Good Dogs Don't Make It to the South Pole

by Hans-Olav Thyvold

  Floods. Ruined crops. Desert. Sometimes I’m afraid Mrs. Thorkildsen will turn into a desert.

  Mrs. Thorkildsen, I’m afraid, is smitten by the Chief’s insanity. She thinks she’s going to the South Pole. Step by step, word by word. With a single dog pulling the sled.

  The Chief is a liar. That was and is the premise and conclusion of Mrs. Thorkildsen’s tale ‘The Antarctic Odyssey,’ and now, full of schadenfreude and a quick glug of Dragon Water, she’s gotten to the moment when he reveals his lying nature to the world. This is Mrs. Thorkildsen’s Exhibit B in her case against the Chief. (Exhibit A, that he demonstrably lied to his mother, will always be Mrs. Thorkildsen’s most damning argument.)

  The Chief stands before Fram’s aft mast with his hands behind his back. It’s early in the morning in the harbor of a small island in the Atlantic. Fram is further away from the North Pole than she has ever been. From the mast hangs a quadratic map unlike all other maps. The map shows an island. The coast is outlined in detail. Inland, the occasional mountain range, but towards the center of the map, not a single topographical feature is filled in. Most of the map is a blank space where all the lines run together towards the exact same point, like on a dartboard. Another way to read the map, which might be what the Chief does, is to see a blistering light radiating from a point in the center.

  The Chief speaks. About the South Pole. The place where the lines run together, or radiate out from. A shining star, or a black hole. All or nothing. The Chief doesn’t even need to say it: First or last. There’s no room for the in-between. Nor does he need to say anything about what awaited those who didn’t come first. Someone was already on the way to be first. Firster than first, that was the Chief’s goal. Any questions?

  No questions.

  ‘He lied to everyone he ever asked for money, he lied to the man he borrowed the boat from, he lied to his king and he lied to his first mate. Told him he was going to the North Pole. He could even explain why he wanted to go to the North Pole. Explain with so much clarity and force that men were willing to suffer the loss of seven summers’ leaves on the trees in order to run with the ice across the polar seas.’

  ‘Is seven summers a long time?’

  ‘Half a dog’s life.’

  ‘So if you left a young dog at the height of his powers, it might die of old age before you made it home?’

  ‘That’s how it was,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says. ‘My father set sail for three years at a time. I first saw him when I was three years old, the next time I was six, and then I had him at home for a whole year when I was nine. Then he left again. Went back towards China, but disappeared on the way. No one ever found out what happened. Mother thought it was the crew that had done him in. “He was too tough,” she said.’

  I’d like to know what Mrs. Thorkildsen’s mother meant by ‘tough.’ The Chief, for instance, must have been a tough man, but obviously not too tough. Tough enough to turn the world upside down, to break his promises and to sail a ship onto which he’d conned his way right into the history books. Tough enough to commandeer a pack of Eskimo dogs out into the great beyond, but obviously not so tough that he got beaten to death by his own crew and chucked overboard. It’s a fine balance.

  The Eskimos taught the Chief to drive sled dogs. Eventually he learned to chastise every mutt who wouldn’t submit to him, and he learned how quickly you can nurse a tired, famished sled dog back to one with its tail in the air, longing to pull on the harness with all its might. He learned what happens if you drive the dogs too hard, and after he’d shot and slaughtered a dog who didn’t want to pull one day, he learned that Greenland Dogs are cannibals, taste good, and ward off disease. A dead Greenland Dog, the Chief thought, might very well be a good Greenland Dog.

  23

  Normally, I wouldn’t be able to quote any of the poetry Mrs. Thorkildsen reads aloud to me from time to time, with the best of intentions. There are many reasons for that. The first is that the poetry reading usually takes place late at night, after a certain amount of Dragon Water consumption. The diction, in other words, isn’t always the clearest.

  The other reason is that the poems she reads are mostly totally incomprehensible. I’m not saying they’re bad, it’s just that they don’t speak to me. And when it comes to poetry, I think it’s best to trust your gut. It might just be that dogs don’t understand poetry, but I do wag enthusiastically when a poem first gets me excited. This, for example:

  A rose is a rose is a rose.

  That’s what I call poetry. Cards on the table, no bullshit, cut to the bone. (It’s been a while since there’s been meat served on the bone in this house, by the way.)

  Mrs. Thorkildsen has been kind enough to show me how poetry is made, though I haven’t asked. The secret of poetry, Mrs. Thorkildsen explains, is simply to make the words a little obscure. She uses a tailor-made metaphor to spark my interest: it’s like choosing to take the most exciting route through the park instead of the most direct one, she says.

  For example:

  Your bum’s

  behind you whichever way

  you aim.

  That’s all there is to it, according to Mrs. Thorkildsen. Good luck!

  Sometimes I have to remind myself that Mrs. Thorkildsen isn’t a dog but a human, with all the flaws and weaknesses that come with the species. I’ve often had to remind her that this is a story about dogs, first and foremost, but now it’s finally gotten through to her. And why has it? Because Mrs. Thorkildsen has discovered—apparently to her own surprise—that the South Pole dogs had names. I’m sure they had names long before they were crammed into the cargo hold in Greenland, too, but those names were left behind when the ship glided out from the dock in the bright summer evening.

  It’s the crew members who give ‘their’ dogs names, and Mrs. Thorkildsen is very concerned about these names. Each time she discovers a new dog name, she gets happy and excited. Then she takes the time to stand and plod across the floor over to the flock of paper wolves by the fireplace, and pick out an individual whom she then places on the table. Then she stops by the fridge, since she’s already on her feet.

  With her glasses perched on her nose and a ballpoint pen in hand, she writes names on the paper wolves one by one as she discovers them.

  That one is Siggen, that one is The Corpse, that one is Maxim Gorkij, which makes Mrs. Thorkildsen laugh, and then there’s Frithjof, Teddy, and The Colonel. The Major makes us both laugh.

  Bella, Bolla, Lasse, Eskimo, Balder, Fix, Lussi, The Angel of Death, Grey, Brum, Lucy, Jacob, Jack of Clubs, Tiger, Rat, Mischief, Emil, Baldy, Hellik, Adam, Rascal, Slap, Grim, Tiny, Suggen, and Mrs. Snapsen.

  Tiny, Kaisa, Kaisa-Boy, Uranus, Neptune, Esther, Sarah, Eva, Olava, The Clock-Maker, Lola, Elsie, Siv, Maren, Cook, Bone, Fancy-Pants, Helga, and Peter. Madeiro. Thor.

  Those are the names I remember. Probably less than half of them. I don’t have the memory of an elephant. I’ve never pretended I did. To make up for it, I produce small, presentable droppings that a reasonably fit retiree can harvest with a plastic bag without difficulty. It all works out.

  ‘Can you imagine,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen asks, ‘what chaos it must have been on board the Fram with all those dogs, in the middle of the Atlantic?’

  Yes, I can. Better than she can, I think. I can imagine how the moist deck of a ship, wobbling across the blue marshes, would be hell for a Greenland Dog—well, for any dog, I’d think. I’ve visited that deck. And I’ve smelled it.

  The men who were unfamiliar with Greenland Dogs—that is, most of the men on board—found them scary and primitive, simply repulsive as they stood there, with dirt in their moustaches and hunger in their eyes. If the dogs were angry, they bit. If they were hungry, they bit. If they were scared, they bit. And it wasn’t possible to teach a single one of the dogs anything at all on board the ship. Fram was a floating zoo filled with more or less wild animals. And, like the animals in a zoo, none of them were supposed to be there.

  ‘This
is animal abuse,’ I point out. ‘To strap polar dogs to the deck and then sail the ship through the tropics, that’s a bit much!’

  ‘Just wait,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says with a smirk, ‘it gets better.’

  ‘I’m guessing they start dropping like flies.’

  ‘The Chief had counted on losing half the dogs over the course of the voyage from Greenland to Antarctica.’

  ‘Cynical bastard.’

  ‘You might say that. But guess how many dogs there were when they arrived after five months at sea?’

  ‘Fourteen hundred and ten thousand? What do you expect me to say? But let’s say the Chief was right. I’m under the impression that he was the kind of man who’s usually right. Let’s say half.’

  ‘Fifty per cent?’

  ‘Per cents are good. We like per cents. Let’s say that.’

  ‘Just wait!’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says, suspiciously cheerful and secretive, and wouldn’t you believe that she has a little surprise in store.

  ‘Sit!’ she says. I sit. Easy peasy. I sit like a speeding bullet.

  ‘Stay!’ she says. I stay, of course, but I’m starting to wonder just a little. Might there be a treat in store? I’m sorely in need of a treat right now. I feel a little empty and my stomach feels restless. Mrs. Thorkildsen walks into the kitchen, and my tail starts to move, all on its own. It’s very impractical to wag while you’re sitting.

  She’s back, but unfortunately not carrying a treat, unless it’s extremely well wrapped up.

  ‘Now you’ll see,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says, and of course she’s right again.

  She walks over to the flock of paper wolves by the fireplace, and now I see what she has in her hand. More paper wolves!

  Mrs. Thorkildsen places them in the flock one by one. Human babies come from the stork, paper wolves come from Mrs. Thorkildsen. There are many of them. Every time I think she’s placed the last one, there’s another. And another. I lose count after four. When she’s finished, Mrs. Thorkildsen stays still with her hands on her hips—the preferred pose of humans when they feel they’ve accomplished something. Which I would say Mrs. Thorkildsen has. She’s earned those hands on her hips now.

  ‘One hundred and sixteen dogs,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says. ‘That’s nineteen more than there were when they left Norway.’

  All I can do is trust that she’s right.

  ‘There were puppies born on board constantly, you see. All the male dogs that were born while the ship was at sea joined the trip to Antarctica. But can you guess what happened to all the bitches who were born on board?’

  I can feel myself getting a little nauseous before she’s even finished asking the question. I can almost smell the scent of roasted Greenland Bitch with rosemary, gravy, boiled vegetables and potatoes.

  ‘Eaten …’ I venture, and what I feel isn’t even rage, just emptiness. Mrs. Thorkildsen, on the other hand, laughs!

  ‘What’s so funny about eating little puppies?’ I ask, hoping my irritation is obvious enough.

  ‘You’ll have to excuse me, Tassen,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says, and in the middle of all the wretchedness it’s good to hear what the laughter does to her voice. ‘No, they didn’t eat the puppy bitches. But I really shouldn’t laugh—what they actually did to them wasn’t much better. When a bitch was born, they took swift action. She was thrown overboard before she had time to open her eyes.’

  ‘They drowned?’

  ‘I should think so.’

  ‘Just like that, plop, plop, they were gone?’

  ‘The crew cried “Fish food!” when a newborn was thrown overboard.’

  ‘Scoundrels.’

  ‘Not necessarily. I think you should keep in mind, Tassen, that these men weren’t dog haters. You might think a man capable of grabbing a newborn Greenland Dog by the scruff and throwing it over the railing while its mother watches must have a heart of stone, if he isn’t pure evil. But that’s not necessarily the case. It’s enough for him to have a goal. And if the goal requires bitches to be sacrificed, then they’re sacrificed. According to the Chief, who had learned from the Eskimos, too many bitches in the pack would only mean trouble. The Norwegian South Pole expedition was, overall, not a great place for women.’

  She can say what she wants. Newborn puppies being drowned isn’t much better than newborn puppies being served for dinner, if you ask me.

  ‘Just listen to what the Chief writes about those who called this animal abuse,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen insists, her glasses perched on the tip of her nose. She reads in a deep voice, as deep as her vocal range will allow her, but I still don’t think she sounds like a hardy polar hero. She still sounds like a hardy librarian:

  ‘If only I had these gentle people under my care. Hypocrites, all of them. Goddamn it! I can safely say the animals love us. Do you hear that, Tassen, the Chief thinks you’re a hypocrite! What do you say to that?’

  The animals love us. Yes, they do, but not because you’re kind and gentle, Captain Amundsen. They love you because that’s what dogs do. That’s our job. We love humans, even when they give us no reason to do so. We love you with all the worries and calamities it brings. And every time we think we’ve had enough, we come back for more. You’d actually have to torment a poor mutt quite thoroughly and quite early on to break them of that instinct. The dog won’t turn from friendly to hostile, but from friendly to scared, and good luck coaxing them out of that corner once you’ve forced them into it. What does he imagine the dogs would have done if they hadn’t been happy—other than die, that is?

  24

  The damned past bites me in the tail once again. It does so because I don’t understand the damned future.

  One day long, long ago, Mrs. Thorkildsen said something completely out of the blue as she did the dishes after her modest breakfast:

  ‘You’re going to have to manage without me a few days next week.’

  ‘You know I can’t stand being alone,’ I replied. ‘And why on earth should I be alone?’

  ‘I’m going on a trip,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen said, ‘with a few of the old library patrons in the association. We’re going on the boat to Denmark.’

  ‘On a boat? In the ocean?’

  ‘Yes, of course. We’re going to Copenhagen.’

  ‘What in the world will you do there?’

  ‘Well, not so much “do”,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen said, and laughed in the slightly teasing way I can’t quite stand. ‘It’s mostly just for the trip’s sake. We’ll only be in Copenhagen for a few hours before we set sail back to Norway.’

  ‘What’s the point of that?’

  ‘Well, there isn’t so much a “point”,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen said. ‘I’m going to relax with good food and drinks, in the company of old friends.’

  ‘Well, that sounds right up my alley!’

  ‘Unfortunately, dogs aren’t allowed in Copenhagen,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen said, trying to sound like she was sorry about this.

  ‘Well, can’t you do it here instead?’ I insisted. ‘It’s far too long since you threw a real party. You have plenty of feed in the fridge and Dragon Water in the linen closet.’

  I’d almost said hah!, but let it be. Mrs. Thorkildsen didn’t answer that one. Of course she didn’t—the discussion had ended and I had won. So, I thought the case was closed, until yesterday, when she started rummaging around in drawers and cabinets. I asked her what was happening, but Mrs. Thorkildsen was too single-mindedly focused on her own endeavors to respond. She was nervous and cheerful all at once, and that’s not like her, at least not when she’s home alone.

  Today, she declared at last, she is finally going across the sea to Copenhagen, only to come right back home again. Wise, sensible Mrs. Thorkildsen—what kind of a ludicrous idea is this? For the first time I find myself sharing the Puppy and the Bitch’s concern for her mental health. I haven’t seen any signs of decline otherwise, but it’s now becoming clear that something is seriously wrong. You don’t just leave your dog like that, at least not if you’re Mrs. Th
orkildsen! I’m not thinking of myself, of course, far from it, I’m not that kind of dog. I am only concerned for Mrs. Thorkildsen’s safety.

  ‘Take me with you,’ I say. ‘I can stay on the boat while you make a quick trip inland. It’ll be fine. Don’t worry about me. Think about yourself.’

  Not that I want to leave home—the thought of a boat on the high seas makes me slightly nauseous, and I have no idea how I would survive the lonely hours in Copenhagen while the librarians do their thing—but I am willing to stick it out for Mrs. Thorkildsen’s sake. But she ignores me. Keeps on packing her suitcase, even more excited now.

  ‘You’ll be just fine,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says. ‘Someone will come and let you out twice a day, and make sure you have food and water.’

  ‘Who?’ I ask, sharply suspicious.

  ‘Neighbor Jack.’

  ‘Neighbor Jack!’ I say. Or perhaps shout. ‘What does that hillbilly know about taking care of dogs? Have you lost your mind, woman?’

  If you met Neighbor Jack, you’d share my consternation. The man lives most of the year in a suit he claims is made of beaver nylon but, after smelling the thing, I can promise you there’s not a thread of beaver in that suit, no way. Neighbor Jack smells of oil, gasoline, diesel, and liquor—all kinds of liquids that can make things move. He’s always in motion. Draw your own conclusions.

  While the Major was still active, Neighbor Jack would help him with things that needed moving, preferably with the help of machinery. He’d plow the snow in the driveway (with a tractor, of course), take the wheels off our car and put them on again, every spring and every fall. He helped with both procuring and consuming Dragon Water, and no matter where he was and what he was doing, he was always smoking the same eternal cigarette. Neighbor Jack is the only man I’ve ever heard yell at the Major. The fact that the Major didn’t tear him to shreds is all thanks to Neighbor Jack’s handyman skills. Neighbor Jack is the best of what humanity has to offer, at least in the Major’s opinion—Neighbor Jack is a jack-of-all-trades. He hammers and drills and lays bricks. He knows how to make things. According to Mrs. Thorkildsen, he also takes care of his old mother who lives one floor below him, but is that supposed to make me feel better? Taking care of a mother is one thing, but a dog involves another level of responsibility.