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.
The cliff you had climbed, and from which you had fallen into the tunnel that plunged into the permafrost, was on the left of the Lena River, facing downstream. On the western bank. The cliff jutted up, almost vertical. The days were short at this time of the year, but the sun did rise. And when it did, the morning sunlight shone on that cliff. There came a moment when the light streamed in through a crack near the tunnel’s entrance.
It shot in at an angle, and for ten or twenty minutes, no longer, there in the pure darkness, the faint glow filled you.
You started and came to.
Who knows, maybe you had been asleep.
You noticed the sunlight bleeding into the space you were in.
IT’S MORNING, you thought.
And then, the next moment, you stiffened, stunned. Because you had discovered something. Immediately overhead—though of course you had no idea how you had landed, what was up and what was down—was an eye. A mammal’s eye. Enormous. Just one, one side of the head: an eyeball. It had to be a few times larger than your own, Anubis, or even bigger…maybe ten times bigger.
The eye stared down at you from directly overhead.
From within the ice.
You were face to face with a prehistoric animal encased in the permafrost. Suspended along the edge of the tunnel, inches away. It had tusks. Long, curved tusks. A long nose. Its body was covered in long fur. It was over eleven feet tall. Alive, it would have weighed six tons. It was something like an elephant that had lived ten thousand years ago, even longer ago than that, and had evolved to live in the cold. An enormous mammal, given the name “mammoth” by a French scientist in the eighteenth century.
One of these extinct creatures had been preserved, frozen, in the tunnel.
In the ground. In a layer of Siberian permafrost more than 160 feet thick.
Without decaying.
And now, Anubis, its huge eye, more than ten thousand years old, stared down at you.
WHO ARE YOU? Anubis asked.
WHO ARE YOU? The question bounced off the ice.
I’M…I’M A DOG.
The eye in the ice was not, of course, a dog. So it didn’t answer.
HAVE YOU BEEN THERE ALL ALONG? Anubis asked.
I’VE BEEN HERE ALL ALONG.
This time, the frozen earth answered. It transmitted the ice-packed mammoth’s answer to the dog’s mind: I’M FROZEN.
YOU’RE AN EYE. Anubis told the eye, very simply.
I’M AN EYE. The mammoth agreed, very simply.
YOU’RE LOOKING AT ME.
I’M LOOKING AT YOU.
AM I…ALIVE?
YOU’RE…ALIVE.
WILL I LIVE?
LIVE.
Anubis’s final question, rebounding off the ice, was transformed into a command. Anubis interpreted what he had heard as a command. He realized that this enormous eye, no one else, was his true master. It was not a dog. The eye (and the creature whose eye it was) had not said it was a dog. But neither was it a human. Anubis realized, then, at that moment, that this thing was his Absolute.
Anubis had no word to express his discovery.
Perhaps a human might have called this thing the “Dog God.”
And so Anubis, whose name itself means the “Dog God,” acknowledged this “Dog God” as his true master, and awoke.
Anubis, Anubis, at last you have awoken.
You were not asleep.
Ten minutes, twenty minutes passed. The brief period during which the tunnel filled with the morning sun’s faint glow was over. Once again pure darkness enclosed you. Your encounter with your true master had ended. What would you do? Obey the command you had been given, of course. The order. One simple word: LIVE. Already, you were trying. You had to break free. You twisted your body, twisted further. You moved. You slipped. You slid down the wall of the tunnel, you fell. But you weren’t afraid. The tunnel did not injure you. You descended.
Into a space.
You searched for your old master.
You looked for that idiot human.
You found him, deep in the tunnel, barely breathing but alive. Too weak even to groan. You were hungry. You knew you would need to build up your strength if you were going to escape from this place. So you saw him as food. You gorged yourself. There was nothing wrong with this. It had happened once before…then too, you’d had no choice; you had sated yourself on your former master’s corpse. You had been eleven months old, or maybe a year. It was the first time you had ever set foot on the Arctic Ocean, and you had almost died. You had eaten your master in order to survive, as if it were a
sort of sacred rite. You had eaten that human, that former idiot. Then too. If there was a difference between this time and the last, it was that last time your “former master” had been wholly dead, whereas this master was still slightly…still breathing, barely. There was nothing wrong with that. You could stop his breathing.
Right?
RIGHT, you reply, to someone. To whoever it is that puts the collar on your moral sense. YES, THAT’S RIGHT, you said and put an end to it, and sated yourself on the flesh.
You wandered, step by step, slowly, through the bowels of the earth. The crevice in the permafrost was narrow, but it branched out in all directions, north and south and east and west, diagonally up and down, in shapes nature had determined. There were blind alleys, of course, and forks that led into loops. But you, Anubis, had a fine sense of smell. You had a dog’s nose, and you sniffed the ground with it. You had an animal’s persistence. You didn’t mind trying and failing and trying again.
You made it out in two days.
So you lived. Because this was the command your true master had given you. You would not return to the Arctic Ocean. You understood: I’M NOT A DOG OF THE ARCTIC OCEAN, NOT NOW. It wasn’t logic that told you this. You had once devoured the flesh of your dead master, the musher, in order to survive, to go out onto the Arctic Sea. Now, once again, you had eaten the flesh of your master, another sled driver—once again, you had performed the rite. The two rites formed a pair. I CAME HERE, AND NOW I WILL LEAVE. Yes, Anubis, by the time you made your way aboveground, you had already grasped the meaning of those two rites. In your heart, you understood. It wasn’t a matter of logic. This time, you would head south.
Your talents as a hunter served you well. There on the Arctic Ocean, hunters living in polar regions kept you with them, and you learned to find prey, chase it down, attack it. You honed your fighting instincts, improved upon your natural abilities as a wolfdog. Here your prey were not musk oxen. You didn’t hunt polar bears. But the procedure was essentially the same. It was practice. You learned to read the weather outside the Arctic Circle. And what did you like to eat, Anubis? Reindeer. Reindeer were abundant in the tundra far to the south of European Russia, and in that special variety of Siberian forest known as the taiga. Some were wild, some were domesticated. In spring and summer, you would encounter herds of several thousand in the wetlands bordering the Lena, property of the nearby sovkhoz. You attacked. You took the reindeer down with the greatest of ease. You gobbled their innards, and their stomachs were stuffed with moss—a kind of lichen known as “reindeer moss.” Their stomachs were green. You smeared those bags with fresh red blood as if it were a sauce and savored the dish. Meat, blood, vegetable matter. The perfect combination of protein, minerals, and vitamins. The ultimate one-dish meal. When you had eaten your fill, you bayed. Your baying rang across the vast Siberian expanse. You might as well have been a pureblooded wolf.
A pureblooded wolf?
But you weren’t. You were a half-breed.
You didn’t care about that stuff.
Strength was everything. The resilience to go on living, living, living. As a dog. As a dog, but also as a family tree. Yes, Anubis, you were one dog, but you were also a lineage. Your line began with Kita, a Hokkaido dog, and then your “father,” some nameless wolf roaming Alaska and the Arctic Circle, added his blood to the mix. That was how you were born. And your seed would grow the tree. You were an individual dog, but you were also a family tree.
I’LL MINGLE MY BLOOD WITH OTHERS! you proclaim.
I’LL MONGRELIZE MYSELF, AND THAT WILL MAKE ME STRONGER! I’LL BE THE STRONGEST DOG EVER! you determine, without the use of words. TO LIVE, TO LIVE, TO GO ON LIVING!
You pay no heed to established “breeds” created by humans. You pursue your own ideal. You had come face to face with the Absolute, there in the permafrost. A mammoth that had lain there, frozen, for more than ten thousand years. An enormous mammal, now extinct. And what of you, Anubis? You were a member of the canine tribe, which had appeared around the same time that mammoth died, more than ten thousand years ago. Half the blood in your veins was lupine; in that sense you had reverted to an earlier stage in your evolution. You were reliving your own evolution. You had been given a chance, once again, to press ahead toward what dogs were originally meant to be. You understood. And so you said: I WILL NOT BECOME EXTINCT.
Only dogs can guide canine evolution. You, Anubis, had that desire.
You were awake.
Here, in this vast territory, you were what your name declared you.
Who could stop you from going south?
The short Siberian summer ended. A vaguely autumnal season passed, and winter came. The nights were long. A reindeer sled glided along the horizon, just within sight. The land was a field of snow now, and the reindeer on the sovkhoz could no longer nibble the lichen that was their main source of nourishment. Whenever people or dogs pissed in the snow, the reindeer would come and lick the stain. For the salt. The reindeer would stand there licking the guard dog’s piss, and you, Anubis, would attack. You would never starve, not even in the winter. The Lena had frozen over again; here and there on its surface, people fished. They sawed holes in the ice and hooked fish through the holes. The fish bellies brimmed with eggs. Sometimes, having hoisted a fish up onto the ice, the stupid humans managed, incredibly enough, to let the creature escape, and you would grab it and scamper off. You would tear into the soft bellies of those river fish, gobble down the eggs. You left the Lena before spring came, pressed onward, walking in the caterpillar-tread marks an armored vehicle had printed in the snow. Once, you heard people operating a radio a few hundred yards away. They weren’t members of the local ethnic minority, they were Slavs who had settled in this region less than a century and a half before. Another time you stood and stared at the white breath gusting from the nostrils of a Yakutian horse. This time too, you stayed a few hundred yards away. In the spring, you filled yourself with nutrients and your body tingled. You had been born in 1952, but your hormones raged, still got horny. Your sexual organs were fully functioning. You kept getting erections all spring and all summer, from summer into fall. You searched for bitches among the guard dogs on the reindeer farms, and when you found them, you had your way with them. You scouted the pets in villages and copulated with every good female you happened across. Still you weren’t satisfied. Because none of them was strong enough. None of these bitches came close to answering the needs of your lineage. You had your way with them, planted your seed. But when it was over, you barked: I NEED MORE! THERE ARE BETTER DOGS! SOMEWHERE ON THE FACE OF THIS EARTH, THERE IS A PERFECT MATE FOR ME, I KNOW IT! Yes, Anubis, you were trying to evolve. That was why these erections came. You forced yourself on more bitches. When another dog interfered, you killed him. And you kept heading south. You were walking through a coniferous forest now. You encountered a hunting dog, and she was good, she was a superior dog, and so you took her.
Still you hadn’t had enough. You needed wilder blood.
South. You wandered this way and that. You were laughing in a blizzard. Laughing a dog’s hilarious laugh. Winter came, then spring. You caught a whiff of smoke—a mosquito repellent. You skirted human lands, keeping just outside the boundary, and then, every so often, casually, you would intrude. Some lands had been inhabited by humans once but were empty now. You passed the remains of one of Stalin’s gulag. You trotted past gold and silver mines, now ghost towns, glancing curiously at the buildings. You discovered a hot spring bubbling up deep in the forest. You sniffed the water and barked. Woof! You noticed a silver coin from the Russian Empire imprinted with an image of a sable, lying in the garden of an abandoned hunting cabin. In the summer, after a long absence, you arrived once again on the banks of the Lena, whose waters were now five miles wide.
At night, the short summer unfurled a sky full of stars.
It was August.
August 1960.
Suddenly you were seized with an impulse. You had felt this before—this pressing urge to do something, something. This unnameable feeling had seized you, impelled you to lift your head to the heavens. You didn’t know the date—you were a dog, you had no use for dates—but it was November 3, 1957. Yes, that was it. A day inscribed forever in the history of the canine tribe. It was year zero Anno Canis, so to speak: that sacred, epoch-making day when a bitch in an airtight chamber, on board a man-made satellite named Sputnik 2, gazed down from orbit at the earth. She had gazed down, that third day in November, on you, Anubis, and you had felt what others felt. Yes, you felt it, sensed a gaze sweeping over you from the vastness of the sky. SHE’S LOOKING AT ME. That dog was Laika. Laika, a space dog, a Russian laika named Laika, a bitch from the USSR, looking at you, gazing down upon you.
And now it was August 19, 1960.
Year 3 Anno Canis.
Another epoch-making day.
Two dogs were in space. One a male, one a bitch, both Soviet space dogs. They had been sent up earlier that day on Sputnik 5. They had been entrusted with a task. The space race was entering the next stage. The Eastern and Western camps (which was just another way of saying the Soviet Union and the United States) were each rushing ahead, desperate to be the first to send a manned spaceship into space. Each side was determined to beat the other in the race. The Americans had been devastated when Sputnik 1 went up, and the launch of Sputnik 2 had turned their devastation to shame. But then, c’mon, they just put dogs in space, right? Animals, that’s the best they can do. The Yankees nodded to each other in satisfaction. There you had it, the limits of communism laid bare. And now it’s our turn! Just watch, here in this free land of ours, we’ll send a person into space! The Yankees were sure they could do it. The preparations were progressing surprisingly smoothly. They were selecting an astronaut. Working to create a manned spaceship, not some silly dogged spaceship. The space race had come to stand as a vehicle for a competition between ideologies, to demonstrate once and for all which of the two was superior. And how were things going in the USSR? How smoothly was its program progressing? The USSR didn’t care about smoothness. It was pouring five percent of its national budget into the space program. As an actual figure, that was six times more than the US was investing. That’s how committed the USSR was to beating the US. This time too, they would win. They would send what the Yankees called a “cosmonaut” (a term coined to describe the Soviet equivalent of the American astronaut) into space. In short, the Soviet Union was pressing ahead with its preparations, not exactly smoothly, no—insanely.
Belka, Why Don't You Bark? Page 14