‘So, we should be happy about the War, because there have been so many books written about it?’
As always when she plays the War card, there is nothing I can say.
Of course Captain Scott was frightened as he struggled in front of the sled. Fear that the trip to the South Pole was in vain, and then, after that fear had turned to certainty, fear of pain, cold, shame, hunger, sickness, and death. Had he used (and eaten!) dogs, maybe the Englishmen would all have survived. One single dog tenderloin, maybe with a side of liver, and who knows? They were so close to making it to the South Pole and back without dogs, but the moral of the story remains:
Bring a dog!
But as long as you’re wandering around out there in the frozen tundra, when it dawns on you that you’re not going to survive this, you might as well make the most of it, provided you have pen and paper. With pen and paper, you can tell the story after you’re dead. Mrs. Thorkildsen, for example, would hardly have survived a trip to the South Pole, but if I know her, she definitely would’ve brought a pen and paper, so her dramatic story would have survived even if she perished. No stories ring truer than those of the dead.
History is written by the victors, they say. The race to the South Pole is the exception that proves the rule. The Chief’s two-volume work with its scientific measurements and descriptions of the weather became a bestseller, but it was Scott’s death-chronicle that became the story. The Norwegians came first, but the Englishmen won. Won the story. English schoolchildren were taught that Scott was the first one to the South Pole, he was just unlucky enough to die a heroic death on his way home, and that’s a much nicer story, even if the bodies in it are just as cold.
There were a lot of gala dinners held in the Chief’s honor, but eventually they all began to taste like dog tenderloin. In the end it all went completely wrong. Unnecessarily so.
Mrs. Thorkildsen once showed me a picture that was taken an hour before the Chief vanishes from the world in a flying machine. He’s sitting alone, older than his fifty-five years, and he looks like he’s lost something. But what? A football game? A friendship? A life? It’s impossible to tell where his thoughts are. Maybe they’re on the other side of the world, seventeen years ago, with a man out there in the middle of a howling inferno, waiting for death to bring eternal life? The Chief knows he’s going to die himself in the next few hours, and I think he’s accepted it. He’s already lived too long. He’s done. Death is freedom. In that respect they’re not so different, the Chief and Mrs. Thorkildsen.
Or maybe he’s just sitting there in his seaplane, annoyed that his bum is itching like hell.
In the end, on judgment day, of course the Chief must also be judged by his personal choice of dog. The South Pole expedition was business, and the dogs were both workforce and provisions, but what kind of a dog did he keep at home? This is a kind of Rorschach test.
‘Show me your dog, and I’ll tell you who you are.’
It’s a pity that the Colonel was sent to live with Oscar Wisting before the Chief came home from his tour. I would have really liked for the Chief to lie awake at night, listening to the howling from the last surviving South Pole dog in the backyard. Fifty-five pounds of food, many tons of guilty conscience.
So, what kind of dog do you think the polar hero chooses to surround himself with?
The answer is … a St. Bernard dog!
I’m not kidding. You know, these sluggish beasts who mostly resemble bears who have sniffed glue. The Chief probably rationalized his choice by saying the breed has a certain reputation as guard dogs, if I know him, but seriously:
What do you associate with a St. Bernard dog?
Salvation.
Right?
With a barrel of Dragon Water around his neck, this good-natured teddy bear of a dog finds his way to the victim hopelessly trapped in the snow and rescues him. Rescues him from the cold, carrying civilization in its most liquid form. I know a lot of dogs will disagree with me on this, but what we’re dealing with here is a dog as diametrically opposed to the Greenland Dog as it’s possible to get, at least as far as the breeds’ roles in human lives. The polar dog expanded the domain of man by pulling him farther and farther into the cold, the St. Bernard dog pulls him back out again. The latter is apparently wonderful with human children. The Chief has no children.
What does a man clad in wolf’s skin want with a St. Bernard dog?
In the end, only one question remains. It’s the kind of question you hesitate to ask, because the answer will resonate in the chambers of your heart for the rest of your life. A positive answer is a sun that will shine through all your days. A ‘no’ is a small dark cloud with eternal rain. A third option would of course be to shut your mouth and keep living with doubt, but you know me. So here we go:
‘Am I a good dog?’
Mrs. Thorkildsen smiles. I can smell it.
‘Yes, Tassen,’ she says. ‘You’re a good dog.’
41
Of course I have regrets. I regret not spontaneously asking Mrs. Thorkildsen whether she might have a little treat in store, but there isn’t time once the Puppy suddenly re-emerges from wherever he’s been, and he is in a hurry.
If I knew him better, I’d say he has changed. The Puppy puts on the coat he’d left behind in the chair, the chair that was just like the one Mrs. Thorkildsen sat and dozed off in while the Major was dying, and he does it with a weightiness that is unlike him, at least not the way I knew him. Or am I the one who’s changed, now that Mrs. Thorkildsen has posthumously declared her son the leader of the pack? Am I simply seeing him with new eyes, now that he’s numero uno? Maybe the Puppy has always been this decisive in his movements, maybe he’s always passed over me with his gaze.
‘Come on!’ the Puppy says. I hesitate. It feels wrong to leave Mrs. Thorkildsen, no matter how dead. If only she could have helped me a little, but Mrs. Thorkildsen says nothing.
‘Come on, Tassen!’ the Puppy says again, and I can tell from his tone there is no more room for hesitation, unless I really, really want a smack on the nose.
So, it’s thanks to Mrs. Thorkildsen. Thanks for all the food. Thanks for the walks. Thanks for the good scratches. Thanks for what you understood and didn’t understand. Thanks for loving me. Thanks for the cinnamon rolls. And the stuffed pancakes with meat and brown gravy. I was sad you stopped making them after the Major passed away, but that’s how it is. Too late now. Thanks for taking care of the Major. Thanks for bringing me to the Polar Museum. Thanks for not beating me to death and stuffing me with sawdust. Thanks for letting me sleep wherever I wanted. Thanks for the nice green ball that says peep-peep! Thanks for the paper wolves. Thanks for being kind.
Did I forget anything?
Probably. But that’s how it is. A dog’s memory has roughly the same shape as the universe, and there’s not much we can do about it.
I know what Mrs. Thorkildsen would boil all her life wisdom down to, if she had to express it in one simple piece of advice:
‘Be kind!’ she’d say. As she said to me. Many times. And I’m going to keep trying, though it’s easier said than done. You often chew the shoe to pieces before you realize you’ve done anything wrong.
The Puppy has wires attached to his ears. The Puppy talks as he drives the car, and I’m starving.
‘No change,’ he says into thin air. ‘She’s there, but she’s not there …’
‘I agree with that, but …’ I begin, but the Puppy interrupts right away:
‘Impossible to say. Tassen, he went wild, but I don’t know if she even knew he was there … no change … I’ve spoken to the police today …’
It’s just impossible to get a word in edgewise here, as impossible as it is to understand what the Puppy is babbling about.
‘They’ve finally decided they’re not going to take any more measures … the weapon will be confiscated, that’s it. No fine, nothing … on my way home now … see you soon … bye.’
It gets quiet, but the
Puppy starts fiddling with buttons and dials until, God help me, music starts coming out of the car. Luckily it’s reggae. Reggae is music without fiddles.
The Puppy speaks again. Peppy and cheerful and he’s talking to me!
‘You didn’t know that, did you, Tassen, that mommy dearest was carrying around a revolver in her purse!’
Mommy dearest? Who on earth is that? Instead of letting me answer the question, the Puppy says:
‘We didn’t know either …’
The reggae song ends and we go to a commercial. For anal cream! It’s a sign.
‘Mom was walking around with a goddamn piece in her purse! You could have been shot, Tassen! A bullet through the skull from a Smith & Wesson. That would have been quite a headline, wouldn’t it: Drunk Old Lady Shoots Dog!’
I can’t imagine Mrs. Thorkildsen would ever have done such a thing. She would have put the famous piece to her own head and pulled the trigger before she’d ever turn it on me. That’s the difference between Margrethe Thorkildsen née Lie, and Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen.
‘I don’t fear death,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen said. ‘And every time I forget that I don’t fear death, and wake up small and afraid in the middle of the night, I remind myself that the worst that can happen to me right now is a long life,’ she said.
I began this eventful day locked up in a cage. I’m ending it locked in a car. This might be progress, but it doesn’t feel like it. I’m having a hard time believing it. Not that I can remember doing anything wrong, but here I sit, hungry and all alone in a car in the middle of the night.
‘No!’ the Puppy says when I naturally tried to follow him out of the car when we finally park in the driveway.
‘You stay here! Stay!’ Slam!
It is a surprising and disappointing message to hear in itself, but never in my wildest dreams do I imagine it will be a life sentence. Which, truth be told, won’t be that long. I’m only a short while away from becoming the next dog to end up in the newspaper after a hot, uncomfortable death in a car, I’m sure of that. When the sun comes up and heats up the interior the soup will be cooked, or more accurately: I’ll be cooked. Hot dog. You need neither a revolver nor an axe to make short work of a dog, all you have to do is avoid rolling down your car window so the poor creature can get some air. All the windows here are hermetically sealed, and even with a dog’s limited capacity for foresight and planning, I can see this is going to be hell. It’s already hell.
Luckily there’s always a solution when life is hell, with a method Mrs. Thorkildsen had mastered to her arthritic fingertips: you move over a bit, and the nail stops gnawing at your ass. You think about something else. That’s why it’s good to always have a little too much to think about.
There are no dogs in Antarctica.
Not anymore. With a stroke of the pen, our polar adventure to the South was suddenly over, after almost a hundred years. No dogs allowed. That’s how it was. Perverse penguins and stupid seals suddenly needed the continent to themselves.
The dogs were put to sleep or sent away. Business as usual. And ever since, there have been no dogs in those parts, except for one. It’s made of plastic and works as a piggy bank collecting money for guide dogs in Australia. I don’t think it would be appropriate to count that one. If a dog isn’t filled with juicy entrails, but sawdust or loose change, you can’t consider it a real dog anymore.
The law that forbids dogs from visiting (!) or living in Antarctica, as you may already have guessed, is not a law of nature but a specially designed manmade law. As if it weren’t enough to rule over the top of the food chain without strength, claws, or sharp teeth, humans have also made themselves masters of who gets to live where on this earth. Humans, out of all of us, drive creatures out of whole continents with the sole justification that they ‘don’t belong’ there. As if humans belong anywhere!
One can hope, humans say. I’ve always liked that expression. It’s the human version of ‘you never know when there might be a treat in store,’ in a way. And the good thing about treats, and the good thing about hope, is that it doesn’t take much.
‘Some escaped.’
Two little words in the Chief’s hand. The best ones he wrote, if you ask me. There were some dogs who just disappeared during the march to the South Pole. They wised up, I’m guessing, and ran away. ‘Enough of this.’ The Wolf’s motto. Nobody knows where the escaped dogs went. They probably died, of course they died, froze to death if they didn’t starve to death first.
But as Mrs. Thorkildsen would say:
Can you be sure?
The Greenland Dog thrives in Antarctic conditions, better than any animal on four legs who has attempted to live in such an environment. There’s no lack of food, either. The perverse penguins could use a few more natural enemies, I’m sure. They need to pull themselves together, plain and simple, and you can say whatever you want about having a wolf on your heels, but it seems to wake you up.
The escaped dogs probably found a good life with a steady diet of penguins and seals, and they probably mated incessantly and grew into many packs who live scattered all over the South Pole, day after day, under the cover of winter darkness. Wasn’t that something the scientists said? That they had no idea how rich the animal life might be, down there in the winter?
Lupus Antarcticus howls at Aurora Australis.
Let’s say that.
42
One day we were on our way home after a successful raid at the Center, and Mrs. Thorkildsen accidentally stopped and read a sign someone had been thoughtless enough to hang on the lamp post by the bus stop. Since dogs famously can’t read, I had to ask Mrs. Thorkildsen what the poster literally said.
‘It’s about a cat who’s missing.’
‘I doubt that,’ I said, ‘it’s probably just vanished.’
‘The cat’s name is Tassen,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen said.
‘Pardon me?’ I said.
‘It actually says that,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen said.
‘There must be some mistake,’ I said. ‘Tassen isn’t a cat’s name. It must be a typo. Tassan, maybe. That sounds more like a cat’s name, don’t you think? A little more exotic.’
‘Tassen the Bengal cat,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen insisted.
It was only later that evening, as I was rolling around in a pile of clothing in the laundry room, that it hit me like a lightning bolt:
Maybe I’m a cat!
I realize it may sound silly, but in that moment, wrapped in the scent of Mrs. Thorkildsen’s dirty clothes, it seemed like an acute existential crisis:
How do I know I’m not a cat? Mrs. Thorkildsen gives me dog food, talks to me like a dog and treats me like a dog, but what if she’s only part of the big conspiracy? These are the kinds of thoughts that can make a dog discouraged, depressed, and lethargic.
Still, I got back on my feet, literally and figuratively. It was night now, but I was wide awake. Normally it doesn’t bother me if I can’t sleep. I can sleep anytime. And the next best thing in the world, after sleeping in the laundry, is lying awake in the laundry. But that night I kept tossing and turning. Something told me I had to go out to the kitchen, but when I got there, all I could think about was needing to go into the hallway, and once I was there I was told to go into the bathroom again, and it went on like that for a few rounds until I forced myself out of the pattern and wandered into the living room.
On the floor in front of the fireplace was the last paper wolf. The Colonel. All the others had migrated up to the heavenly mantle. Standing there on its own, it seemed neither threatening nor strong. Truth be told, it seemed a little feeble. Alone. I get scared when I’m alone, too. Mrs. Thorkildsen too, I’d imagine. I don’t know, since I’ve never seen what she’s like when I’m not there, but I think she’d be scared.
We dogs may have our shortcomings when it comes to shoes and moral concepts, I don’t deny that. What love really is, or what it’s supposed to be good for, I’m not sure. I’ll probably never learn to tell t
ime or drive a car. I’ll probably always leave behind a trail of dirt, and there isn’t a dog that doesn’t shed. Non-shedding dogs are an urban legend. But when there are no more sleds to pull, invaders to attack, prey to hunt, what do you do then? Who are you then?
The best thing you can aspire to in this world is company. Whether it’s for pleasure or pain, a crowning or an execution: everything is better with company. You might say it all went to hell with Mrs. Thorkildsen, but you know what? It could have been worse, because Mrs. Thorkildsen had me to keep her company. And I had her. That’s what we had in common, her and me, what bound us together. We were company.
There’s someone behind the car!
I’m in a devil’s bind now, locked inside the car. An alien being is rummaging around in the back of the car, scraping and rocking it up and down while I frantically try to come up with a reaction. I don’t have time, I’m more and more paralyzed by fear until it all ends with the car door opening and I think it’s all over, but it’s only the Puppy—thank God it’s the Puppy, I should have known it would be the Puppy, and I tell him exactly how deeply loved and missed he is.
He ignores me so chills run down my spine. To the untrained eye he might seem unfriendly but, believe me, the Puppy isn’t unfriendly, he’s just the boss. He’s just the kind of guy who doesn’t need to yank the leash to make you do what he wants.
It’s not so important that we talk. There aren’t actually that many situations that require talking, are there? A dog and his master don’t need anything in common beyond a shared goal, and it’s enough if one of them knows it, as long as the two of them stick together. Traveling is often better in silence.
In my life with Mrs. Thorkildsen, there were endless decisions that had to be made, but in this new life I think I can leave it to the Puppy to make most of the decisions. Maybe we’ll eventually get to a point where he can deal with the Bitch with my help, make her see me as ‘intelligent and eager to learn,’ too. Maybe there’s a future for me on the couch, on the white couch.
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