Good Dogs Don't Make It to the South Pole

by Hans-Olav Thyvold

  ‘Not nearly enough,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says.

  The Librarian takes a fresh swig. I may have overestimated Mrs. Thorkildsen’s special talent for drinking; new evidence would suggest that this is a more widespread skill. It would seem that librarians, in the course of their everyday work, are exposed to environmental hazards that predispose them to liberal engagement with intoxicating beverages. Once a librarian, always a drunkard. It’s just a theory.

  ‘Where does your mother live?’ Mrs. Thorkildsen asks.

  ‘Mom died two years ago. One day she didn’t answer the phone when I called, so I went to her house and let myself in. She was lying on the kitchen floor, and I didn’t need to look closer to realize she was dead.’

  ‘What on earth happened?’

  ‘She lost her balance and fell while she was cleaning the top of the fridge. Her head hit the kitchen counter, and that was that. Broke her neck. Apparently no more than one second passed from when she lost her balance until she was dead.’

  ‘That is just the most horrible thing I’ve ever heard!’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says, and she sounds like she means it.

  ‘And here’s the best part,’ the Librarian continues. ‘The autopsy revealed that Mom had been dying of cancer. She hadn’t noticed a single symptom, at least as far as I know, but according to the hospital, she would most likely have died a slow, painful death over the next eighteen months.’

  ‘Well, that’s just the most horrible thing I’ve ever heard,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says, and it sounds like she means it again. A new personal record.

  ‘It’s not so bad,’ the Librarian responds. ‘I honestly think she might have taken her own life otherwise. Mom told me about an uncle she lived with in Vietnam after her parents died, before she came to Norway. Her uncle had six cartridges lined up on the mantle. His wife and the four kids in the house knew who they were intended for if the situation became … intolerable. Mom used to stare at the ammunition neatly lined up in a row on the shelf, and wonder which bullet was meant for her.’

  ‘Oh, dear!’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says, clasping her hands together. ‘Well, it’s time for the main course. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind helping me in the kitchen for a minute?’

  Life doesn’t get much better than this. In the kitchen. Mrs. Thorkildsen, the Librarian, a couple of giant, juicy steaks of polar bear, and little old me.

  ‘Oh my God!’ the Librarian says when she spots Mrs. Thorkildsen’s steaks. ‘And I’m a vegetarian!’

  ‘Nonsense, you’re no such thing!’ Mrs. Thorkildsen nearly wheezes. ‘You’re descended from a Neanderthal who chowed down on meat whenever he had the chance.’

  ‘Yes, but that was only because he was too dumb to fish,’ the Librarian replies, and they laugh again. I can’t get Mrs. Thorkildsen to laugh as often as she should, and when it happens, it’s usually by accident, and afterwards I don’t always understand what she was laughing at.

  I love hearing her laugh. There’s a whole human life echoing in that laugh, it’s like the song of the whales in the ocean, shaped and reshaped year after year, slowly, so slowly that neither Mrs. Thorkildsen nor anyone around her realize it happened, and is still happening.

  Of course I can make Mrs. Thorkildsen laugh. Every sofa cushion with self-respect and liver paste on the menu should be able to do that, but if I’m being honest, it comes down to cheap tricks more than subtle humor. A little nudging with my snout here and there, chasing my own tail a little, it doesn’t take much. But the repertoire is limited, and some of the tricks are getting old. If I’m being completely honest, some of her reactions might be wearing off a bit, too. The laughter I can summon is a different laughter than the one that rises from conversation between Mrs. Thorkildsen and our guest.

  Mrs. Thorkildsen waxes enthusiastic to the Librarian about her hero Lindstrøm as she arranges the meat on the plates and I almost drown in my own saliva. I don’t bark, nowhere near it, but I think a couple of choice words wouldn’t be out of place.

  ‘Steak!’ I shout, and nearly add: ‘For fuck’s sake!’ To hell with manners. This is serious business. And what do you know, for a second the two cackling hens actually pause to pay attention to the fact that yours truly is actually present and in the process of going insane from hunger.

  ‘You’ll get yours, too, Tassen,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says. ‘Relax.’

  Then she keeps on blabbering about this, that, and the other, and they raise their glasses to toast again. But finally, finally the moment has arrived, and here comes the food bowl, filled to the brim. Meat! Juicy, bloody meat, as if I had torn it from the polar bear’s bone myself. Satan Snarl tears the chunks of meat off his victim and greedily swallows them whole. Without sauce. Satan Snarl is happy.

  ‘Well, an old mind has to occupy itself somehow,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says as I return to the ladies in the living room, fully satiated. I’ve missed something. Maybe the Librarian has asked a question, something about why an old widow and her dog devour every book they can find about something that happened on an iceberg on the other side of the planet long, long ago.

  ‘The famous South Pole journey is the kind of story you think you know, right?’ Mrs. Thorkildsen asks, without waiting for an answer. ‘Brave men and brave dogs plodding through ice and snow to the South Pole and returning in triumph, while Captain Scott loses everything he has because he doesn’t think to use dogs to pull his sleds. The foolish Englishman who’d rather tire himself out in the harness than risk harming a hair on a dog’s head.’

  ‘I’ve mostly heard about Scott, actually,’ the Librarian says. ‘The moral victor, in a sense. I remember I saw a movie about him on TV. The Great Son of the Empire. That kind of thing. There’s something so hopelessly Lord Byron-romantic about scrawling out your final pompous reflections before you die for king and country. It’s unbelievable that he even made it to the South Pole at all. Can you imagine dragging heavy sleds across a glacier up to a height of three thousand meters? It’s got to completely break a man.’

  ‘Why didn’t the English use dogs?’ the Librarian asks. Good question!

  ‘Because they had no idea what they were doing. They probably eventually realized that they should have gone with sled dogs, but they hid behind the argument that it was undignified for civilized people to be pulled along by dogs. Horses, on the other hand, were perfectly fine. But the ponies Scott brought with him froze to death, as any Norwegian farmer would have expected. So it became all about human muscle power. Scott and his men exhausted themselves and got gangrene and scurvy and I don’t know what else. Had they brought a dog or two for provisions, at least they would have avoided the scurvy. Terrible disease. You get back all the little cuts and wounds you’ve ever had, all at once. Subjecting your men to the most painful ailments because of a disease that could have been avoided by slaughtering a dog—I don’t see the moral victory in that.’

  ‘A British honor code?’

  ‘Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s a particularly British phenomenon, though the Brits are former world champions in two-faced hypocrisy. I think it’s about vanity. Male vanity. Any defeat, even if it means death, is preferable to a tainted victory, as long as the defeat looks good. I remember thinking that in connection with that Norwegian girl who won the New York Marathon many times.’

  ‘Grete Waitz?’

  ‘That’s it, Grete Waitz! She once had stomach issues during the race, but that didn’t stop Grete Waitz. She scooped the worst of it out of her shorts using her hand and ran onward to victory with shit running down her legs. When she was asked why she didn’t quit the race, she said it was for practical reasons. Before the race, she’d already sold the car that came with the winnings, and it would be very clumsy to have to reverse the sale. A man like Robert Scott would rather have died than to subject himself to something like that. But to drown in terrible and unnecessary diseases, that was okay. You’re still a polar hero!’

  ‘So, what is it that drives someone like Amundsen, then?’ the Librarian
asks.

  ‘The same thing that drives all men: Honor, glory, fame, wealth, and women. In that order. And he won and lost it all—alone. Amundsen never formed a close bond with anyone. He saw women as a threat to his dreams and ambitions. He became the way certain men do when they don’t get the necessary corrections from a woman. Combine that with a cynicism that set him up to step over the corpses of dogs to reach his goals, and you have a winner.’

  ‘And what do you think a “Mrs. Amundsen” might have done for him, then?’

  ‘That depends on when she comes into the story. Had she really been the right one for him, he probably wouldn’t have left her to spend years of their lives in order to maybe be the first to get to a place where no one had any business being. Plodding along on the ice for months and years while your children grow up. By the way, Amundsen was also the first one in the country to get his pilot’s license. If he’d had a wife, they could have discussed this idea of going to the South Pole on the porch over a glass of white wine, and perhaps he would have had the brains to say, “Let’s wait a few years, dear, and go there for a long weekend. Then we won’t have to kill all those beautiful dogs in order to get there.”’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘They arrived at the South Pole on the fourteenth of December, nineteen eleven.’

  Mrs. Thorkildsen gets contemplative, I can sense that before she opens her mouth after a slight pause:

  ‘When I was growing up, the South Pole expedition was like something that had happened in prehistoric times. The pictures might have been taken a hundred, five hundred years earlier, and the motives would be the same. Men, dogs, and sleds, and otherwise pure white. But it turned out it wasn’t from prehistoric times after all, it was less than twenty years before I was born.

  ‘The way I read the story now, it’s about the end of an era. It was the world that belonged to my mother and her generation putting a kind of full stop. Or a semicolon. Those of us who survived the War can easily forget that there was a world and a life before it. It overshadows older memories. All the urgings not to forget the War, they may have succeeded in keeping the memory alive, but they may also have suppressed the subsequent history, and not least the prehistory. Do you have any kind of relationship to the War?’

  ‘Well, our family didn’t have any kind of relationship to that War, but we had a clear connection to another War, of course. I’ve managed to keep both wars out of my life. Seeing the Vietnam War through the eyes of a Norwegian, and the occupation of Norway through the eyes of a Vietnamese. I don’t feel anything special when I hear the national anthem. I don’t like skiing.’

  ‘Bad Norwegian!’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says, audibly tipsy now. ‘No respect for our culture.’

  ‘I know! I’m a terrible person,’ the Librarian chuckles. ‘A goddamn alien, that’s what I am.’

  What do you think two librarians talk about when they’re chatting over the dinner table? That’s right, they talk about books they’ve both read, and books only one of them has read and the other simply must read. Long books, good books. But slowly and surely, Mrs. Thorkildsen and the Librarian begin to close in on their prey: Bad books.

  ‘Crime fiction is a symptom of societal decline,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says in a somber voice, and I sense what’s coming. ‘The crime trend has infected a whole generation of readers. A generation that has seen the world change like never before, who have all the filth and injustice in the world available at the tap of a keyboard, who have War in their living rooms. The most challenged generation of all time, you might say, so they seek refuge in a static literary universe where nothing ever really changes, and the law always wins. And that’s not the worst part …’

  Mrs. Thorkildsen catches herself and calms down a bit before she continues:

  ‘… the worst part is that the world of crime is disguised as the “real world”—that’s one of the stock phrases in the newspapers’ panegyrics, that it’s so real. So realistic! And ideally it’s supposed to be nauseatingly brutal. The fun part is how the reviewers use precisely this brutality to declare that the work is realistic, as if they’d all survived the most macabre forms of torture themselves! What on earth is this need that’s being fulfilled by these detailed descriptions of human degradation, whether you’re writing or reading them? If you really need crime to come so close up against your life, why don’t you expose yourself to a crime, or, better, commit one!’

  ‘But, as you say, people read it,’ the Librarian says in her soothing voice. ‘And what needs does crime fiction fulfill? I’d say it’s pretty obvious that it’s excitement, wouldn’t you? Excitement and escapism. Isn’t that what good writers provide?’

  ‘Sure. But why isn’t Crime and Punishment regular fare for all those people who devour the crime fiction of the week? Capote? Genet? Mailer? Fucking Edgar Allan Poe!’

  ‘Nevermore!’ the Librarian adds. They toast. They get quiet, and it’s a good quiet, until the Librarian asks:

  ‘But they ate dogs?’

  Is that a tiny sigh I hear out of Mrs. Thorkildsen? And what, in that case, could it mean?

  ‘They did,’ she starts. ‘Both dogs and men ate dogs. The part about the diet is a side of the polar history I never before considered, but really I should have, since I’ve played the role of steward myself. Calculating purchases and preparations for number of people x physical activity x time. On budget. Ideally under. And this was before vitamins were discovered, so the first challenge is simply not to get sick or die from bad food. The British were bothered to death by scurvy, but none of Amundsen’s people. Why? Roald Amundsen’s forte in Antarctica was the food. And the dogs. Which turned out to be partly the same thing. The dogs were listed under both the debit and credit columns of the provisions plan. You’re going to move five men and fifty-two dogs thirty kilometers a day for a certain number of days. Then you’re going to slaughter dogs as obstacles are overcome, sleds get lighter, and the daily distance is covered. The only requirement for completion, apart from the conquest of the South Pole, is that the men survive. The dogs can be sacrificed. Not only can they be sacrificed, they’re calculated sacrifices, estimated to make up twenty-five kilos of provisions per capita. Of the fifty-two dogs who set out for the South Pole, only eleven made it back to the winter quarters.’

  ‘They shot forty dogs?’

  ‘Or beat them to death. Well, actually, some of the dogs did escape.’

  Mrs. Thorkildsen slowly gets to her feet and walks over to the coffee table to retrieve, perhaps unsurprisingly, a book.

  ‘You’ll have to read for yourself,’ she says as she strides across the room. ‘It’s the closest you get to the human being Roald Amundsen throughout his whole story about the South Pole expedition.’

  The Librarian takes the book, almost obscenely caresses it between her fingers as she pulls it toward her, acknowledges its purely technical quality with a complimentary remark, and then reads aloud from the spot Mrs. Thorkildsen has marked with one of her little flags:

  What went quicker that evening than before was the lighting of the primus stove, and pumping it up to high pressure. I thus hoped to create as much noise as possible, to avoid hearing the many shots that would soon be fired. Twenty-four of our brave companions and faithful helpers had the bitter wage—death. It was hard to bear, but it must be so. We had agreed to stop at nothing to reach our goal.

  ‘At least he’s honest, for once.’ Mrs. Thorkildsen holds her glass close to her chest.

  ‘You can say that again,’ the Librarian says. ‘To stop at nothing.’

  ‘I tried to keep count, but I’ve given up trying to figure out exactly how many dogs were sacrificed, all in all. With bitches who were born on board the Fram, at the South Pole, and later additions included, it must have been as many as two hundred. Maybe more. Some of the dogs ended up meeting the sorry fate of being skinned and taxidermied. Tassen and I met a few of them at the Fram Museum. What do you say, are you shocked?’

  ‘Not shocke
d,’ the Librarian says, pausing. ‘Maybe a little surprised at the extent of it. I knew they used and killed dogs, but I was under the impression that it was a matter of just a few, perhaps for medical reasons. Two hundred is pretty extreme.’

  ‘Right? On the other hand, it’s just a number, isn’t it. Two or two hundred, does it really matter?’

  ‘You mean: how many deaths does it take to declare something a War?’

  ‘That question also has to do with who’s dying. Did you know that some places in America, it’s now illegal to eat horse meat? Illegal! It’s created a huge industry for those in charge of handling horse cadavers. There are horse funerals where the giant animal is put six feet under with the help of an excavator and a crane. Can you imagine?’

  ‘I read something about some people who had their deceased dog taxidermied, apparently it’s become quite common. That’s probably why I reacted when you told me about the dog waste on the South Pole expedition. But you mean to say they really loved the animals?’

  ‘You can see for yourself what the Chief says about it, I’ve flagged the passage—I thought it was noteworthy.’

  Mrs. Thorkildsen hands the book back over to the Librarian, who reads with a clear, young voice that marks a sharper and sharper contrast against the content the longer she reads:

  I loved my dogs under normal circumstances, and apparently the feeling was mutual. But the circumstances in question were not normal. Or perhaps it was me, that I wasn’t normal? I’ve later thought that might be the case … the goal I refused to give up on made me brutal. I was too brutal when I forced these creatures to haul the heavy burdens on those sleds.

  ‘And why do we care about these dogs at all?’ Mrs. Thorkildsen asks. ‘The animals we should really feel sorry for here are the native inhabitants. Tons of seals and penguins killed and devoured by creatures that didn’t belong on the continent. The seals down there weren’t accustomed to people, and they didn’t try to run when they were hunted, just lay there waiting to be clubbed. Even better, with a fish in hand, it was easy for the hunter to lure the seal all the way over to the ship before killing it, so he wouldn’t have to drag his massive prey across the ice. God knows how many animals they killed.’