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

The bitch knew by some unnameable sixth sense. That she was pregnant.

She had to prepare. She readied herself to give birth.

Nine weeks passed. Thumps came from overhead, from the layer above, even though it was supposedly closed off. She ignored them. The North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong had begun redeveloping the network of tunnels. The bitch kept silent, however, so that her former masters wouldn’t find her. She wasn’t a red dog anymore, she was a mother. A mother dog preparing to give birth for the first time. Her instincts told her everything to do. Find a quiet place and hide. Ignore the humans, all you need is food. Forget the humans. Turn your back on humanity.

The mother dog obeyed these commands.

She kept a low profile, there underground.

Labor pains began. Then, at last, the delivery. A slimy, half-transparent bag slithered out as she pushed. Then a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth. One after another, slowly. Three of the pups were dead. The bitch ate the afterbirth, as all mother dogs do, and she ate her dead children too.

Three puppies had been born alive.

She began raising them. But she had problems suckling them. She didn’t have much milk. Two of the puppies grew weak. Again the mother’s instincts kicked in. She didn’t hesitate at all. She bit into the weaker puppies, killing them.

And ate their bodies.

One puppy.

He sucked powerfully at her teats.

He lived. He was healthy, strong. He, DED, was your child. A male with no name. He did not inherit your name, and he would not eat the flesh of his flesh. Even when his mother died. This was in February 1969. The puppy was no longer suckling. He didn’t eat the body. Instead he imitated his mother’s actions when she had been alive. He ate the food she had brought to the cave where he had been born, their nest.

His mother’s body rotted, stank.

AWFUL, the nameless puppy thought. The stench grew worse with every passing day until at last it drove him away. He would go. You see, DED, how clever your son is? He wandered quietly, secretly, through the fourth layer. There was a need for secrecy—he knew this from his mother’s actions, he had figured it out. It wouldn’t come as a surprise to you, DED, even on the other side, to learn that the labyrinth of tunnels and branches had been completely transformed. There were new passageways, and others that had been closed off. All the paths too narrow for humans to pass through had been abandoned. But if you were a puppy? Could they be used? Yes, they could. And so the fourth layer was now connected to the third, and so to the second, and to the first.

You would have been impressed by your son’s intimate knowledge of the map’s coordinates. He had grasped it all. He appeared and vanished without warning in this “new new world,” faster even than the humans.

Yes, he was fine.

Relax, no need to worry.

You need not linger.

Spring came and the nameless puppy was growing healthily. He was an orphan, but he had never suffered from hunger. He knew well where in the network of tunnels he could find food, and what it was safe to take. He knew everything. Everything relating to this world, that is. But he wasn’t satisfied with this… this routine, with no aim beyond survival. At this early stage in life, he placed no stock in omniscience. He wanted the unknown. It was this, the things he had never experienced, that called to him. And so, even as he surpassed the humans, he spied on their doings. Explored the new munitions storeroom they had dug. The cave next to the underground kitchen, where they kept live chickens that began laying eggs day after day. When an operating room was added to the underground hospital after a medical unit was sent down from Hanoi, he tried to get as close as possible to the astonishing thing they had in there: a light bulb powered by a bicycle-powered generator that the surgeons used when they operated. He was doing all kinds of things, seeing all kinds of things.

Early summer.

The nameless puppy began encountering difficulties. He was growing healthily… in fact, he was now fully grown. He was no longer a puppy, and he was no longer the size of a puppy. His body had filled out remarkably. But this bewildered him: how could the world have shrunk so? The narrow paths that led in and out of the fourth layer were now impassable.

WHAT’S HAPPENED? the nameless dog asked himself in his frustration.

He shouted, IT’S TOO TIGHT! EVERYTHING IS TOO CLOSE!

This circumscribed world didn’t satisfy him. It wasn’t enough. He didn’t feel fulfilled. And he started losing track of his coordinates, which made it difficult to keep hidden. Everything had changed, his measurements were all wrong! He was no longer omniscient, he realized that. So what was he to do? What?

He was approaching an answer.

First there was the fourth layer. Then there was the third. Then he found the second and finally the first. He kept probing the network of tunnels for things he didn’t know. And at last… at last…

Summer. He was crawling through the first tunnel. It stank. It stank. He crawled. He kept crawling and crawling. He forgot all the coordinates he had carried in his head. WHO CARES, he thought. WHO CARES ANYWAY! His body tingled with a heightened sensitivity. An unnameable sense growled within him. He was biting through to something new. Which way had he come, which branches had he chosen? Which forks in which paths had he entered? It didn’t matter, he was being led on. By a voice. You, nameless dog. A nameless sense dispensed its commands to you, a nameless dog. The voice spoke to you. And you heard it, didn’t you?

To live. Live. Live at the edge of starvation. Hunger to live.

YES, you replied. YES, YES, YES.

Woof!

At last, nameless dog, you, too, barked.

Unsatisfied, you set out, beyond the confines of the world you knew by smell. You sniffed, inhaled the odors, searching for the unfamiliar. Finally, you crawled out aboveground. Your fixation on the unknown had made it happen. The smell of grass, undergrowth, moss on a stone, a dangling vine. It was hot. That’s what it was like up there. On the Indochina peninsula, in the tropics, just above the seventeenth parallel north. You had emerged into North Vietnamese territory, outside the DMZ. The exit from the network of tunnels, incidentally, was a camouflaged wooden trap door of the same sort used at crucial junctures underground, so you knew how it worked. You scratched at it, broke through. There was no sentry on guard. You pressed forward over a terrain devoid of humans, devoid of any trace of humanity, and you were out. You stood there, dazed.

WHAT IS ALL THIS? EVEN THE SOIL SMELLS DIFFERENT?

IT’S ALL SO DIFFERENT!

You were moved. The scent in your nostrils was the earth baked by the sun. But it wasn’t daytime now. When you emerged from that cramped world, it was the dead of night.

July 1969.

The moon was out. You turned to look at it. It was dazzling. This was nothing else, only moonlight, but for you, born and raised underground, it might as well have been as bright as the sun. You had seen the Vietnamese doctor’s light in the tunnels, so your eyes were familiar with illumination. They had been educated by the bulb in the operating room, and they had felt awed by its vivid round glow. But the moon hovering up there in the sky… this was different. The shock of it was altogether different. You were moonstruck. Any number of stars twinkled in the sky along with the moon, but it was the moon that got you. An American reconnaissance plane carrying an infrared camera flew by, but you were enchanted by the moon.

That summer, humans, too, found their gazes drawn to the same celestial body. The whole world was focused on the moon that season, because the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration had launched Apollo 11 and, for the first time in human history, landed a man on the moon. That was the human world, though, not the dog world. Dogs had been the ones to open the door to space travel, but now the man-made satellite Sputnik 2 was all but forgotten. Twelve years had passed since then.