Hideo Furukawa - Belka, Why Don't You Bark?

By the time we return from this trip, I’ll have one of the best teams around!

The dogs were in trouble. Seven ten-month-old puppies following the lead of their mother, joined by four more completely worthless dogs, bound for the ice floes of the Arctic Ocean. This was an adventure, yes—the same adventure a brilliant musher had set out on fifty years earlier, in full knowledge that he was risking his life. The dreamer, of course, had no sense at this point that he was seriously gambling with his life. He and his twelve dogs crossed the Brooks Range and set out across the Arctic Ocean. And then came forty days of hell. One of the dogs put a leg through a patch of thin ice and drowned. Another ended up alone on a large chunk of ice while the team was sleeping one night and drifted off. One tumbled down a crevice in the ice and dragged several down with it as it fell. The tangled harness strangled another dog. Of the seven wolfdogs, only two lived to see their eleventh month. The survivors were utterly fatigued. Their master had started drilling them at three and a half months. It was too early. And too intense. He had pushed them too hard.

The two surviving puppies lost their mother.

The sled was hardly moving. Some days the dogs’ bodies would be frozen stiff, each hair on their bodies like an icicle. A fierce blizzard gusted down over them, and the dogs’ master, the dreamer, came down with bronchitis. Fuck, I’m done for , he thought. Whiteout. I can’t see anything, I don’t know where I am.

I’m dying.

He died. It was their fortieth day on the Arctic Ocean. Only one of the wolfdogs was still alive. His name was Anubis; he was now almost a year old. Amazingly enough, three of the worthless dogs had survived. These four surviving dogs lay in a circle around their master’s corpse. They couldn’t have run away if they wanted to—they were still tied to the harness. They survived for four days on their master’s flesh.

And then they were saved.

They were hunters, members of one of the tribes of Arctic natives that would later come to be known collectively as the Inuit. Residents of these regions had no government. They weren’t Canadians, they weren’t Americans. Neither were they citizens of the Soviet Union. Until 1960, they had no fixed abode. During the winter—what they considered winter—they traversed the frozen sea from camp to camp hunting ringed seals and polar bears, setting out on an occasional trip to kill musk oxen. They traveled by dogsled. Eventually they would switch to snowmobiles, but at this point, when the hunters saved Anubis and the three others, dogs were still their only means of transport. They could see what had happened. Some stupid white guy had died. An adventurer who fell victim to his own incompetence. Leaving the dogs behind. Four of them!

Hilarious.

The dogs were teetering on the verge of starvation. The hunters fed them just a little, took possession of them.

Two years passed. Anubis was still alive. The other team members, too, were alive, with the exception of one dog that had died in an accident. The hunters, their new masters, directed their sleds with whips. It stung, but the dogs got used to it. Anubis learned to read the weather. He could pull a sled to the hunting grounds and back, but he also showed himself to be a capable hunter, able to find game, chase it down, attack. He noticed that when he helped his masters hunt, they treated him somewhat better, so he tried even harder. He exhibited a special ability to sense various impending dangers. This, the hunters realized, was no ordinary dog. He was made of different stuff from the other three they had found him with—they were worthless. There was something in this animal, hidden deep inside… a rare talent for doing exactly what he was told. Not only that—faithful as he was to his human masters, he also had a wild animal’s instinct for battle.

This was how they saw Anubis two years later.

In November 1955, an unusual man visited the camp where Anubis’s masters were living at the time—one of several they moved between. Anubis’s masters were citizens of no country; this man was a citizen of the USSR. He was a researcher at the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in Leningrad, commonly known as AARI. The Soviet Union was gathering secret data about the Arctic Ocean for military purposes. The Soviet Union wasn’t alone—its greatest enemy, the US, was using its intelligence agencies and military to collect the same sort of information. Both countries acted covertly. The Soviet Union had erected numerous observation stations in the Arctic, building them on the ice floes. “Drifting ice stations,” they were called. They were constantly moving. It was a dangerous business. The AARI researchers were having problems with the polar bears that turned up at their bases from time to time. Hence the visit to the camp where Anubis’s masters lived. The man drove up in a snow tractor. The camp and the observation station were adjacent to each other then—a mere twenty miles apart, which made them neighbors by Arctic standards—but this was purely a coincidence, owing to the drifting of the station and the movement of the camp.

The AARI researcher said he wanted to buy a dog to keep the bears away.

They negotiated a deal. In exchange for supplies that had been brought in on a transport plane the previous week, the researcher got the best dog for the purpose.

Anubis was three years and one month old.

He spent the next year or so drifting on the Arctic Ocean, between 73 degrees and 84 degrees north latitude, and between 120 degrees east and 160 degrees west longitude. Early in December 1956, they were to the east of Wrangel Island, on the Chukchi Sea. The Bering Strait lay somewhere way off to the south, and beyond it the Bering Sea. The Bering Sea came to an end at a line of islands. The Aleutians. But Anubis felt no longing for home.

I’M AN ARCTIC OCEAN DOG, he thought.

He lost that sense of himself. The researchers completed their surveys, and the ice stations were dismantled. They took Anubis on the icebreaker with them. But that was the end. They sold him at a small harbor town at the eastern edge of Siberia. The town’s inhabitants were all dressed in reindeer hides. They used reindeer bones to beat the snow from the hides they wore. These people became Anubis’s new masters. For the fourth time.

He was in the middle of nowhere, but still he had made it to the mainland, the great Soviet continent. He was walking, now, on Eurasian soil.

But tell me, dogs, you other dogs—what has become of you?

Three other dogs ended up in the communist sphere. Jubilee, News News (known as E Venture), and Ogre were captured on the Korean Peninsula by the People’s Liberation Army. The pure German shepherds changed their nationality. In 1953, the situation was totally different. Truman was no longer president of the United States. Stalin, former general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, had died of a brain hemorrhage on March 5. The two men no longer had a personal relationship. In the confusion that accompanied the UN forces’ retreat, these three dogs were left behind on the “other side” of the 38th parallel. They would never return. An armistice was signed in July, but the dogs were not handed over like other prisoners.

Come 1956, all three dogs were still among the dogs of the People’s Liberation Army War Dog Battalion. The two males, News News (E Venture) and Ogre, had been castrated; the bitch, Jubilee, remained as she had been born. She had not yet given birth.

And what of the capitalist sphere?

Two lines of dogs lived in its center, on the American mainland.

Sumer and Ice.