‘In a zoo?’
‘They die,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says, ‘of various illnesses.’
‘What kind of illnesses?’
‘I don’t know, Tassen. Some kind of canine flu the other polar dogs brought with them, they think.’
‘And that was that?’
‘Apparently that was that.’
‘After traveling around the world, after being the first to set foot on the last place on earth, they die of illness in a dirty zoo?’
‘Well, we don’t know that it was dirty but, yes,’ says Mrs. Thorkildsen, ‘all but one. The only one of the dogs from the South Pole to survive and make it back to Norway. The Colonel.’
The Colonel stood out from the crowd as early as that day two years before outside Kristiansand, when the happy, well-fed dogs stood lined up to board the Fram for the first time. Unaware that the big party they’d been enjoying was about to come to an end, most of them simply let themselves be transported out to the ship via rowboat, a couple of them at a time—some more willingly than others, though. It was time-consuming, but the most efficient way to get it done. The crew on board had time to position and tie up the dogs as they arrived on board, and the men in the rowboat got a personal first impression of their four-legged traveling companions.
Lindstrøm was one of the men in the rowboat. The other was Oscar Wisting, the dog wrangler himself. None of the Chief’s men had a better grasp of Greenland Dogs than Oscar Wisting. The dogs did what Wisting wanted, down to the last reddish-brown renegade who decided he wasn’t getting in a rowboat that day, no sir. Had he not been wearing a muzzle, he might have attacked, but the way things stood he would have to try to escape instead. The dog jumped overboard and started to swim, the first recorded escape attempt of the South Pole expedition. Oscar Wisting jumped after him.
And that’s how they found each other. Or that’s how Oscar found the Colonel. He knew what he was looking for. The animal was one of the largest ones in the pack. Born to lead. That is, if the beast also could be forced into being led.
‘Suppression techniques.’ I mumble it almost under my breath, but Mrs. Thorkildsen, the same Mrs. Thorkildsen who can’t hear me when I shout that the food bowl is empty, picks up on it anyway.
‘What the hell do you mean?’ she asks with a strange mix of genuine surprise and light irritation.
‘That’s exactly how you make the whole dog and pony show run,’ I say, trying to match her light irritation. ‘Precisely by mucking up and obscuring the whole relationship. The master designates a slave to lord it over his fellow slaves ever so slightly, and that’s how the dirty work is done. It’s the oldest trick in the book. I mean, if it were me going to the South Pole, with humans pulling the sled, I’d certainly get them to slaughter each other when the time came. All it would take would be giving some of them the slightest advantage, and they’d instantly think they were better than the rest of them, yes, simply superior to their fellow specimens. They’d believe it enough to kill their brothers without thinking twice or getting mad about it. Do you know what people like that are called?’
‘No, Tassen, I don’t know,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says with affected patience.
‘They’re called most people.’
‘Well, well,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says, and pours herself another glass. ‘But let me tell you how it all turned out with the one dog who made it home,’ she continues, glass filled.
‘The Colonel and a couple of other dogs who were born during the trip were sent back to Norway. It might have been luck. Or it might have been the Chief realizing that without having a single living South Pole dog to show for himself, the criticism of the dog slaughter would have been relentless. So, the Colonel came home to Norway as the sole survivor. At least that’s something.’
‘Back to Norway? The guy had barely set a paw here his whole life!’ I naturally object.
‘The Colonel became the most famous dog in the history of Norway. A dog superstar, plain and simple. The newspapers reported on everything he did, and the Fram sponsors lined up to borrow him and show the Colonel off.’
‘It might have been better if he’d died in the zoo, rather than ending up as a circus attraction.’
I mean that.
‘Well, he doesn’t, you see, and the Chief is precisely the one who prevents that from happening. He’s suddenly become a dog lover now that there’s only a single dog left. You might call it a conscience. The Chief, with his two hundred beautiful dogs lying dead in his tracks, has suddenly become concerned with the Colonel getting a good life in peace and quiet. He splurges on an expensive operation for the animal, for an illness that would have been treated with a bullet through the skull in Antarctica. The Chief wants to personally take care of the Colonel when he at some point returns from his world speaking tour about the conquest of the South Pole, he telegraphs. The Colonel is promptly moved to the Chief’s gloomy, secluded home in the Bundefjord outside Kristiania. Here, in pastoral surroundings, the four-legged polar hero would be able to live out his days.’
It’s possible the Colonel was happy. But to his surroundings, meanwhile, the Greenland beast was a source of fear and alarm. At night he sat behind the Chief’s house and howled at the moon. Other than the howling, the neighborhood was upset because some of their own dogs had started mysteriously vanishing after they were last seen with the Colonel on their heels. Amundsen’s caretaker wrote to the Chief in America that the Colonel had most likely killed them and stored them as provisions somewhere in the woods.
‘A depot,’ I point out.
‘And the whole time, he continues to make life a living hell for anyone who comes near him,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen adds. ‘If the Colonel had been any other dog, he would have been banished to the north or gotten a bullet through his skull, but he was a national treasure now. A snapping, uncontrollable national treasure; a natural disaster waiting to happen. In a saga in which dog’s lives are cheap, in which dogs have had to pay with their lives whether they created problems or not, the last remaining survivor has become untouchable.’
The end is almost too sweet. The Colonel is sent to Oscar Wisting in his hometown of Horten, where he becomes the big hero and a regular feature of the streetscape. The Colonel roams freely and can usually be found outside one of the town’s two butcher shops. He gets to mate all the time; there’s a long line of breeders begging to pay admission to join the polar hero’s family tree. The Colonel is still a leader by nature. Just as there was in Antarctica, in his old age in Norway there’s always a small following of dogs that respectfully flock to him.
And then, after a good dog’s life, the last of the dogs to make it to the end of the world dies with little fanfare, full of tasty meat at the end of his days.
One of Mrs. Thorkildsen’s old friends, most likely a library colleague, I’d imagine, once put it this way:
To be or not to be—that is the question.
Sure, sure. If you’re going to be that black and white, it might look like that’s the question: To be or not to be? So black. So white. Black as fur, white as snow.
But usually life looks more like brown slush in late winter.
One trip out of the cage. That’s another way you might look at it. You lie curled up in your nest, safe and sound. All your needs are satiated and you’re at peace. Then one day the cage door opens, and without understanding why, or really having any desire to, you leave life in the cage and wander out into another life. Maybe it’s a good life, with adequate portions of love, food, and exercise. Maybe it’s a sad life, with loneliness. Maybe it’s short, maybe it’s long, but whether you’re ordered there or escape there, you’ll eventually find yourself back in the cage, safe and sound in your nest.
A bullet through the skull after a deed well done at the end of a tiring day, or years of illness and decline? More brown slush. Still, what do I gain by fearing, even thinking about death—me, who unlike Mrs. Thorkildsen, can’t say that the world has changed much since I was young? I’m not t
alking about all the daily death traps that must be summarily avoided, from atomic bombs to the mailman. I think of the fear that grows so strong it becomes a hunger. I think that may be what happened to Mrs. Thorkildsen.
If a dog and not a librarian were to make that statement, it wouldn’t be ‘to be or not to be,’ but ‘alone or not alone.’ It’s not about many or few. It’s about somebody or nobody.
It’s about not having to be alone when you die, just like it was about not being alone while you lived. A death-defying pack to flank you on the battlefield, or a frightened, arthritic old hand holding your paw while the vet’s IV enters your vein, it doesn’t really matter. But not alone.
That’s what matters.
Everyone remembers—or should remember—the space dog Laika for her groundbreaking efforts in the next stage of the human conquest of the universe, after the earth had finally been fully discovered, with the help of dogs, and the ensuing two wars had ended. Laika, too, was the first to make tracks where people, not to mention most people, had no business being. Out in the great unknown.
But that’s where the similarities end. While the Chief’s pack went into the unknown with a clear mission and a plan for how to get back with their hides intact, there was no going back for Laika. Unlike her fellow canines the Greenland Dogs, also unable to turn back, this had nothing to do with her race. Laika was a stray from Moscow, of indeterminate origin.
Laika died weightless and panicked from overheating after a few hours aboard Sputnik 2, but her job was already done at that point. She had involuntarily proven that a person could survive being shot into nothingness with a rocket launcher, and humanity hasn’t stopped doing it since. A wolf and a human meet one day along the road, and soon they were both weightlessly floating in the Great Nothingness. From Nowhere to Nothing, I suppose that’s the logical next step. But again, one might ask Mrs. Thorkildsen:
What are they doing up there?
The official story is that Laika was put to sleep after a few comfortable days in space, in a humane and dignified way, of course, but that’s the thing about the truth—it tends to come to light once it reaches a certain age. It took its time. And not only that. A scientist who had joined the Laika project and later penned the masterpiece Animals in Space, Oleg Gazenko, later said:
‘I’m sorry about that. We shouldn’t have done it … we didn’t learn enough from that project to justify the dog’s death.’
Determining whether the average human being might have a future in space wasn’t a good enough reason to kill a single shabby street dog, according to wise old Oleg. What I don’t know, unfortunately, is how he felt about wiping out a couple hundred Greenland Dogs to reach the South Pole fifteen minutes before the Englishmen. That’s all guesswork.
36
It’s an elaborate process when Mrs. Thorkildsen sets out to transform herself from tired, disheveled troll with fire breath and papyrus skin to perfumed society lady. I don’t even know which of the two smells worse. Regardless, it can take years for Mrs. Thorkildsen to primp, an ocean of time. At least. Many oceans.
First she has to take off the clothes she for one reason or another slept in, and spends some time wading around in her faded, old, and increasingly wrinkly skin where the blue bruises bloom. There’s less and less of Mrs. Thorkildsen, but her skin seems to be growing. Then she has to shower. I’m not a big fan of all that, I avoid the bathroom while this is happening, so I don’t know exactly what she does in there, but I can smell the chemicals. She emerges wearing the oversized bathrobe with a towel on her head. Coffee break. After a selection process that takes its time, she puts on one garment after another, until the weekday edition of Mrs. Thorkildsen is firmly in place, the Mrs. Thorkildsen I think of as Mrs. Thorkildsen when Mrs. Thorkildsen isn’t here.
At this stage in the process Mrs. Thorkildsen sensibly enough takes a break for some food, and it would be natural for me to try to sneak a treat, but since Mrs. Thorkildsen doesn’t let me out because we’re going for a walk later, I’m starting to feel the urge to pee, and then—and only then—the hunger for a treat isn’t quite as strong.
I didn’t comment on it, but when Mrs. Thorkildsen had finished her traditional daily crispbread with cheese and her silly little glass of cow’s milk, Mrs. Thorkildsen downed a considerable portion of Dragon Water.
The strolling tempo was decent today. The wheel on the wheely bag squeaked as usual, and we had a relatively pleasant walk as we plodded along down the roads of Suburbia, Mrs. Thorkildsen and me.
I don’t know what came over me, but I hear myself ask Mrs. Thorkildsen whether she’d ever seen that Jesus Our Lord and Savior guy that the two anxious women came by to inquire about. Mrs. Thorkildsen stops dead in her tracks, suddenly very serious.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Maybe because you said you don’t like him. You don’t say that about anyone else.’
‘There are lots of people I don’t like,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says, sounding a little offended.
‘Like who?’
‘Hmmm … like Paulo Coelho, for example, or Dag Solstad. For example.’
‘Who are they?’
‘Miserable celebrity authors.’
‘I meant people you can touch and smell.’
‘Like who?’
‘I’m thinking, for example, about how you might not like your son’s Bitch. Just feels like I get a whiff of it whenever they come by.’
‘Well, do I like her …’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says. ‘I wouldn’t say I dislike her. We’re just not very … compatible.’
‘My goodness,’ I say.
‘That’s just the way it is—some people are better together than others,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says on a concluding note, but I keep pushing.
‘She seems very focused on getting you to notice her?’
‘I can’t imagine that.’
‘Maybe this is the kind of thing you can’t imagine, but only sense? If you had a trace of a sense of smell, I wouldn’t have had to tell you this. Or maybe I would’ve had to anyway. Even though your eyes and ears work perfectly according to you, you don’t look at her, and you don’t hear what she says.’
‘Of course I do!’ Mrs. Thorkildsen snaps.
I can’t be bothered to answer. I mean, what in the world can I say? If you’re the least bit wise, or experienced as it’s called, you sometimes know better than to say anything at all. I stay silent, though Mrs. Thorkildsen is wide open now, like George Foreman against Muhammad Ali in Zaire. ‘The Rumble in the Jungle.’ But I’m not Muhammad Ali. Even in the most dire circumstances, I’m not what you might call a fighter. ‘The Hysteria in Suburbia’ is officially canceled. I’m non-confrontational and proud of it.
Non-confrontational. What a terrible word. What a terrible thing to be. But lucky for me, that’s how we solve conflict in these parts. We avoid them. Should a conflict suddenly appear and block the road, you simply step to the side and keep strolling along as if nothing happened.
That’s all there is to it.
An ancient day. The Humanoid and the Wolf-Dog.
On our way from the Dragon Watering hole to the Library, in the deserted alley behind the movie theater, Mrs. Thorkildsen halts our march, opens the wheely bag, pulls out a small bottle, opens it, and looks around before taking a giant swig. She shoves the bottle back in her bag and suddenly seems very pleased with herself.
‘I’ve never understood people who say they only drink aquavit with fatty foods,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says. ‘Aquavit is a fatty food.’
The wheely bag has grown too heavy. Mrs. Thorkildsen realizes that as soon she begins dragging it up the steps to the Library. I knew the day would come when that stupid bag would get us in trouble, and I’ve tried in my subtle ways to suggest as much without being heard, but today was a reality check for Mrs. Thorkildsen.
‘This isn’t going to work, Tassen,’ she says.
‘I think you’re right about that,’ I say.
‘So, what do we do now? I
can’t leave the wheely bag outside the Tavern, either, with every broke panhandler in town pouring in and out of these doors.’
‘What would the Chief do?’ I ask.
‘What?’ Mrs. Thorkildsen asks. I don’t know if she doesn’t understand what I mean, or simply doesn’t hear what I say.
‘What would Roald Amundsen do in this situation?’ I repeat.
‘Hmmm. Fortify himself with a dog tenderloin?’
Mrs. Thorkildsen laughs. Alone. Dog-eating humor is just so passé.
‘The Chief would split us into two teams,’ I interrupt coolly. ‘Team A tackles the ascent to the next plane to get help for transporting the rest of the equipment, and team B stays by the wheely bag and keeps a lookout so no bad drunkards come and help themselves to the Dragon Water therein. So, the question we really need to ask ourselves is: who is team A, and who is team B?’
Mrs. Thorkildsen has to pause to consider this. A long while, I’d say. But this may be hindsight playing tricks on me.
‘You know, Tassen,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen finally says quietly, ‘sometimes I worry about you.’
‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘I worry about you, too.’
Sadly, we don’t have to execute my brilliant plan for the stair climb. A white knight, a drunkard in the prime of his youth, stinking of perfume and Dragon Water, lifts Mrs. Thorkildsen’s wheely bag up the stairs with tattooed arms and a cheerful disposition that, from one second to the next, puts Mrs. Thorkildsen in a considerably better mood. The youngster slips into the Tavern, and for a moment I am afraid Mrs. Thorkildsen is going to let all her inhibitions go and run after him.
So here we are, at the gates of the Kingdom, ready for wisdom and scratches, but the gates are closed, and a small sign hangs from them. Unfortunately, it isn’t a pictogram, so I have to wait patiently for Mrs. Thorkildsen to put on her glasses and read the message. The fatal message.
This branch is closed as of November 1st. Borrowed books may be returned in the red box on the left. Looking for a book? Help yourself from the green shelf on the right. We thank our patrons for 43 wonderful years!
Good Dogs Don't Make It to the South Pole Page 19