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

Old Fuck, Old Bag, WO, WT, and Opera. And me.

These were the residents of the Dead Town.

This was how she catalogued them.

And these were the people she observed.

On some level, she was actively engaging with them. But at the same time, she made zero effort to communicate—to convey anything at all, feelings or intentions. She simply put herself in the same spaces and watched their every move. She stared at the five Russians.

And then there were the dogs.

A few dozen dogs, the other residents of this Dead Town unmarked on any map from the time it was built and now forgotten by history.

There was time in her schedule for observing the dogs.

Every day, she watched the old man train them. Once in the morning, once in the afternoon. He was teaching them more advanced techniques now, fighting and attacking, on a field that gradually came to encompass the whole of Dead Town. The dogs moved frequently from place to place, covering an enormous territory, rehearsing their destructive maneuvers; and the girl followed. Rehearsing—yes, because this was only a rehearsal . A dry run for some sort of field day of the dogs, a fucking preview of the Great Doggie Festival. She understood, more or less, what was happening. That they were practicing. That one day they would take to the streets.

She kept her distance. She always stayed a few yards away, watching. Watching the dogs do their exercises. I don’t go in for this fucking gym class shit, thanks, I’d rather sit out. Look at these shitheads, fucking scampering around like maniacs. Woof-woof-woof-woof-woof-woof! Don’t you ever get tired? Actually, the dogs seldom barked. For the most part, they darted off and sprang at their simulated targets in total silence. They’d had it pounded into their heads that this was the way to do it: covert attacks. The old man, their trainer—the Old Fuck—had made this clear. And yet there was such ferocity in their movements that you almost seemed to hear them barking, baying, their voices rich and loud.

If one actually heard a sound, it was more likely to be a gunshot.

The bullets weren’t real, they were blanks. But they accustomed the dogs to the sound.

The dogs no longer regarded the girl as an intruder, no longer growled. Because the old man scolded them that first time. The dogs remembered. And so they kept quiet. A few had barked at her the second time, when she came to watch, to study them, and she herself had told them off.

“Shut the fuck up,” she said, glaring. “You’re annoying me.”

She stared straight at them as she spoke, and they shut up.

The old man laughed when he saw this.

Upwards of forty dogs would participate in these exercises, learning specialized techniques. Honing their abilities. Seven or eight would take the day off. The old man let them rest before they got too worn out. He took stock of each dog’s condition individually and based his decision on his assessment, though for the most part he followed a fixed order. The dogs he released from training spent the day in their cages.

In the doghouse.

Outside, exposed to the air.

The girl went by the cages too. It was only natural that she incorporated a visit to this area, given over entirely to the dogs’ use, into her daily schedule. Every so often, a new dog would join the ranks. The newcomers tended to be young; they must have been captured outside. The new dogs stayed for some time in the cages with the dogs that had been released from training, all day every day. And there were puppies too. Little dogs, natives of the Dead Town, who had only just been removed from the cage they had shared with their mother, where they had sucked at her teats.

Now the whole litter was kept in a large cage of its own.

During the day, at least, it was theirs .

Only six or seven weeks old, these puppies had not yet learned caution. The girl watched them through the chain-link fence. The first time she saw the little bastards in their cage, she had a thought. There were old dogs here, and little ones. She remembered the old dog that had appeared on the roof and barked at her that time when the Old Fuck spoke in Japanese, “SHE-neh,” drop dead —that dog, she thought, was a senile old fuck himself. The thing is, she sensed, whether they’re dogs or people, I fucking hate old fucks.

“Don’t get any ideas, though,” she told the puppies, speaking through the chain-link fence. “That doesn’t mean I think you’re cute.”

This too, she said in Japanese.

After that, she came every day to grumble outside the puppies’ cage. Objectively speaking, they were adorable. Roly-poly with ears that poked out from their round heads, bodies covered with light, soft hair. That wasn’t how the girl saw it. “Morons. Idiots. Fuckheads. Fucking little doggie-shits,” she said. She twined her fingers around the chain-link fence. “Look at you. So fucking tame. Some fuck feeds you and you’re his.” Each puppy had a tag. She couldn’t read the names, of course, because they were written in the Cyrillic alphabet, but she could read the numbers. Arabic numerals were okay: 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, and then 113, 114. Seven in all. As far as she was concerned the numbers might as well have been names, and so she added them to her list.

She recognized the puppies through the numbers they had been assigned.

This, in part, was what allowed her to focus so intently on them. This, in part, was why she sometimes looked so enchanted as she stood before their cage. Though at the same time, there was something in the unpredictability of their actions that fascinated her, kept her from getting tired of standing there looking .

So she went on visiting the cage, grumbling to the puppies.

“Look at you, tripping like that,” she said. “Can’t even walk right.”

“Little doggie-shits, fucking gnawing on each other,” she said.

“Think you’re so grown up, huh?” she said. “Fucking think again.”

“Assholes,” she said.

There was something good about this part of her schedule. She felt better.

One day, she decided to see how dumb the puppies were. She searched the kitchen and the stores of dog food. She knew what they were fed. Obviously. I watch the Old Bag preparing the shit. She had a hypothesis she wanted to test. “All people have to do is feed you and you’re theirs, right? You fucks. Yeah, I’m talking to you Forty-four. And Forty-five, Forty-six, Forty-seven, Forty-eight, One hundred thirteen, and One hundred fourteen, all of you. Fuckers. I bet you’ll let me feed you too.”

This was her hypothesis.

The result was a chorus of yelping.

Number 44: FEED ME!

Number 114: FEED ME!

Number 45, number 46, number 47, number 48, and number 113: FEED ME! FEED ME! FEED ME! FEED ME! FEED ME!

The second she pushed the food through the fence, they gathered around and began going for it, snapping at it, not even bothering to sniff it and see what it was.

No, they hadn’t yet learned to be wary—not at all. And since they had already been weaned from their mother’s milk, they had no problem eating the sort of “Russian dog food” the girl gave them. She gave them sheep hooves. Leftovers. But they chewed them all the same, licked them all over. There was a bit of meat and gelatin left, if only a little.

“Happy?” the girl asked. “You like that?”

They looked happy.

“You like stinky crap like that?”

WE’RE HAPPY, the dogs replied. WE LIKE IT.

“See, I knew it,” the girl said, the pride in her words not entirely matched by the unusual stiffness and, simultaneously, the slight relaxation of her expression. “I can make you mine as easily as they can. Look at you, wagging your fucking tails. Fucking morons. Fucking shitheads. That’s Russia for you. Eating this foul-smelling mutton crap because you’ll take any nutrition you can get.”