“Belka, why don’t you bark?”
Dogs, dogs, here you are.
You penetrated the military’s encirclement of the city. Strelka, Belka, the old lady, WO and WT, and a dozen dogs managed to escape. By the next morning, however, WO, WT, and their motorcycle were blown to smithereens. Orders were issued in cities throughout the Russian Far East that dogs were to be hunted down and killed, and as a consequence four thousand dogs died, including many unrelated to the rebellion. Three days after they fled, Strelka’s band was reduced to Strelka, who would disguise herself, depending on the situation, as a Chinese-Russian, a Korean-Russian, or a Mongolian-Russian; Belka, who disguised himself as an ordinary pet; and the old lady. It was easier this way; they had greater freedom of movement. Though they did have one bulky bit of luggage. They had the globe. The old lady had presented it to Strelka in an abandoned cabin, in a region midway between the taiga and the wetlands. Strelka accepted it, she pondered its meaning. She decided the old lady was asking her where they should go. She spun the globe.
They had to get out of Russia.
Out, off the Eurasian continent altogether.
For a moment she thought to point at Japan, but then she reconsidered. Like I’d f*cking go back there. She moved the tip of her finger up to Sakhalin, then up over the Sea of Okhotsk to the Kamchatka Peninsula. East. They’d keep heading east, off the continent, beyond. But not as far as North America—too f*cking worldly to go to a f*cking English-speaking country, she decided. She jabbed her finger down randomly to the east of the Kamchatka Peninsula.
On an archipelago sandwiched between the Bering Sea and the Pacific Ocean.
The old lady understood.
She got them on a train, which took them to the ocean. They crossed the ocean. The old man’s bank account hadn’t been frozen yet, so funds were not a problem. They flew in an eight-seat charter plane from Sakhalin to the Kamchatka Peninsula.
Three weeks later, they crossed to another island in the Pacific, though they still hadn’t left Russian territory. The crossing took twenty or thirty minutes on a fishing boat that set out from a small coastal village on the southeast edge of the peninsula. They got off the boat, went ashore. The island was unpopulated, but there were a few old wooden buildings. A factory that had all but rotted away. A seafood processing plant run by Japanese capital in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War; it had, apparently, produced canned crab and salmon and had been the base of the North Atlantic fishing industry. You stayed there, preparing, for three months.
You. Three of you. First: Strelka. You watched as the old lady did this and that, working toward the goal. You watched, trusting her. You obtained fake identities, fake pasts, and still you remained there, on the uninhabited island, biding your time. The old lady made trips to the village on the peninsula to buy food and eventually a boat. You and Belka went to the village a few times and learned that sled dogs were kept there, and that there were puppies, four or five months old. The old lady chose seven puppies, bought them.
Little by little, you were getting ready to set sail.
It would happen in secret.
And I ask you: Where will you go? And you answer: We’ll leave the world behind, we’ll go to Dog Heaven. Who are you? I ask. And you answer: I’m me, f*cking a*shole.
And then there’s you. The other you.
You stand on the beach on the island’s eastern shore, gazing out over the vastness of the ocean, beyond the fog. You hear the other dog talking to you, in Japanese. Asking you, “Belka, why don’t you bark?”
Soon you will cross the ocean together. And you will kill the twentieth century. You will build a heaven for dogs, only dogs, on that island within the fog, and from there you will declare war on the twenty-first century.