation.
You ruled them, Anubis.
You brought the team into harmony.
The sled. Traveling down the Lena.
You ran. You were made to run. You were no longer pawned off on anyone else. Your new master—strictly speaking he was your fake master, the evil younger brother with the same face as the good older brother—had no intention of giving you away. “Good dog,” he said. “You get along great with the other dogs, you keep them in line so well,” he said. “I wouldn’t give this dog to anyone,” he said, “no matter how many thousand rubles I was offered.” And he ran the hell out of you. He pushed you and the other sled dogs to the limit. Show me what you can do! Show me what you can do! Move these goods! Move it! Move it! You ran. You were made to run. You understood the intentions behind your amateur master’s ambiguous commands, and you communicated them to the rest of the dogs, led the team back and forth across the frozen waters. Again and again, dozens of times, along a north-south axis.
“I’m in transport!” your idiot master howled. “It takes a specialist to do this kind of work, and I’m that specialist! I’m a transporter, the pride of the Soviet Union!”
The winter was endless. The Lena remained covered with a thick layer of ice. And then, all of a sudden, it was spring.
Just like that, the thaw had come.
The amateur “transporter” didn’t recognize the signs. In certain regions, the thawing of the Lena breeds natural catastrophes. It etches an enormous, awful hymn to the power of nature, there in the landscape itself. In Yakutsk, for instance, it often causes massive flooding.
You, Anubis, were the first to notice. You heard the spring of 1958 coming. To the Lena. It was a sort of cracking sound. Something snapped. You were running. You had left the port and were headed somewhere upriver. Headed south. As you ran, you sensed something. I’M MOVING FARTHER FROM THE ARCTIC OCEAN, FARTHER AND FARTHER. You pulled the sled, you made sure the other dogs did their part. And then it happened. Your ears caught the sound, and the pads of your feet, forelegs, hind legs—they heard it too. Crick. Crick. Crack. Craaack.
You tried to stop.
You felt instinctively that WE HAVE TO STOP!
You whined in warning.
“Shut up!” your master said.
The harness and your place at the head of the team made it impossible for you to stop on your own. If you tried to stop anyway, you would be dragged along, tangled in the ropes. In the worst case you might suffocate and lose your legs, and the team would be thrown instantly out of line. But you had noticed what was happening. IT’S BREAKING, IT’S BREAKING, IT’S BREAKING. You whined a warning to the other dogs. But how could you convey the force of the vision that rose before you?
You wanted to tell them: THIS PATH IS BREAKING UP!
“Hey! Don’t stop!” your master commanded, cracking his whip violently in the air. “Keep running! Run until you die!”
Little did he realize what these ominous words foretold.
A second or two later, the frozen Lena was roiling. It had happened. In a sudden, dramatic burst, the thaw had begun. The route snapped apart into countless chunks of ice that heaved and churned, creaked and snapped and strained. The earth was sliding, roaring. Rolling. Flipping. Fissures crisscrossed the river’s surface. No—the river’s surface was a mass of fissures. The ice that had stretched off into the distance before them had vanished. Their destination was gone. A few dogs tumbled in and sank. The icy water gurgled around them as they drowned. They kept moving their legs even in the water, as if they were s
till running. “Run until you die!” indeed. The ropes dragged the sled toward the hole. Sink! The ropes intoned. Drown! Submit to your death! The man with the whip seemed to be blowing bubbles. Anubis, your master was an idiot. Your master didn’t know anything. But you, Anubis, you knew.
Woof! you barked.
As fiercely as you could.
Your master stared at you.
You opened your mouth wide, bared your fangs. You were a wolfdog, and they were sharp.
That was the sign. You were telling him what to do. CUT THE ROPE! you were saying. CUT THE ROPE THAT BINDS US!
IF YOU WANT TO LIVE, CUT IT!
Woof! you barked.
You had given your master an order.
You had bared your fangs. And he reacted instantly. He responded automatically, as if inspired by mental association. He leapt from the sled, whipped out the knife on his belt, and ran toward you, wheezing. He slashed through the rope he had tied to you, and then threw himself around you, tried to hang on. Woof! you barked again.
COME ON! you were saying.
Just then, the ice beneath your feet rocked again. You and your master streamed forward a few dozen inches even as you stood there, motionless, on a piece of what had been your road. Or maybe it was a few feet of road? Rumbling, tumbling, it sank, it shook. You didn’t have time to jump off, make a run for it. Everything was heaving. The whole Lena was lurching, crunching, shuddering. Around you, the other dogs were howling. The flow of the river itself was barking. Yes, Anubis, this was it—it was happening. You were in the midst of the whirlpool, unable to keep up with the pace of events. You felt things shifting: up becoming down, down becoming up. You were plunged into the water for seconds, then bobbed up again. You were drenched. You understood. THE PATH HAS BROKEN, THE PATH IS A RIVER, GET OUT OF THE RIVER, GET TO THE BANK!
Belka, Why Don't You Bark? Page 13
