Good Dogs Don't Make It to the South Pole

by Hans-Olav Thyvold

  ‘What on earth am I going to do with all these channels?’ and I have to admit I have no answer.

  The big change comes in small steps. Mrs. Thorkildsen discovers that she prefers to watch TV in the late morning, and that becomes the norm. And just like she’d had a regular time when she sat down to watch the news with the Major, she now has a set time before lunch when she sits down to watch a program I can’t make much sense of, which obviously gives her great pleasure. The program mostly consists of people talking and saying things I can’t understand. Old people, young people, men and women, they meet every day to talk and scream and cry over each other while Mrs. Thorkildsen watches.

  Neither Dr. Pill nor his patients speak a language known to me, so I don’t understand a peep of what’s going on. Mrs. Thorkildsen is kind enough to always tell me what the program is about that day. And it’s hefty stuff. Actually, a pretty appalling parade of uniquely human problems:

  ‘Was it child abuse or was it an accident?’

  ‘Why is my mother pretending she has cancer?’

  ‘My twenty-one-year-old daughter is infatuated with her controlling, jealous, heroin addict boyfriend.’

  ‘Should I divorce my sick wife?’

  ‘My husband hit me with a wooden spoon—and now he wants me to apologize!’ Closely followed by: ‘I hit my wife with a wooden spoon—and she should be sorry!’

  Each day brings new calamities, and new humans crying and moaning, people acting in ways I’ve never seen anyone behave in Mrs. Thorkildsen’s home, and which I can’t imagine Mrs. Thorkildsen accepting. Still, it seems to be doing Mrs. Thorkildsen good.

  ‘Come on, Tassen, let’s go watch Dr. Pill,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says. I trundle out after her to the living room, where she arranges herself in front of the TV. The music chimes in. Mrs. Thorkildsen tells me what today’s program is about, and then I don’t hear from her again until it’s over and the TV is turned off.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ she usually says when it’s over. Usually no more than that, but sometimes she delivers longer, head-shaking commentaries, with the same conclusion as her comments on the news. It’s all going to hell.

  Mrs. Thorkildsen’s own family and emotional life is probably much less dramatic than what we see unfold on Dr. Pill’s show. The people she talks to on the phone have their problems, too, but those problems mostly revolve around getting old. Hearts that don’t want to beat, hip bones that break, and kids who don’t come to visit. No violence, no ruinous passions, no drug abuse, just boring problems of the type you watch TV to forget. But it’s good to be able to complain a little, even when you don’t have much to complain about, so Mrs. Thorkildsen stretches the truth and says no one ever comes to visit her either. Which isn’t true, first of all, and, second, I think she’s mostly saying it to make the other person feel better.

  The Puppy actually comes by quite often; he mostly talks numbers and then he leaves. He might grab a cup of coffee if he has time, but he rarely does.

  One day he suddenly appeared in the living room and wanted to take me in the car with him. To my surprise, Mrs. Thorkildsen had no problem with that.

  I was confused, and honestly a little frightened when we drove off. The Puppy and me. It was a little scary that Mrs. Thorkildsen wasn’t coming along on the trip. It was the only time I’d been away from her since the Major died. And it didn’t make me any calmer that I could clearly pick up the scent of guns.

  A weapon in the car changes, if not everything, a lot of things. Were we going to war now? Hunting? Or were we out on some other errand? I was nervous, had an unsettling sense of impending catastrophe but, as we kept driving, I understood that something literally huge was about to happen. The Puppy had the window on his side of the car open, and a whole world of smells poured in, all at once. There was no use trying to pick up one scent; all I could do was open my nostrils and let it seep through.

  When it dawned on me that, for the first time in my life, I wasn’t going to stay in the car but would be participating in the hunt itself, I’m ashamed to say that I went a little off the rails. Mrs. Thorkildsen has brought me to many places I, with my simple mind, assumed were the woods. I mean grass, trees. It’s the same concept, but this was something else altogether. An infinity of trees and plants and smells and sounds. There was life everywhere—a scampering, crunching, aromatic orchestra of small animals, and I was the only dog there. My woods.

  I’d never heard a weapon fired before, although the Major kept an arsenal of weapons at home his whole life, hidden in the strangest places around the house—from the pistol in the sock drawer in the hall to the double barrel pump-action shotgun under the bed he slept in. I never saw him use any of them.

  When the first shot went off, I almost pissed myself in sheer terror. I’d never heard anything like it. I jumped and cowered in the moss, but before the echo had finished resonating through the woods, the bang was imprinted on me like our tribe’s invincible roar, and by the second shot I was looking forward to the third.

  So, I went hunting in the woods and Mrs. Thorkildsen’s Puppy went hunting in the woods. We both pissed here and there to mark our territory, and it was a great day until I bounded up a hill with the Puppy hopelessly far behind me. I was over the crest of the hill before he even saw what was happening. The Puppy started screaming and shouting in a voice that may have been powerful within four walls, but sounded feeble and weak out here among the trees. There was no way to hear his cries through the smell that saturated the air more and more. I’m usually almost impossible to control when I meet a new, exciting smell, and this was a smell more exciting and complex than anything I had ever smelled in my whole life.

  Then the alarm bells went off in my tiny dog brain. The exciting, euphoric mood was shot through with an arrow of anxiety. An arrow of smell. The scent came from a spot in the moss right in front of me, but the impulse to follow it was quickly choked off. I hesitated to put my snout up to it; suddenly it seemed more appropriate to pull back a little, since the message was more than clear enough from where I stood: Fear!

  A smell that left an impression, the smell of a being that barely knows what fear is, and claims its space accordingly. That’s what most of us try to assert every time we lift a foot, but most of us aren’t even fooling ourselves. When, after sniffing the puddle a grumpy Amstaff has left behind in the park, I lift my leg and micturate contemptibly, I have no illusions of being able to defend the territory later in an open battle with said Amstaff.

  So, yes, I’ve sniffed up the message of fear over a long life with many lampposts along the way, but none of the smells have ever truly scared me. Fear is what I fear most of all, but I didn’t know fear was a feeling that, boiled down to its innermost essence, smells of Wolf.

  I’ve heard of the Wolf, but never really absorbed the fact that he exists. There are a lot of dogs in the city who think the Wolf is just an urban legend, and barely even that. I can see where they’re coming from, especially if they’re hunting dogs. I was eager to believe that the Wolf existed, I just wasn’t prepared for what I’d feel the day I really sensed his presence. That was the day I understood what lay behind the expression that had been meaningless in my life so far: ‘ignorance is bliss.’ The scent rose up from a giant stone, still wet. I approached it slowly, and with each step I drew closer, the smell changed and the world changed with it. Here were battle cries and mysteries and stories that won’t die. The bloodthirsty will to defend one’s territory to the last breath and the indomitable will to survive. The meaning behind the moon. How to kill a snake. Forests of wisdom. Forests of fear.

  I could have spent the rest of my life smelling that stone, and I probably would have, had the Puppy not suddenly appeared and grabbed my collar with an invective I won’t repeat here, before giving me a smack on the nose so stars and moons danced in front of my eyes. The hunt was over.

  That was the end of perhaps the best dog experience in my not particularly sinful dog’s life, with my tail raised high
and a powerful new scent seared in my memory. I vomited in the car for the first time since I was a young dog, and got another smack on the mouth for that, too, but it didn’t matter. When we got home, the temptations were rinsed off with the garden hose until I smelled pretty boring again, but the scent of Wolf was lodged inside me for good. The scent of Wolf is simultaneously the most inspiring and the most humiliating thing I’ve ever experienced.

  The Puppy was disappointed that we returned from the hunt with no bounty, and he didn’t try to hide it. Mrs. Thorkildsen consoled him with a few cinnamon rolls and a cup of coffee. The Puppy called me a useless hunter, but I knew better. I know I have it in me, but I also can’t stop thinking about a new, frightening suspicion:

  Maybe Mrs. Thorkildsen isn’t a killing machine after all.

  It strikes me as odd that the Puppy, a strong, relatively young man with a weapon, can’t manage to whack the slightest little treat, while old, unarmed Mrs. Thorkildsen can fell more large game than she can carry home on her own. The more I mull it over, the more restless I become: perhaps Mrs. Thorkildsen is feeding us not by her own hunting and killing, but by gathering what’s left after the real predators have had their fill. Mrs. Thorkildsen, I fear, might be nothing but a simple scavenger.

  So, truth be told, my respect for Mrs. Thorkildsen should have ended there once and for all. If it had ever occurred to me to challenge Mrs. Thorkildsen’s role as leader of our little pack, maybe I would have succeeded. I may not be large, but I can bare my teeth and growl from the bottom of my throat when I need to (and size is irrelevant anyway, since Mrs. Thorkildsen’s fear of rats speaks for itself). One leap onto Mrs. Thorkildsen’s breakfast table—standing there alert, growling in her face and baring my teeth—I don’t think Mrs. Thorkildsen would have taken up the fight, not without a weapon.

  On the other hand, I can say with a fair amount of confidence that I’ll do no such thing. It’s a nice creature comfort, of course, to have your food served on a plate every day and not have to worry about a somewhat safe place to sleep. It not only satiates and nourishes you, but gives you a peace of mind that frees your thoughts to ponder other questions. Simply put, you have time to philosophize. To be fair, philosophizing isn’t good for all dogs. You can see some of them in the park, plodding along without jerking the leash even the slightest bit tighter, weighed down by the mournful history and fate of all dogs, though they seem to have absented themselves from their own kind.

  5

  Mrs. Thorkildsen has stopped driving. I don’t know why, or the reason she chose this particular moment, now that we are finally finding a rhythm and shape to our new existence. Maybe she remembered her own words from the time she tried to convince the Major that he had grown too old and decrepit to drive a car. I remember it well, anyway, not for the words that were said but for the reaction they provoked in the Major. In fact, I had barely bothered to listen to the conversation before becoming aware of a sharp odor that emanated from the Major as soon as Mrs. Thorkildsen mentioned the word ‘driving,’ one night as they sat there talking as usual.

  She started the way she usually does when she has something important to say, by referring to an actual event that occurred among their family or friends. There were plenty of those to choose from. There was always a recently widowed cousin, a nephew with jungle fever, or a second cousin’s spouse who slumped dead over the steering wheel after two straight days of shoveling snow with his tractor.

  The story, which she pretended was about an old fogey who fell down some stairs and almost met his untimely end, laid the groundwork for Mrs. Thorkildsen’s expression of concern for the Major and his health. She knew him well enough to know that this would have no effect on him whatsoever, but she also knew these arguments were just a step along the way to her real mission: to make him terrified every time we were out driving a car.

  Even a Pug with a poor sense of smell would have sensed Mrs. Thorkildsen’s growing unrest as our next hunting trip drew nearer. The second she slid into the passenger seat, she buckled herself securely in with straps (while I had to hang on to the best of my ability), and her voice turned dry and sharp. Her breath grew uneven and the tempo of her heartbeat shot up and down. Every time we approached an intersection, she held her breath until we had cleared it, or she let go of a tiny, barely audible whimper.

  Finally, the Major stopped driving his car. Not by calling it quits and handing over his keys once and for all, but more and more often it was Mrs. Thorkildsen who sat behind the wheel when we went out hunting, and as these things usually go, it didn’t take long before it felt like it had always been this way. When the Major sat behind the wheel, it was Mrs. Thorkildsen who dominated the conversation and gave directions. The Major’s responses grew short when he drove, and Mrs. Thorkildsen filled the space. Now the roles were reversed.

  The car has been replaced by a wheely bag Mrs. Thorkildsen brought up from the basement, a scary blue wheely bag she pulls behind her with one hand when we go out for a walk. She holds my leash in her other hand and, unfortunately, Mrs. Thorkildsen only has two hands. She’s found a poor solution to the problem by sometimes tying my leash to the wheely bag. I don’t like this as it looks like Mrs. Thorkildsen is walking the wheely bag while the wheely bag walks me. A sled dog team in reverse, with the human in front and the dog in the back. This is not how it’s supposed to be. It’s a matter of dignity.

  The wheely bag is just big enough for Mrs. Thorkildsen. We no longer need help from strangers when we go pick up Dragon Water. After explaining to the man behind the counter what she needs this time, she fills the wheely bag with more bottles than she ever would have been able to carry, and we plod along home. Sure, it takes time, but time isn’t a problem. Not for Mrs. Thorkildsen and me. And Mrs. Thorkildsen has also bought herself a pair of magic shoes. Huge and white, much bigger than any of her other shoes, but also lighter. Antelope skin. Somewhere an antelope was grazing on a savannah, and could have kept doing so, had it not occurred to an old woman up north that she was going to get rid of her car. It’s hard to wrap your head around. But the shoes are beautiful. They’ll really be something to sink my teeth into when the time comes. Patience.

  The loss of our car has been a blessing for the passionate walker in me, although it also means a sudden encounter with a reality full of new demands and challenges, some of the type us medium-sized dogs are less enthusiastic about. The suburbanites, for example. Little did I know, before we started making the journey on foot, that the hunting grounds were located in another city. The Center, as it turned out, was deep in the heart of Suburbia. In the car, I had never registered the existence of the city limits; it had never occurred to me that the Center might be elsewhere, or how far away it was. But traveling on foot, it’s like crossing an invisible line, and you’re suddenly in Suburbia.

  In the city, they don’t live like Mrs. Thorkildsen and me, in a single-family home behind a white painted fence. In the city there are no fences. The houses aren’t separate and alone, they’re stacked vertically, so high that I get a little nauseous if I don’t keep my eyes glued to the ground as we manoeuvre towards the Center.

  With no fences, you’d think Suburbia would be an Eldorado for dogs—who also wouldn’t need to guard the houses since they’re big enough to guard themselves—but there aren’t many dogs around, and the few we meet are well-behaved walkers on a leash. There’s plenty of room to run around between the houses, but there’s no one running around. Still, there’s no doubt there are plenty of dogs in Suburbia, and I think even Mrs. Thorkildsen would smell that if she could just be bothered to get down on all fours and stick her nose up against the lampposts. I can smell them, but I can’t see them, so I’m full of questions:

  Can they see me? Are they sitting up there behind the curtains in their tall houses, following my every move? Should I be worried?

  The answer to the last question is yes. As a dog, you should generally always be a little worried. It’s part of the job, I think. T
he problem is that new problems and worries come up all the time. For example, I had never before been exposed to the terrifying trial, the lonely humiliation it is to be tied up and left on the street, until Mrs. Thorkildsen stopped driving her car.

  The first time it happened, I’m ashamed to admit I went a little bananas. Totally bananas, to be completely honest. Maybe because it happened so fast and without warning. One moment we were strolling peacefully in the street together in the crisp, cool autumn air, the next I was left there, tied up and abandoned.

  ‘Stay here, Tassen,’ was all she said before she left. A horrible message, so brutally curt and confusing that I had to collect myself before I could even start to register the situation around me. I was supposed to stay here, alone, tied up in a totally foreign place, without Mrs. Thorkildsen, possibly for the foreseeable future. Life turned upside down. Maybe I should have expected this, I thought to myself. When the Major came to get me, my life was suddenly transformed as if by a magic wand, and now that life—and Mrs. Thorkildsen along with it—had vanished again. I was in shock, too paralyzed to howl out my sorrow and fear. I had never felt so afraid and lonely, even before I sensed the stench that wafted up from the ground all around me, a cacophony of smells from dog after dog after dog with one common message:

  ‘Alone!’