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

“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 still 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!

THAT WAY!

You leapt from one unbroken part to the next, deciding in a split second which way to go. THAT WAY, THAT WAY! But your body felt heavy, weighed down. Everywhere you looked was shaking. Everything you saw was roiling wet. You lost your sense of balance. It was happening all around you, Anubis.This was it, but you weren’t sure what it was, you couldn’t grasp the details. Still, you ran. You were running, that alone was sure. Your vision of the scene was riddled with holes, but somehow you crossed them, you reached the bank. The bank wasn’t just a bank, it was a cliff jutting up at an angle of seventy or eighty degrees. A layer of Siberian permafrost. You climbed. Your body felt heavy. Because someone was clinging to you. An idiot human had his arms wrapped around your body. He was crying. Oh, oh, oh, he wailed. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh , he wailed. SHUT UP! you thought. You managed to scramble up the bank despite the burden of him. You didn’t slip. No, not you. You weren’t the one who lost his footing and careened down a gaping crevice in the permafrost. It was him—your master. That idiot. And he took you with him. He kept his arms wrapped tightly around your body, your left leg, as he went, tumbling down into that cavernous hole that plunged like a tunnel into the permafrost.

You tumbled, your body at a diagonal.

You didn’t climb up from the bank onto solid land. You went down. Underground.

You slid. You fell very, very fast.

Your body was bashed, abrasions everywhere.

You didn’t lose consciousness, but your vision went black.

It was too deep. Too narrow. Your master, who had fallen first, was groaning. At intervals, even deeper down. You smelled death. A nasty scent that curled upward, another ominous sign marking all but certain doom for your master. It was cold. The earth was frozen all around you. The air eddying over your body was around 25 degrees Fahrenheit—not unbearably cold, but you were soaked. You began to feel the chill in your bones. In your cervical vertebrae, your lumbar vertebrae, your shoulder blades, your skull: you felt the cold seeping in, tightening its grip. You felt: I’M GOING TO FREEZE. And you thought: NO. You thought: I WANT TO LIVE, I WANT TO LIVE, I WILL NOT DIE. You were determined. The cavern in the permafrost was tight, cramped, a natural tunnel, a world of perfect darkness. It was too dark. You were terrified. Yes, Anubis, you recognized the truth: I’M SCARED. The long night had come.

AM I GOING TO DIE?

Again and again, you asked yourself the same question.

AM I GOING TO DIE?

From time to time, you wriggled your hind legs to make sure you were still alive. You had no idea how you landed, there in the tunnel. You might be hanging from an outcropping of rock, or leaning on it. You tried not to doze. I DON’T WANT TO FREEZE, you thought, and struggled to stay awake. Only it was so dark in the tunnel that even with your eyes wide open, you felt as though you might be sleeping. You had been sleeping for a long, long, long time; so it seemed. Maybe it was real? Had you been asleep? Your vision had gone black, been black—and maybe that blackness had continued, now, for ages? You searched for sunlight. Of course. There in the depths of that long, long, long night, you yearned for some sign of a subterranean morning that would never come.