1958–1962
(Year 5 Anno Canis)
Dogs, dogs, where are you now?
1958. Still the world was divided along the same lines. Every patch of ground across the surface of the earth had been categorized as belonging to one of two ideologies. Either you were communist or you were capitalist. Or else you wanted to be one or the other. Except for you, dogs—you belonged to both sides.
First of all, four dogs entered communist territory. Three became Chinese. Originally American, these purebred German shepherds were captured on the Korean Peninsula by the People’s Liberation Army. They had been the pride of the US Army, part of the military dog elite: Jubilee, News News (aka E Venture), and Ogre, siblings by different mothers. They had been fathered by Bad News, which meant that their grandparents, on their father’s side, were Masao and Explosion. That was their lineage. And now they were Chinese. The last of the four dogs belonged to Kita’s line. But while his lineage could be traced back to Kita, a Hokkaido dog, his blood was far from pure; he was an Arctic mongrel, a “hybrid breed.” A wolfdog. And so far, he belonged to no nation. He was on Soviet land and was destined eventually to become a Soviet dog, but for now, in 1958, he still had no experience of the thing we call a nation.
Anubis, there you were on the Eurasian continent.
On that vast expanse of land, in Soviet territory.
But this was the Arctic. You hadn’t yet left Far East Siberia, though it was only a matter of weeks before you would. Already you had moved away from the coast of the East Siberian Sea, crossing the Kolyma River. You, Anubis, were pulling a dogsled. And in a little more than a year—between December 1956 and the beginning of 1958—you had passed from your fourth master to your fifth, and from your fifth to your sixth. Why? Because there was something wrong with you. It had nothing to do with your abilities; you were extraordinarily capable. Your senses were more acute than those of any ordinary dog, and you could anticipate all kinds of danger before they appeared. You identified passable routes faster than your masters, dashed easily over the most arduous terrain. You were a magnificent sled dog. The problem, Anubis, was that the dogs you ran with feared you. Most of the dogs in Far East Siberia were Russian Laikas. You weren’t at home in that environment. Or rather, you were—but only at first. In the beginning, things went smoothly. Because people trusted you and you communicated well with them. Because you always tried to do your duty. The problem was that face of yours…your mien. You were nothing like the others. You were no ordinary dog. Something in you was decidedly different.
You were, it almost seemed, half beast.
Because you were.
And so, for no apparent reason, the other dogs were struck with fear. WHAT’S GOING ON? they asked. WHY IS THIS ENEMY AMONG US? He smelled like a wild wolf, and their master had ordered them to watch out for wolves. He smelled just like the members of those other packs, the ones that lived on the outskirts of human territories, watching for a chance to slip in and take down a reindeer or some domesticated animal. His features were half wolf. And so—WHAT’S GOING ON? Eventually, hard as they tried to keep in line as they pulled the sled, they lost the rhythm. They fell out of sync, and the sled capsized. Other times, they might get so spooked that they would ignore their master and his whip and start running on their own. Because they were afraid, every one of them. Of him. Of you.
Anubis. It was your fault.
But you didn’t let it bother you.
As the dogs scrambled for food, you bit them, ever so calmly. You bit them as if you were their leader. You liked dried fish. You liked reindeer meat that had been boiled with barley and allowed to cool. You ate seal meat. You devoured…the peace.
That, Anubis, was your problem.
So your masters let you go. They made the trip from one town to the next, and when they headed back, you were no longer hitched to the sled. They traveled from a town to a village, and left you—only you—behind. They would never abandon you; they passed you on to a new master. “He’s a good dog,” they all said. “He just doesn’t get along with my team. I don’t know what it is. So you can have him,” they said.
You kept moving.
You crossed Far East Siberia, from one village to the next, from a village to a town, from a town to a town, from a town to a village.
Heading west.
To a village further west.
To a town further west.
Purely by chance, you kept tracing a path west across the Eurasian continent, skirting the mountains that marked the southern border of the Arctic Circle. You crossed from Chukchi lands to Koryak lands, then on into Evenk territory. You had a fifth master, and then a sixth, and after that you didn’t count. Neither, Anubis, did you care at all what ethnicity (what “traditional ethnic minority”) your successive masters belonged to.
THERE’S THE ARCTIC OCEAN AGAIN, you thought. Yes, because you had once been a dog of the Arctic Ocean. You had lived on the ice, on one of those “drifting” observation stations. For about a year, from the time you were three to sometime after your fourth birthday, you had been carried by the tides across the Arctic Sea.
I HAVEN’T LEFT THE ARCTIC OCEAN, you thought. And it was true—you were still within the Arctic Circle, still following the shore. Limning the ocean’s edge. Circling.
Circling west.
You had set out from the shores of the East Siberian Sea, which is part of the larger Arctic Ocean. Though in that season, there was no border between water and land. You had traveled for a little over a year, until you found yourself gazing out at another sea, also part of the Arctic Ocean, but with a different name. The Laptev Sea, to the west of the Novosibirsk Islands.
Then, Anubis, sometime in 1958, you left Far East Siberia.
Anubis, Anubis, where are you now? You were on the Lena Delta, in the port town of Tiksi. There, around you, the waters of the Lena River flowed. The second largest river in the USSR, 2,650 miles long—it ended in this port, fanning out into an enormous delta as it streamed into the Laptev Sea. And what, Anubis, were you doing here?
Pulling a sled, of course.
Only now you were pulling it in a different direction. You were no longer heading west. You moved along a north-south axis. It was winter, and the Lena was frozen over—a perfect way to travel. The river had been transformed into a well-equipped sledding route. That’s where you were running. That’s where you were made to run. The thick pads on your feet hit the frozen river, forelegs and hind legs, crossing the ice. The Lena River had two sources: one in the Baikal Range, the other in the Stanovoy Range. Both lay south of the Laptev Sea, the Lena Delta, and the port town Tiksi. In the interior of the Eurasian continent. And so you could tell, Anubis—you could sense it. SOMETIMES, I MOVE AWAY FROM THE ARCTIC OCEAN. You moved for a time along a north-south axis. Up and down the frozen Lena, up and down, with Tiksi as your base.
Midway along the Lena was the town of Yakutsk, capital of the Yakutia Republic, one of the members of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic within the Soviet Union. Half the town’s inhabitants were Yakuts. Your new master was one of them. Not that you, Anubis, cared who your master was. In the beginning, in Tiksi, you had a different master. Then one day your master changed; he was someone else now, only with the same face.
These two men were twins. In their late thirties. The younger brother lived just outside Yakutsk and worked as a fur hunter, using supplies provided by the kolkhoz. He could never fulfill his quota, however, and so he lived in wretched poverty. The older brother had been granted a transport license that made it possible, in an age when ordinary people, ordinary Soviets, were forbidden to travel from town to town or region to region without an “internal passport,” for him to run his dogsled up and down the Lena, from the lower reaches to the middle. He carried goods. Only specialists could do this kind of work, and the pay was good. Needless to say this was before snowmobiles became common in Siberia, when it was hard to move things fast, and he did such consistently excellent work that he had been officially recognized for his service. In short, the older brother succeeded. And his younger brother seethed with envy. So one day, when they met in Yakutsk after months apart, the younger brother secretly killed the older brother. Clubbed him to death. He buried the body in the forest, near the hut he stayed in when he went hunting. And he became his brother. He made the older brother’s privileges his own and went back to the port town Tiksi.
No one noticed.
People’s comings and goings were strictly monitored in Tiksi, which was home to a base, but the evil younger brother was easily mistaken for his good older brother; they let him right in without subjecting him to a security check or anything.
The dogs didn’t know what was what. It was precisely on occasions like this, however, that you showed your mettle. You, Anubis, helped the younger brother. You were too skilled a dog. Your new master was an amateur—though as a member of a tribe of nomadic horse riders he was used to driving horse-drawn sleighs, and he had ridden in dogsleds a few times—but you could divine his intentions, you knew in advance what it was he wanted you, your team, to do. You subjugated yourself to his will. And you led. The other dogs feared you, and because they recognized a crisis, they obeyed you. You appraised the situation, Anubis, and they fell in line.
Rather than let your stupid master’s flimsy orders play havoc with them, they recognized your authority.
The pack cohered.
The team functioned as a team.
You terrified the other dogs because you were a wolfdog. But still, a dog is a dog. Once the hierarchy was established, terror bred obedience. You inspired fear in the other dogs, not as a wolfdog, but as the leader of the pack. That, at any rate, was how they themselves, subject to their fear, understood the situation.
You ruled them, Anubis.
You brought the team into harmony.
The sled. Traveling down the Lena.
You ran. You were made to run. You were no longer pawned off on anyone else. Your new master—strictly speaking he was your fake master, the evil younger brother with the same face as the good older brother—had no intention of giving you away. “Good dog,” he said. “You get along great with the other dogs, you keep them in line so well,” he said. “I wouldn’t give this dog to anyone,” he said, “no matter how many thousand rubles I was offered.” And he ran the hell out of you. He pushed you and the other sled dogs to the limit. Show me what you can do! Show me what you can do! Move these goods! Move it! Move it! You ran. You were made to run. You understood the intentions behind your amateur master’s ambiguous commands, and you communicated them to the rest of the dogs, led the team back and forth across the frozen waters. Again and again, dozens of times, along a north-south axis.
“I’m in transport!” your idiot master howled. “It takes a specialist to do this kind of work, and I’m that specialist! I’m a transporter, the pride of the Soviet Union!”
The winter was endless. The Lena remained covered with a thick layer of ice. And then, all of a sudden, it was spring.
Just like that, the thaw had come.
The amateur “transporter” didn’t recognize the signs. In certain regions, the thawing of the Lena breeds natural catastrophes. It etches an enormous, awful hymn to the power of nature, there in the landscape itself. In Yakutsk, for instance, it often causes massive flooding.
You, Anubis, were the first to notice. You heard the spring of 1958 coming. To the Lena. It was a sort of cracking sound. Something snapped. You were running. You had left the port and were headed somewhere upriver. Headed south. As you ran, you sensed something. I’M MOVING FARTHER FROM THE ARCTIC OCEAN, FARTHER AND FARTHER. You pulled the sled, you made sure the other dogs did their part. And then it happened. Your ears caught the sound, and the pads of your feet, forelegs, hind legs—they heard it too. Crick. Crick. Crack. Craaack.
You tried to stop.
You felt instinctively that WE HAVE TO STOP!
You whined in warning.
“Shut up!” your master said.
The harness and your place at the head of the team made it impossible for you to stop on your own. If you tried to stop anyway, you would be dragged along, tangled in the ropes. In the worst case you might suffocate and lose your legs, and the team would be thrown instantly out of line. But you had noticed what was happening. IT’S BREAKING, IT’S BREAKING, IT’S BREAKING. You whined a warning to the other dogs. But how could you convey the force of the vision that rose before you?
You wanted to tell them: THIS PATH IS BREAKING UP!
“Hey! Don’t stop!” your master commanded, cracking his whip violently in the air. “Keep running! Run until you die!”
Little did he realize what these ominous words foretold.
A second or two later, the frozen Lena was roiling. It had happened. In a sudden, dramatic burst, the thaw had begun. The route snapped apart into countless chunks of ice that heaved and churned, creaked and snapped and strained. The earth was sliding, roaring. Rolling. Flipping. Fissures crisscrossed the river’s surface. No—the river’s surface was a mass of fissures. The ice that had stretched off into the distance before them had vanished. Their destination was gone. A few dogs tumbled in and sank. The icy water gurgled around them as they drowned. They kept moving their legs even in the water, as if they were still running. “Run until you die!” indeed. The ropes dragged the sled toward the hole. Sink! The ropes intoned. Drown! Submit to your death! The man with the whip seemed to be blowing bubbles. Anubis, your master was an idiot. Your master didn’t know anything. But you, Anubis, you knew.
Woof! you barked.
As fiercely as you could.
Your master stared at you.
You opened your mouth wide, bared your fangs. You were a wolfdog, and they were sharp.
That was the sign. You were telling him what to do. CUT THE ROPE! you were saying. CUT THE ROPE THAT BINDS US!
IF YOU WANT TO LIVE, CUT IT!
Woof! you barked.
You had given your master an order.
You had bared your fangs. And he reacted instantly. He responded automatically, as if inspired by mental association. He leapt from the sled, whipped out the knife on his belt, and ran toward you, wheezing. He slashed through the rope he had tied to you, and then threw himself around you, tried to hang on. Woof! you barked again.
COME ON! you were saying.
Just then, the ice beneath your feet rocked again. You and your master streamed forward a few dozen inches even as you stood there, motionless, on a piece of what had been your road. Or maybe it was a few feet of road? Rumbling, tumbling, it sank, it shook. You didn’t have time to jump off, make a run for it. Everything was heaving. The whole Lena was lurching, crunching, shuddering. Around you, the other dogs were howling. The flow of the river itself was barking. Yes, Anubis, this was it—it was happening. You were in the midst of the whirlpool, unable to keep up with the pace of events. You felt things shifting: up becoming down, down becoming up. You were plunged into the water for seconds, then bobbed up again. You were drenched. You understood. THE PATH HAS BROKEN, THE PATH IS A RIVER, GET OUT OF THE RIVER, GET TO THE BANK!
THAT WAY!
You leapt from one unbroken part to the next, deciding in a split second which way to go. THAT WAY, THAT WAY! But your body felt heavy, weighed down. Everywhere you looked was shaking. Everything you saw was roiling wet. You lost your sense of balance. It was happening all around you, Anubis.This was it, but you weren’t sure what it was, you couldn’t grasp the details. Still, you ran. You were running, that alone was sure. Your vision of the scene was riddled with holes, but somehow you crossed them, you reached the bank. The bank wasn’t just a bank, it was a cliff jutting up at an angle of seventy or eighty degrees. A layer of Siberian permafrost. You climbed. Your body felt heavy. Because someone was clinging to you. An idiot human had his arms wrapped around your body. He was crying. Oh, oh, oh, he wailed. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, he wailed. SHUT UP! you thought. You managed to scramble up the bank despite the burden of him. You didn’t slip. No, not you. You weren’t the one who lost his footing and careened down a gaping crevice in the permafrost. It was him—your master. That idiot. And he took you with him. He kept his arms wrapped tightly around your body, your left leg, as he went, tumbling down into that cavernous hole that plunged like a tunnel into the permafrost.
You tumbled, your body at a diagonal.
You didn’t climb up from the bank onto solid land. You went down. Underground.
You slid. You fell very, very fast.
Your body was bashed, abrasions everywhere.
You didn’t lose consciousness, but your vision went black.
It was too deep. Too narrow. Your master, who had fallen first, was groaning. At intervals, even deeper down. You smelled death. A nasty scent that curled upward, another ominous sign marking all but certain doom for your master. It was cold. The earth was frozen all around you. The air eddying over your body was around 25 degrees Fahrenheit—not unbearably cold, but you were soaked. You began to feel the chill in your bones. In your cervical vertebrae, your lumbar vertebrae, your shoulder blades, your skull: you felt the cold seeping in, tightening its grip. You felt: I’M GOING TO FREEZE. And you thought: NO. You thought: I WANT TO LIVE, I WANT TO LIVE, I WILL NOT DIE. You were determined. The cavern in the permafrost was tight, cramped, a natural tunnel, a world of perfect darkness. It was too dark. You were terrified. Yes, Anubis, you recognized the truth: I’M SCARED. The long night had come.
AM I GOING TO DIE?
Again and again, you asked yourself the same question.
AM I GOING TO DIE?
From time to time, you wriggled your hind legs to make sure you were still alive. You had no idea how you landed, there in the tunnel. You might be hanging from an outcropping of rock, or leaning on it. You tried not to doze. I DON’T WANT TO FREEZE, you thought, and struggled to stay awake. Only it was so dark in the tunnel that even with your eyes wide open, you felt as though you might be sleeping. You had been sleeping for a long, long, long time; so it seemed. Maybe it was real? Had you been asleep? Your vision had gone black, been black—and maybe that blackness had continued, now, for ages? You searched for sunlight. Of course. There in the depths of that long, long, long night, you yearned for some sign of a subterranean morning that would never come.
The cliff you had climbed, and from which you had fallen into the tunnel that plunged into the permafrost, was on the left of the Lena River, facing downstream. On the western bank. The cliff jutted up, almost vertical. The days were short at this time of the year, but the sun did rise. And when it did, the morning sunlight shone on that cliff. There came a moment when the light streamed in through a crack near the tunnel’s entrance.
It shot in at an angle, and for ten or twenty minutes, no longer, there in the pure darkness, the faint glow filled you.
You started and came to.
Who knows, maybe you had been asleep.
You noticed the sunlight bleeding into the space you were in.
IT’S MORNING, you thought.
And then, the next moment, you stiffened, stunned. Because you had discovered something. Immediately overhead—though of course you had no idea how you had landed, what was up and what was down—was an eye. A mammal’s eye. Enormous. Just one, one side of the head: an eyeball. It had to be a few times larger than your own, Anubis, or even bigger…maybe ten times bigger.
The eye stared down at you from directly overhead.
From within the ice.
You were face to face with a prehistoric animal encased in the permafrost. Suspended along the edge of the tunnel, inches away. It had tusks. Long, curved tusks. A long nose. Its body was covered in long fur. It was over eleven feet tall. Alive, it would have weighed six tons. It was something like an elephant that had lived ten thousand years ago, even longer ago than that, and had evolved to live in the cold. An enormous mammal, given the name “mammoth” by a French scientist in the eighteenth century.
One of these extinct creatures had been preserved, frozen, in the tunnel.
In the ground. In a layer of Siberian permafrost more than 160 feet thick.
Without decaying.
And now, Anubis, its huge eye, more than ten thousand years old, stared down at you.
WHO ARE YOU? Anubis asked.
WHO ARE YOU? The question bounced off the ice.
I’M…I’M A DOG.
The eye in the ice was not, of course, a dog. So it didn’t answer.
HAVE YOU BEEN THERE ALL ALONG? Anubis asked.
I’VE BEEN HERE ALL ALONG.
This time, the frozen earth answered. It transmitted the ice-packed mammoth’s answer to the dog’s mind: I’M FROZEN.
YOU’RE AN EYE. Anubis told the eye, very simply.
I’M AN EYE. The mammoth agreed, very simply.
YOU’RE LOOKING AT ME.
I’M LOOKING AT YOU.
AM I…ALIVE?
YOU’RE…ALIVE.
WILL I LIVE?
LIVE.
Anubis’s final question, rebounding off the ice, was transformed into a command. Anubis interpreted what he had heard as a command. He realized that this enormous eye, no one else, was his true master. It was not a dog. The eye (and the creature whose eye it was) had not said it was a dog. But neither was it a human. Anubis realized, then, at that moment, that this thing was his Absolute.
Anubis had no word to express his discovery.
Perhaps a human might have called this thing the “Dog God.”
And so Anubis, whose name itself means the “Dog God,” acknowledged this “Dog God” as his true master, and awoke.
Anubis, Anubis, at last you have awoken.
You were not asleep.
Ten minutes, twenty minutes passed. The brief period during which the tunnel filled with the morning sun’s faint glow was over. Once again pure darkness enclosed you. Your encounter with your true master had ended. What would you do? Obey the command you had been given, of course. The order. One simple word: LIVE. Already, you were trying. You had to break free. You twisted your body, twisted further. You moved. You slipped. You slid down the wall of the tunnel, you fell. But you weren’t afraid. The tunnel did not injure you. You descended.
Into a space.
You searched for your old master.
You looked for that idiot human.
You found him, deep in the tunnel, barely breathing but alive. Too weak even to groan. You were hungry. You knew you would need to build up your strength if you were going to escape from this place. So you saw him as food. You gorged yourself. There was nothing wrong with this. It had happened once before…then too, you’d had no choice; you had sated yourself on your former master’s corpse. You had been eleven months old, or maybe a year. It was the first time you had ever set foot on the Arctic Ocean, and you had almost died. You had eaten your master in order to survive, as if it were a sort of sacred rite. You had eaten that human, that former idiot. Then too. If there was a difference between this time and the last, it was that last time your “former master” had been wholly dead, whereas this master was still slightly…still breathing, barely. There was nothing wrong with that. You could stop his breathing.
Right?
RIGHT, you reply, to someone. To whoever it is that puts the collar on your moral sense. YES, THAT’S RIGHT, you said and put an end to it, and sated yourself on the flesh.
You wandered, step by step, slowly, through the bowels of the earth. The crevice in the permafrost was narrow, but it branched out in all directions, north and south and east and west, diagonally up and down, in shapes nature had determined. There were blind alleys, of course, and forks that led into loops. But you, Anubis, had a fine sense of smell. You had a dog’s nose, and you sniffed the ground with it. You had an animal’s persistence. You didn’t mind trying and failing and trying again.
You made it out in two days.
So you lived. Because this was the command your true master had given you. You would not return to the Arctic Ocean. You understood: I’M NOT A DOG OF THE ARCTIC OCEAN, NOT NOW. It wasn’t logic that told you this. You had once devoured the flesh of your dead master, the musher, in order to survive, to go out onto the Arctic Sea. Now, once again, you had eaten the flesh of your master, another sled driver—once again, you had performed the rite. The two rites formed a pair. I CAME HERE, AND NOW I WILL LEAVE. Yes, Anubis, by the time you made your way aboveground, you had already grasped the meaning of those two rites. In your heart, you understood. It wasn’t a matter of logic. This time, you would head south.
Your talents as a hunter served you well. There on the Arctic Ocean, hunters living in polar regions kept you with them, and you learned to find prey, chase it down, attack it. You honed your fighting instincts, improved upon your natural abilities as a wolfdog. Here your prey were not musk oxen. You didn’t hunt polar bears. But the procedure was essentially the same. It was practice. You learned to read the weather outside the Arctic Circle. And what did you like to eat, Anubis? Reindeer. Reindeer were abundant in the tundra far to the south of European Russia, and in that special variety of Siberian forest known as the taiga. Some were wild, some were domesticated. In spring and summer, you would encounter herds of several thousand in the wetlands bordering the Lena, property of the nearby sovkhoz. You attacked. You took the reindeer down with the greatest of ease. You gobbled their innards, and their stomachs were stuffed with moss—a kind of lichen known as “reindeer moss.” Their stomachs were green. You smeared those bags with fresh red blood as if it were a sauce and savored the dish. Meat, blood, vegetable matter. The perfect combination of protein, minerals, and vitamins. The ultimate one-dish meal. When you had eaten your fill, you bayed. Your baying rang across the vast Siberian expanse. You might as well have been a pureblooded wolf.
A pureblooded wolf?
But you weren’t. You were a half-breed.
You didn’t care about that stuff.
Strength was everything. The resilience to go on living, living, living. As a dog. As a dog, but also as a family tree. Yes, Anubis, you were one dog, but you were also a lineage. Your line began with Kita, a Hokkaido dog, and then your “father,” some nameless wolf roaming Alaska and the Arctic Circle, added his blood to the mix. That was how you were born. And your seed would grow the tree. You were an individual dog, but you were also a family tree.
I’LL MINGLE MY BLOOD WITH OTHERS! you proclaim.
I’LL MONGRELIZE MYSELF, AND THAT WILL MAKE ME STRONGER! I’LL BE THE STRONGEST DOG EVER! you determine, without the use of words. TO LIVE, TO LIVE, TO GO ON LIVING!
You pay no heed to established “breeds” created by humans. You pursue your own ideal. You had come face to face with the Absolute, there in the permafrost. A mammoth that had lain there, frozen, for more than ten thousand years. An enormous mammal, now extinct. And what of you, Anubis? You were a member of the canine tribe, which had appeared around the same time that mammoth died, more than ten thousand years ago. Half the blood in your veins was lupine; in that sense you had reverted to an earlier stage in your evolution. You were reliving your own evolution. You had been given a chance, once again, to press ahead toward what dogs were originally meant to be. You understood. And so you said: I WILL NOT BECOME EXTINCT.
Only dogs can guide canine evolution. You, Anubis, had that desire.
You were awake.
Here, in this vast territory, you were what your name declared you.
Who could stop you from going south?
The short Siberian summer ended. A vaguely autumnal season passed, and winter came. The nights were long. A reindeer sled glided along the horizon, just within sight. The land was a field of snow now, and the reindeer on the sovkhoz could no longer nibble the lichen that was their main source of nourishment. Whenever people or dogs pissed in the snow, the reindeer would come and lick the stain. For the salt. The reindeer would stand there licking the guard dog’s piss, and you, Anubis, would attack. You would never starve, not even in the winter. The Lena had frozen over again; here and there on its surface, people fished. They sawed holes in the ice and hooked fish through the holes. The fish bellies brimmed with eggs. Sometimes, having hoisted a fish up onto the ice, the stupid humans managed, incredibly enough, to let the creature escape, and you would grab it and scamper off. You would tear into the soft bellies of those river fish, gobble down the eggs. You left the Lena before spring came, pressed onward, walking in the caterpillar-tread marks an armored vehicle had printed in the snow. Once, you heard people operating a radio a few hundred yards away. They weren’t members of the local ethnic minority, they were Slavs who had settled in this region less than a century and a half before. Another time you stood and stared at the white breath gusting from the nostrils of a Yakutian horse. This time too, you stayed a few hundred yards away. In the spring, you filled yourself with nutrients and your body tingled. You had been born in 1952, but your hormones raged, still got horny. Your sexual organs were fully functioning. You kept getting erections all spring and all summer, from summer into fall. You searched for bitches among the guard dogs on the reindeer farms, and when you found them, you had your way with them. You scouted the pets in villages and copulated with every good female you happened across. Still you weren’t satisfied. Because none of them was strong enough. None of these bitches came close to answering the needs of your lineage. You had your way with them, planted your seed. But when it was over, you barked: I NEED MORE! THERE ARE BETTER DOGS! SOMEWHERE ON THE FACE OF THIS EARTH, THERE IS A PERFECT MATE FOR ME, I KNOW IT! Yes, Anubis, you were trying to evolve. That was why these erections came. You forced yourself on more bitches. When another dog interfered, you killed him. And you kept heading south. You were walking through a coniferous forest now. You encountered a hunting dog, and she was good, she was a superior dog, and so you took her.
Still you hadn’t had enough. You needed wilder blood.
South. You wandered this way and that. You were laughing in a blizzard. Laughing a dog’s hilarious laugh. Winter came, then spring. You caught a whiff of smoke—a mosquito repellent. You skirted human lands, keeping just outside the boundary, and then, every so often, casually, you would intrude. Some lands had been inhabited by humans once but were empty now. You passed the remains of one of Stalin’s gulag. You trotted past gold and silver mines, now ghost towns, glancing curiously at the buildings. You discovered a hot spring bubbling up deep in the forest. You sniffed the water and barked. Woof! You noticed a silver coin from the Russian Empire imprinted with an image of a sable, lying in the garden of an abandoned hunting cabin. In the summer, after a long absence, you arrived once again on the banks of the Lena, whose waters were now five miles wide.
At night, the short summer unfurled a sky full of stars.
It was August.
August 1960.
Suddenly you were seized with an impulse. You had felt this before—this pressing urge to do something, something. This unnameable feeling had seized you, impelled you to lift your head to the heavens. You didn’t know the date—you were a dog, you had no use for dates—but it was November 3, 1957. Yes, that was it. A day inscribed forever in the history of the canine tribe. It was year zero Anno Canis, so to speak: that sacred, epoch-making day when a bitch in an airtight chamber, on board a man-made satellite named Sputnik 2, gazed down from orbit at the earth. She had gazed down, that third day in November, on you, Anubis, and you had felt what others felt. Yes, you felt it, sensed a gaze sweeping over you from the vastness of the sky. SHE’S LOOKING AT ME. That dog was Laika. Laika, a space dog, a Russian laika named Laika, a bitch from the USSR, looking at you, gazing down upon you.
And now it was August 19, 1960.
Year 3 Anno Canis.
Another epoch-making day.
Two dogs were in space. One a male, one a bitch, both Soviet space dogs. They had been sent up earlier that day on Sputnik 5. They had been entrusted with a task. The space race was entering the next stage. The Eastern and Western camps (which was just another way of saying the Soviet Union and the United States) were each rushing ahead, desperate to be the first to send a manned spaceship into space. Each side was determined to beat the other in the race. The Americans had been devastated when Sputnik 1 went up, and the launch of Sputnik 2 had turned their devastation to shame. But then, c’mon, they just put dogs in space, right? Animals, that’s the best they can do. The Yankees nodded to each other in satisfaction. There you had it, the limits of communism laid bare. And now it’s our turn! Just watch, here in this free land of ours, we’ll send a person into space! The Yankees were sure they could do it. The preparations were progressing surprisingly smoothly. They were selecting an astronaut. Working to create a manned spaceship, not some silly dogged spaceship. The space race had come to stand as a vehicle for a competition between ideologies, to demonstrate once and for all which of the two was superior. And how were things going in the USSR? How smoothly was its program progressing? The USSR didn’t care about smoothness. It was pouring five percent of its national budget into the space program. As an actual figure, that was six times more than the US was investing. That’s how committed the USSR was to beating the US. This time too, they would win. They would send what the Yankees called a “cosmonaut” (a term coined to describe the Soviet equivalent of the American astronaut) into space. In short, the Soviet Union was pressing ahead with its preparations, not exactly smoothly, no—insanely.
And before there could be cosmonauts, there had to be more space dogs.
When Sputnik 2 went up in year zero Anno Canis, Laika, the space dog, the Russian laika, had perished. Sputnik 2 had been an incredibly primitive artificial satellite: in fact, it had been designed so that it was impossible to bring it back to Earth. It was all but certain from the start that it would be destroyed upon reentering Earth’s atmosphere; essentially Laika was fated to die. There was no hope that she would make it back alive. The situation was different for the two dogs who starred in the program in August 1960—year 3 Anno Canis. They were outfitted with pressurized suits. They had clear helmets that stuck out to accommodate their snouts, odd snaky tubes, brown protective skin. These suits had to be tested before the cosmonauts could fly. If dogs could be sent into outer space in these suits and make it back alive, then the same thing could be done with humans. This would prove that people could be launched into space and brought safely back to Earth.
That was the point of this mission.
Sputnik 5 blasted off on August 19. It circled the earth seventeen times in its planned orbit. And the following day, the two dogs returned to Earth alive.
These dogs had finally succeeded in a mission that did not result in inevitable death. One male dog and one bitch, each in a pressurized suit, had seen the earth from outer space and then returned. To the earth that had given birth to the canine tribe. Two dogs—two Soviet dogs. Their names—Belka and Strelka.
Belka and Strelka. They received a joyous welcome. They were Soviet heroes, these dogs, following in the footsteps of that other great hero, that dog among dogs, Laika.
Nikita Khrushchev was premier of the Soviet Union at the time. Having brushed aside various political enemies in the wake of Stalin’s death, he had become both First Secretary of the Communist Party and Chairman of the Council of Ministers. He was the first to crack a smile upon being informed that the two dogs had accomplished their glorious mission. “Two more heroes are born! Ura!” he said, grinning. Once again Communism had overwhelmed the West in the areas of science and technology, demonstrating to the world that Communism would lead mankind forward! And we accomplished it with dogs! Haha! Those bastards must be quaking in their shoes, terrified to think that they’re about to be overtaken yet again in the space race. And yes, yes, all their fear was occasioned by two little dogs.
Ura!
Khrushchev had particular cause for his somewhat childish glee. As it happened, that first Soviet hero, Laika, had become a hero largely as a result of his efforts. Which is to say, the whole thing had started out as a whim on his part. This isn’t speculation, it’s truth: Khrushchev created the space dog. At first, he had given the go-ahead to the rocket program because he recognized the potential military significance of the research, not because he was captivated by the romance of space exploration. So it came about that on August 21, 1957, the USSR succeeded in launching an R-7 rocket whose astonishing propulsive force derived from a pack of booster rockets. The rocket, the Soviet Union’s first intercontinental ballistic missile, had a range of 4,350 miles. People called it by the affectionate nickname Semyorka. Sputnik 1, which was launched less than a month and a half later and became the first man-made satellite in the history of mankind, was essentially the same rocket, except that the Semyorka’s cone had been fitted with a man-made satellite rather than the nuclear warhead it had originally been designed to carry. All of which is to say that Khrushchev hadn’t had a whit of interest in or sympathy for his scientists’ dreams. People in space! The greatest adventure of the century! The spine-tingling thrill of science, of technology! He didn’t care. At first. But then, once they had actually launched the satellite, beating the US to the chase, he saw how stunned the entire world was. Those bastards in the West were quaking in their boots! Communism had opened the door to a new age for mankind, and they were flabbergasted! They were stunned!
This was very cool. Khrushchev grinned.
He even thought up a slogan. Whoever conquers space wins the Cold War.
At last, Khrushchev’s perspective changed. This was in October 1957. The anniversary of the October Revolution was coming up soon, the very next month, on November 7, and as it happened this year they would be celebrating the Revolution’s fortieth anniversary. Plans were being made for a grandiose ceremony. This is perfect! Khrushchev thought. If we had the Yankees trembling in their boots because we set a satellite in orbit around the earth, sending out little beeps, just imagine how humiliated they’ll be when we do it again almost immediately! We’ll turn their shock into shame.
Well then, let’s hit ’em with a bang!
There’s no time like the present, as they say, and so Khrushchev lost no time in arranging a meeting at the Kremlin with the people who had created Sputnik 1—the starry-eyed scientists who had been the driving force behind the rocket project. So, guys, how do you feel about sending up something flashy and doing it in time for the anniversary next month?
How do we feel about what? said the scientists.
Something that’ll make the Yankees groan with shame.
With only a month to prepare, it seems…
What should it be, I wonder? Khrushchev went on, ignoring the scientists’ befuddlement.
Something that would make them groan? You realize, of course, that we have certain plans of our own that…
Something flashy, Khrushchev told them, not even registering the consternation written on their faces.
Well, yes, Comrade Khrushchev, if you think that would…but what…
Something that’ll makes their jaws drop, those bastards in the West, you know? Bam! Just like that. You get what I’m saying? We won’t niggle about the budget, of course, it’s there, the same as always. Whoever conquers space wins the Cold War. Hahaha!
He was demanding the impossible. What sort of project could they possibly develop from scratch in a month? Still, it was an order. And so Sputnik 2 was born. The basic structure was the same as Sputnik 1, except that it had suddenly grown much larger, and it was equipped for experiments on living subjects. And it would carry the very first mammal ever to travel in space. It would carry a dog.
A dog?
The scientists themselves were dumbstruck when it occurred to them.
But that was the decision they made, and that’s how history unfolded. That’s how the great Soviet hero Laika was born. Khrushchev deserved the credit. Khrushchev created the space dog. And so, in the year zero Anno Canis, Laika rocketed into the sky and died.
Gazing down, all along, at the earth.
Khrushchev deserved the credit.
And now Khrushchev was bellowing Ura! In August 1960, two dogs returned alive from space, and Khrushchev guffawed. Two more heroes had been born. A male dog named Belka and a bitch named Strelka. They had returned to Earth as the Soviet Union’s great space dogs, Communism’s space dogs. Now Khrushchev had a dream. It was a quest—a political, military adventure. It was totally stupid. The kind of dream scientists wouldn’t care about at all.
The two dogs should mate. There was a need for their children to be born. The scientists were more than happy to go along with this part of the plan. They were gathering all sorts of data, everything they could think of relating to the effect of space flight on animals—on the animal, that is to say, as a living organism. Soon they would be sending a person up. They had to keep cranking out all kinds of experiments. Not just everything they could think of, even things they couldn’t quite imagine. This, in particular, was crucial. They had already determined that dogs could live in space, but might their bodies have been damaged in some way invisible to the eye? For instance, were these dogs, having once rocketed into space, still capable of reproduction? Could their sojourn in weightlessness have stripped them of that ability? Or might the lack of gravity one day produce some irregularity in their genes as a side effect? The scientists, eager to test this possibility, gladly mated Belka and Strelka. In fact, they later did the same thing with their human cosmonauts. The first female cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova—who rode the Vostok 6 in June 1963, and whose call sign ya chaika, “I am a seagull,” became famous around the world—was pressured by the Kremlin elite into marrying Andrian Nikolayev, who had ridden on the Vostok 3 in August 1962. Data about the couple, including their experiences leading up to Tereshkova’s pregnancy and information relating to their daughter’s physical development, were gathered and closely guarded as a state secret. Of course, in a sense this made sense: at the time, the USSR treated any data related in any way to space exploration as top-secret information.
But that’s neither here nor there. We were talking about Khrushchev’s dream. His proposal. The two returnee space dogs, reborn into the world in August 1960—August of year 3 Anno Canis—devoted themselves to their procreative activities under the scientists’ round-the-clock watch, until at last they achieved their mission as the lab animals they now were. The bitch Strelka became pregnant by Belka and gave birth to a litter of six. For the next few weeks, the scientists monitored the six puppies’ every movement. Veterinarians and animal ecologists were called in. There seemed to be nothing at all unusual about the pups. The scholars presented their results: all six of the heroes’ children were in perfect health. They had entered their third month now and were growing like beanstalks. Ura! cried the scientists. We have approached a step nearer to launching a manned spacecraft! Khrushchev selected one of the six puppies, a bitch, and sent it as a gift to the leader of those bastards in the West. John F. Kennedy had been inaugurated as president of the United States in January 1961. Khrushchev had heard that the Kennedys were unusually fond of dogs, and so he sent the puppy with a card signed “From Khrushchev” to Kennedy’s daughter Caroline. This present, however, had nothing to do with Khrushchev’s dream. It bore no relationship to the political/military adventure he was fantasizing about. He was just rubbing it in. The young American president, leader of the capitalist bloc, oozed charm, and so Khrushchev had decided to send him a message, that was all. “Pretty cool, huh?” he was saying. “Here in the Soviet Union we’ve already bred a second generation of our space dogs! Not bad, eh? Yes sir, science and technology are pretty advanced here in the Communist bloc, if I do say so myself. Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking. We’re screwed, you’re thinking. How about it? Am I right, Kennedy, my boy?”
There went the first puppy.
There had been six, so now there were five. Five healthy Russian laika puppies. There they were. And Khrushchev had a dream. Or rather, he had a whim. He had created the space dogs, so now, he thought, he would create a platoon of dogs descended from those Soviet heroes! There was no telling when the Cold War might suddenly turn into a hot war. Proxy wars were brewing in the Third World even now. They could send this new platoon of dogs there, to the front lines. A meticulously trained, elite group led by the descendants of space dogs. Yes! Yes! Khrushchev groaned at the brilliance of his idea. What will happen if we succeed with these dogs? It will be the best possible propaganda within the Communist world, and with respect to the West it will have the combined effect of the first Sputnik flights—all that shock and shame balled up into one. And it will work! Just imagine! Mere animals, beasts, made special by the impossibly rare distinction of descent from the very dogs that expanded the USSR’s territory into outer space, kicking the shit out of dippy little capitalist soldiers! Wahahahahaha!
It started as a joke. But Khrushchev’s every word was a command. The enormous Soviet state had developed a rigid system of governance. Almost immediately, Khrushchev’s dream was funneled through bureaucratic channels, transformed into stern directives. Power in the USSR was apportioned, essentially, to three separate organs. The party, the military, and the Committee for State Security, aka the KGB. The task of realizing Khrushchev’s dream would fall to the third of these three pillars of the state. Because the KGB would be able to push the plan ahead most efficiently and with the greatest secrecy.
It wasn’t a joke anymore.
Among the largest military organizations within the KGB was the Border Guard. Though it wasn’t really part of the official Soviet military—it was not under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Defense—it was sizeable. Usually its forces numbered two hundred thousand; in its heyday it was expanded to include some three hundred fifty thousand. Its forces were highly trained and its units were provided with the latest small arms, firearms, rockets, tanks, armored vehicles, armed helicopters, and military transport aircraft. Naval units, of course, had their own ships. Members of the KGB, as well as their families, were all part of a privileged class in the USSR. This was a necessary consequence of the KGB’s status as an organization dedicated to preserving the peace by collecting intelligence about ordinary citizens. In addition, because the Border Guard’s operations included suppressing anti-Soviet guerrilla activities, and crushing antigovernment minority movements—meaning all such movements, since all minority movements were so regarded—was a regular part of this, Russian applicants were given preferential treatment in hiring. Pure Slavic Russians. Slavs. That was the nature of the Border Guard. It was a privileged military elite.
Each individual defensive platoon in the Border Guard had its own team of guard dogs. A posse of war dogs, in other words. In emergency situations, of course, they used all manner of small arms, firearms, and attack vehicles, but they also used dogs to close the border.
At this point in history, in the vast Soviet state, troops of dogs, who had been fighting all along on the front lines, were active in this context as well.
The stern directives made their way down the chain of command.
And at the end of the chain, where Khrushchev’s dream landed—stripped of its romance, reduced to an ordinary, utterly pragmatic order—was the handler.
He was a major in the Border Guard. A young commissioned officer, twenty-seven years old. Six months before the order was passed down, he had been assigned to head up the Committee for the Purchase and Rearing of Guard/War Dogs. Needless to say, he was a pureblooded Slav. Blond hair, white skin. Mild and yet somehow forbidding features. He had not, however, been born into a privileged class. He had made his way up in the world, but his father was a farmer. His parents worked on a kolkhoz. His blood was pure, but his Slavic lineage contained no trace of any aristocratic blood, no noble seed. He was a second son. After graduating with outstanding grades from a school that trained future military men, he applied to the KGB, eager to show his loyalty to the homeland in some more passionate way—actually, the KGB had first gotten in touch with him, though that was kept highly secret—and after two years spent on the European border as a candidate officer, he was assigned to a detachment that answered directly to the head office. Later, he successfully applied to a special forces training school. He spent a year and a half studying a curriculum centered on guerrilla warfare but which included various other topics, ranging from assassination and advanced firearm techniques to basic procedures for causing confusion behind enemy lines and their applications, methods of torture and how to resist them, medical techniques, the use of codes, and individual survival techniques. Many students found the regimen too demanding and dropped out. The last three months of training took place at a camp on the Arctic Ocean. There the students were housed three to a room—prior to this they had lived in a wide hall—and were encouraged to develop a sense of camaraderie. There were microphones buried in the walls, the floor, and the ceiling, and every conversation was recorded. Anyone who couldn’t keep himself perfectly in control at all times was given the boot. A man needed nerves of steel to survive. If your roommates said, “Man, this is hell, isn’t it?” you had to respond immediately, “Absolutely not.” If they kept pressuring you to agree, saying, “C’mon, you know it is. We’re all exhausted,” you had to tell them right off, “I will either graduate from here, or I will quit the military. One or the other.”
And the young officer did what he had to do.
A smile flickered across his face, faint but brutal. “The day I give up being a military man, I will start calling myself the Archbishop.”
“Why?” his roommates asked.
“Because the only reason I would ever quit is if it was all over anyway—if the glorious promise of the revolution was squandered. And if that day comes, I will call myself the Archbishop. You had better kill me then. Assassinate me.”
Under the Communist system, the Russian Orthodox Church was a symbol of conservative values. “Huh,” the fellow students laughed, “so you’ll take orders?” They laughed, but while they smiled, their expressions were stiff.
1958. After graduating first in his class from training school, he was assigned to the Chinese border. He was a captain now and led a defensive platoon. 1959. He created his own special forces unit and tried to control the conflicts breaking out in Central Asia—in Kazakhstan and eastern Kyrgyzstan, along the Sino-Soviet border. He revealed a talent for putting pressure on Islamic populations as well. 1960. He was promoted to become the head of the Committee for the Purchase and Rearing of Guard/War Dogs. He was a major now, twenty-six years and seven months old, and he took his position seriously. 1961. The directive was handed down. Yes, Comrade Khrushchev’s dream. Here, in this environment, in the eyes of the man responsible for carrying out the directive, the dream was reduced to a realistic strategy, political and military. The adventure lost its sparkle.
1962.
No. Year 5 Anno Canis. I’ve focused too long on the human perspective. Dogs, where are you now? You, Anubis, closest to the origin of the new era. Where are you?
You were getting close. At last.
Yes, Anubis. You still had your erections. You were an old dog now, on the cusp of your tenth year, but your spirit, your vigor, was undaunted. MY DESTINY AWAITS ME, you barked. All along, you kept your nose to the ground, following the scent. The odor of that glorious bitch whose blood, coursing through her veins, was wilder and more powerful than the rest. It was there, you felt it. Your nose led you on. And so, Anubis, you kept heading south. You had faith in the impulses stirring within you, and you continued south. Or perhaps that’s not quite right; it was less impulses in the plural than the lingering trace of a single impulse. Its echoes. That summer, you had felt something gazing down at you from the vastness of the sky. In year 3 Anno Canis. And you had understood. YES, you thought. I MUST PURSUE THAT GAZE.
Therein, you understood, lay the evolution of the canine tribe.
Woof! you barked.
I’LL SIRE THE STRONGEST BLOODLINE!
Your mind was made up; your penis was hard.
I WON’T DIE. MY SEED WON’T DIE. IT WILL LIVE…AND LIVE, FOREVER!
MY FUTURE WIFE! you barked.
Year 5 Anno Canis. At long last you arrived, your massive penis straight as a flagpole. Stirred by the sensation of that gaze from outer space, you had run to the very ends of the earth, and now here you were in the distant outliers of the Soviet Union. Here where the USSR hit up against South Siberia and Mongolia. You were in the west of the Tuvan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Grasslands and squat mountains as far as the eye could see. You emerged from a forest of white birches, and there you were.
The KGB Border Guard had set up its breeding grounds in these grasslands.
The facility, administered by the Committee for the Purchase and Rearing of Guard/War Dogs, was the largest anywhere in the USSR. It was outfitted with equipment for training inexperienced dogs before they were assigned to their units. During the past two years everything had been updated. Because there was a new man in charge. And because the five remaining children of those two dog heroes, Belka and Strelka, had been welcomed to the camp. They were no longer puppies. They were fully mature. Already they were creating the next generation. Getting pregnant, making others pregnant. The puppies were Russian laika, of course, but the facility head decided to mate them with different breeds. For the future—to create a corps of dogs loyal to the homeland. They would draw on these bloodlines, on the bloodlines of those five puppies’ parents, to establish a corps of the mightiest dogs on the planet. They had gathered magnificent males, magnificent bitches. These dogs contributed the use of their wombs, their sperm. A third generation of heroes was being brought into the world, litter after litter.
The space dogs’ grandchildren.
Woof! you barked.
I’VE ARRIVED! you announced.
Inside the breeding grounds, 213 dogs froze in their tracks. Dogs with standing ears raised their heads; dogs with floppy ears raised their tails. WHO HAS ARRIVED? they were saying. LISTEN TO HOW STRONG THAT VOICE IS! WHO IS IT WHO IS IT WHO IS IT? Each dog felt that the other dog, the one that barked, had been calling to her, or to him. YOU, YES YOU.
I’LL HAVE MY WAY WITH YOU! you barked.
I’LL MAKE YOU PREGNANT! you barked. You, Anubis, you barked.
TO LIVE!
And the dogs were afraid. Each time you barked in the breeding grounds, the dogs broke into a commotion. Some were struck with terror. Some suddenly went into heat. The bitches got wet between their legs, while the males leapt at their handlers’ legs and waists, at nearby poles, and simulated intercourse. People hurried this way and that, unsure what was happening. Woof! you barked again. And again: Woof! At last, you were almost there! But you weren’t yet inside. You were outside the fence. You stood three feet away. The fence was electrified. You had sensed that, of course. You were clever. You saw danger before it struck. You had made it this far, after all, from the Arctic Ocean. You had come, what’s more, by way of Alaska. And you had another strength too: you could read the workings of destiny before it became manifest.
So you waited.
For something…SOMETHING.
Barking all the while.
Barking. And it came.
Riding a horse.
A human.
“So you’re the one barking,” he said in Russian.
Woof! you answered.
“You want to go inside?” he asked. “Caught the scent of our bitches?”
Woof! you answered.
“You’re male?” he said, appraising you. “And I see you’re erect,” the young man who was in charge of the facility said, still atop his horse, impressed.
OF COURSE, you said.
The young man lowered his Kalashnikov automatic rifle, took aim.
But no gun was going to scare you off.
I’VE ARRIVED! you barked.
“You seem,” the young man continued in Russian, speaking entirely seriously even though you were a dog, somehow maintaining his dignity as a commissioned officer, “to be saying that you’re the dog, the breeder male, I’ve been waiting for. What confidence!”
I’VE ARRIVED! you barked.
“Is it true? Have you really come?”
IT’S TRUE! you barked.
“You’re built a bit like a wolf,” the young commissioned officer said. He had dismounted by now. You stood facing each other through the fence, which buzzed with electric current. “You’ve got wolf blood in you? Is that it? Did you know how close wolves are to German shepherds? You know about German shepherds? A breed created just sixty years ago, specifically to fight in war? They’re war dogs through and through. People wanted the perfect build for war, and they made it. That’s what a German shepherd is.”
Woof!
“Are you a natural…ideal?”
Woof! you answered.
“If you want a bitch, I’ll let you have one. She’s good. Young animal from a good line. But she’s not complete. She’s missing something. She’s not a soldier. You understand what I’m saying? I want a dog with a soldier’s pride. I’m waiting for puppies that have that. How about it? I’ll let you have her, see what happens. Shoot your sperm into her. I can see you’re special. I see that erection of yours. All right.”
The young commissioned officer had given you his permission.
It had happened.
“My passion brought you here. It’s true, I can see that. Take them. The second generation of heroes, and the third. If the puppies you sire are as good as I expect, I’ll name them as the true successors. The males will all be Belka, the bitches will be Strelka. That will be the mark of their legitimacy. The sign that I approved of them. The proof.”
Woof!
“Come!”
You understood that command. You leapt the fence. Jumped right over. Just like that. And you became a Soviet dog.