1957
Dogs, dogs, where are you now?
Mainland USA, 1957. Fate unites two lineages. On the one hand, the purebred Sumer; on the other, the mongrel Ice. Both were bitches, each having borne more than one litter.
Sumer was gorgeous. Her skull and muzzle were of equal length, et cetera, et cetera—she was the perfect embodiment of the purebred German shepherd standard. She hadn’t lost her looks, even now that she was getting old. There she was, in a cage, in a kennel, in the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois.
Ice was frightening. Her father had been a Hokkaido dog, her mother a Siberian husky, and one of her grandmothers was a Samoyed. She had a face like a fox’s with brilliant blue eyes, a sturdy bone structure, hair on her back that the wind whipped like a mane. She looked odd, even eerie, resembling the standard image of no breed. No one owned her. She roamed freely across a wide swath of Minnesota, bound by nothing. Until they came after her with rifles.
Sumer bore puppies who were contenders to the throne. Any number of them, blessed creatures with everything going for them, expected by dint of their distinguished lineage to dominate the dog shows. She was getting on in age, but the planned mating continued; she got pregnant and gave birth again and again and raised her pups until they were four or five months old. She was, in short, a mother.
Ice obeyed her instincts, mating with pet dogs in residential developments when she was in heat, absorbing into her own bloodline the strengths of dogs whose looks and personalities suited hers. The puppies she gave birth to were another step away from purity. Their looks were unclassifiable; they had a dangerous, untamed strength. Ice led her children, and she led those of the other dogs in her pack. Five dogs from the team that had once pulled a sled in Far North Alaska and their children. They were all “wild dogs” now, regarded with unease by the humans, and she was the top dog. The leader of the pack.
A beautiful German shepherd who was, above all, a mother.
A freakish mongrel who was a mother, yes, but also a queen.
Queen of the freaks, of the monsters.
Ice, Ice—they came after you with rifles. The townspeople despised you. They hated you, and they hated your pack. Human society could not countenance your existence. You were evil. Monsters stalking the towns. Dogs unleashed were beasts, natural that they be destroyed. But you were not destroyed. You were too clever. Sometimes you retreated into the mountains, sometimes you set upon the towns. You never rested for long. Because to do so was dangerous. Because you felt how dangerous it could be. Though you had no knowledge of this—of course you didn’t—the blood that coursed through your father’s veins was the blood of a victor. You were descended from a long line of Hokkaido dogs who kept to this side of the line. Survivors. For thousands of years, the Ainu, the natives of Hokkaido, had used your ancestors to hunt large game. Your ancestors were the hunters. Hokkaido dogs who fought with bears and lived. These were your ancestors. Hokkaido dogs who brought down mighty deer. These were your ancestors. Every one of them survived the process of unnatural selection that hunting became. They had made it, they abided on this side of the line. And so you understood. You understood what it was to be on the side of the hunters, and you made sense of it all. You could almost tell what people were going to do before they did it. There was no way they would ever eliminate you.
Every bullet the rifles fired was another wasted bullet.
IDIOTS, you said. And you told the pack you led, WE WILL NOT BE CAUGHT.
WE WILL KEEP RUNNING.
Yes, you kept running. You “wild dogs” ran and ran, dashed ahead the way you had in Far North Alaska, over the land, over the fields of snow, over the ice floes. Minneapolis was far behind you now. You roamed through Minnesota, but you did not go north. The situation—their attempts to eradicate you, and your evasions—led you in an altogether different direction. You headed south. Yes, south. Do you grasp what that means? You, Ice, and you, former sled dogs, members of Ice’s pack, you were banished from the land of your birth, sent far, far to the south, and now, of necessity, you moved further south.
Do you understand what that means? It means this: destiny.
The pack had swelled to a few dozen. A pack of monsters, “wild dogs,” growing ever more mongrelized, following the dictates of Ice’s wisdom, her instinct, obeying the queen as they ran up and down, hither and yon, across a region that spanned four states, southern Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois.
You galloped.
You lived. You ran like lightning. You weren’t going to die.
But in America, in 1957, the gun barrels were always there, tracking you.
Ice ran. Sumer did not. Sumer busied herself caring for her children in a clean and spacious cage that had been specially made for her. She moved lethargically, offering her pups her teats. She helped her newborns eliminate their waste. She was dignified, relaxed. She had the majesty of an earth goddess, the confident glow that was the sign of her productivity, her fertility. And this was the perfect environment for raising her pups, it was kept utterly clean, uncontaminated, and every last one of her children was pure as well. Perfect German shepherds, every one.
In the world Sumer inhabited, of course, mongrels were abhorred.
There was no reason, in its value system, for a mongrel to be born.
You, Sumer, do not run. You are waited upon. The owner of the kennel you live in—its owner as well as yours—lavishes attention upon you because you are the mother of her future champions. She places enormous value in your existence. You are cared for. You care for your children, and the woman who ought to be your master but is instead your breeder and handler, she cares for you.
Because you give birth to a beautiful elite.
Because you give birth to dogs of the highest quality, a second generation that is gorgeous above all else, possessed from birth of the qualities necessary to meet even the most stringent dog show standards and to remain unfazed by the judges’ stern, appraising gazes.
The puppies milled around your teats.
And then, when they had drunk their fill, they frolicked and tangled in the shadow of your protective aura.
Until 1957, when at last fate began playing its tricks with you.
What happened? Your master did something she shouldn’t have. Your master and the master of your fellow dogs, and of your children, the owner of your spotlessly clean kennel, she did something unclean, morally contaminated. Her patience had finally reached its limit. She wasn’t taking the trophy. She had been breeding all these dogs with the sole aim of winning the highest title, and here she was, her aspirations still unfulfilled. Her dogs always took second, not first, place. Yes, they had won repeatedly in group judging, totally overwhelming the other dogs. But none had ever been Best in Show. Not one had managed to ascend to the pinnacle, to become the Number One Doggie in the United States. Your master had once been described as “the queen of the postwar American dog show universe” for her utterly masterful handling, her ability to become one with her dogs. But she didn’t have the crown. She was a celebrity who appeared regularly in dog magazines. But without the crown. Each time she became the focus of attention as “a young—and beautiful!—woman handler,” her self-esteem soared; each time the Best in Show ribbon slipped from her grasp, she was more spectacularly wounded. And now, to make matters worse, she was losing her youth. And so your master tried to bribe the judges. It didn’t work. Well then, what if she spread her legs for one of the bigwigs who ran the show? She tried, but she wasn’t young enough; the association chairman couldn’t get it up. I’m way too old, she thought. I’m running out of time. And once she had convinced herself of this, she got so overwrought that she began to lose it. Take your age, Sumer, for instance. Before long you would be too old to give birth, past the age when so-called “late pregnancy” was possible, and all of a sudden that came to seem, in her mind, like some sort of sign—a revelation. It was now or never. And so your master tried a third trick: she went into the paddock and slipped poison to all the other candidates for Best in Show—a Doberman pinscher, a cocker spaniel, a Scottish terrier, a boxer, an Afghan hound, a toy poodle—and then, just to be absolutely sure that everything was all right, put poison in their owners’ lunches too. Four dogs died and two of the owners were hospitalized. Her transgression was discovered with almost hilarious ease, and she was immediately found guilty and shipped off to prison.
Now, Sumer, there was no one to maintain your kennel.
The woman who cared for you had been banished from society.
It was late summer 1957.
And what had Ice been doing that summer? What had become of our mongrel Queen of the Monsters, leader of a pack that roamed back and forth across the borders of four states?
She had puppies. She had given birth again. She was an active mother, suckling her young. How many times had you given birth, Ice? You had no idea. You never counted. Only idiots bother to count each little digit like that, crooking the five fingers on their two hands. Counting is a cross borne by the people of civilized communities, saddled with their decimals. You, Ice, had feet, not hands, and pads on your toes, because your feet were meant for running. They were the engines of your speed. You, Ice—you do not count. You don’t skitter from number to number, you live by instinct. You heed your blood…you are swayed by the intuitions you inherited from a line of victors.
It was, probably, your fourth birth, though you didn’t know that.
And so, Ice, as summer drew to a close, you and your pack ceased your roving.
You were in your nest. You hated summer. The blood coursing through your veins derived, every drop, from northern breeds. Summer was your enemy. Truth be told, the south itself was your enemy. But it was your destiny to move southward, and destiny is not something you can shake. Your mane, which had evolved to help you endure the bitter cold, was no more now than a soft brush. Each time you birthed a litter, you caressed the puppies with your mane. It was a sign of your motherly love. You and your pack stayed close to the nest. Seven pups were born over seven hours in that gray area at the end of August and the beginning of September, before and after midnight on August 31—you could say the puppies had been born in one month or the other, depending on the time zone—and for the next week you didn’t have a free moment. Another week went by and still you had no time to yourself, but you could at least begin teaching your pups to walk. And other things too. THIS WORLD IS HOT, you told them. IT’S BRUTALLY HOT, AND SO YOU’LL HAVE TO LEARN TO ADAPT AS YOU LIVE YOUR LIVES. This was your command to them: Mongrelize. This was the sacred law of mongrelization: Mix. Be contaminated. Refute the notion of the standard.
Because people are the ones who tried to keep dogs pure.
You and your pack ceased your roving, Ice, if only for a time, and that was very dangerous indeed. True, you had given birth several times before, but this was not then, this was America in 1957. You were public enemies. You, Ice, were Public Enemy Number One. You assumed it would be safe to stay put for two or three weeks, that it would be enough, but you were wrong. You miscalculated. You didn’t even calculate. Because you didn’t count.
People were idiots, yes, with five fingers on their two hands. But they did more with those fingers than count to ten. They also gripped their guns and pulled the triggers.
What happened?
You were surrounded. You and your pack were no longer roving freely. Your territory, and your hunting, began to center on a single point. A single point on the broad map of America. A place one could have pointed to on the mainland—there. A place with clearly identifiable coordinates. You were beasts, it was fitting that you be eliminated, and now at last they had tracked you down. Little by little, they closed in on you. They had you by your tail. These idiots, with their ten fingers…these humans, Ice, had the highest respect for your intelligence. The amateur hunters had all given up. Now only professionals were left on the side of the hunters, and they were hunting you.
National Guard.
Past developments, years of repeated failure, had led to their dispatch.
It was 1957 in America. The governor gave the local members of the National Guard the go-ahead, and they took up their guns—their military guns. Gripped them with their ten fingers. The National Guard was a reserve corps, of course, but they were professionals. Equipped as professionals, with the authority of professionals.
You were fine, Ice, you and the pack of “wild dogs” you led, as long as you could run. You were safe, you didn’t die. But now you didn’t run. You couldn’t run. And so it happened. One of the squads at the western edge of Wisconsin closed the border and came in pursuit. They used every trick in the book. You could hardly move. You were stuck in the nest with your puppies, not yet three weeks old, and so you couldn’t rely on your intuition to anticipate what was coming, to lead the other dogs. You couldn’t run at the head of the pack. No longer could you assure them, WE WILL NOT BE CAUGHT. No longer could you say, WE WILL KEEP RUNNING.
And so it happened.
Panicked, terrorized, the pack dispersed.
Ice was still a mother then. Not the queen, not the leader of her pack; she was the mother of seven little pups. What’s happening? Ice responds sluggishly. The other dogs are fast, fleeing. Their speed attracts attention. The leaderless pack, dissolving, yet incapable of dissolving fully, winding up somehow in town, in groups of three and two and four. They are discovered, they are shot. The call goes out and they are shot. The dogs are shot, and so quickly too, in no time at all—the guard have accomplished their mission! And so Ice and her children, a bitch and seven pups, are left alive.
They survived until the very end.
They left the nest. Of course. WALK, she told them. WE WILL ESCAPE, STEP BY STEP. WE WILL SURVIVE. The mother and her children stumbled forward. Ice was growling softly. Rrrrrrrr. Searching for a path that would save them from extermination, a path to deliverance.
Searching.
They came to the state highway. They could hide their scents by crossing here. Hide their tracks. WAIT HERE A MOMENT, Ice told her children. I’LL INVESTIGATE, YOU WAIT HERE. With that, she darted out onto the highway. She was crossing. There was nothing at all difficult about this. She had crossed any number of these nameless rivers, “human roads.” A moment later, she had crossed to the middle. This river was heavily trafficked, yes, but not so much that it could not be forded. And then…Ice stopped. There in the middle of the river, she paused, turned, looked back. Stood still, looking back. One of her pups had barked. Yelped for its mother. It was about to run out into the road. NO! STAY THERE! YOU MUSTN’T FOLLOW! Ice commanded. She watched until the puppy had retreated. And then—
She was hit.
A pickup truck traveling at seventy-five miles per hour threw her nine feet into the air.
She hit the ground. She died instantly. Countless cars ran over her, and in fifteen minutes she was flat. Cars, cars, cars. Ice, of course, would never have even tried to count them.
And so, Ice, you are dead. Utterly and completely dead.
You are dead, and Sumer is still alive.
Sumer: the other mother. The earth goddess, whose whole life was centered on the shows, who lived in her clean cage and gave birth to one litter after the next, spawning a beautiful elite. Except that no one looked after her cage anymore. The woman who had cared for her had been locked up herself now, in a much bigger cage. So your kennel was no longer maintained. Not that it had been completely abandoned. True, the first two days after the arrest, no one had fed the dogs, but then the authorities noticed. Something had to be done.
The situation was taken care of within a single day.
The kennel was auctioned off. The dogs too. Most of the dogs found new homes right away. They had belonged to the queen (now deposed) of the American dog show universe, after all, and their breeding was impeccable. Over a dozen bids were placed for some of the newborn pups in Sumer’s newest litter. There was much maneuvering. Sumer’s former owner had plotted to take down her rivals; now the other dog-show regulars were eager to take what they could from her. The owner was a celebrity—a queen, even if she had lost her throne.
The dogs fetched prices incomprehensible to anyone outside the dog-show loop.
It happened very quickly. Less than twenty-four hours after the authorities decided to hold the auction, almost all the problems had been solved. An agent had taken control. On the face of it, the dogs seemed to have been sold off in a manner that was completely fair; in reality all sorts of secret, backroom deals were struck. The agent made a tidy profit. Not only the dogs, but all the equipment, too, was disposed of. The kennel was dismantled.
And you, Sumer, where are you?
No answer, not a bark. Why not? Because you were dazed. Because you had been separated. From your children, your kin. They had still been suckling, but they were taken from you, your pups, every one. Gone. Snatched from your protection, from the range of your loving gaze. And what about you? What happened to you? No one wanted you. Not one of your children’s buyers wanted you. Zero, zip. They had their eyes on the future champions, not on the aging bitch who seemed unlikely to bear any more children. You were still very beautiful, Sumer, but you were too old to be entered in dog shows. So you had no value in that world, and everyone who saw you reached the same conclusion: you weren’t worth the trouble and expense. Your old master might not have been so quick to give up. But she was locked up, and the authorities no longer recognized her as your master.
Where are you?
Late summer 1957. The agent had to get rid of you somehow. A few other dogs remained unsold. But he told the authorities he had sold you. To avoid complications. He would have to dispose of you. You and the others. He would kill you.
He herded you all into a trailer.
To take you to another state and kill you. Secretly.
All around you, the other dogs were trembling. They sensed what was happening. But you were still dazed. You had frozen. You were by the window, Sumer. The agent had tied you all up in one corner so that you wouldn’t soil the floor. He had put down a rubber mat. The trailer lurched. Pulled by the car in front of it. You were moving.
Toward death.
And then it happened.
You were on the highway. You had crossed from Illinois into Wisconsin. It was 1957. Late summer, verging on early autumn. You were dazed, staring out the window with empty eyes. You didn’t notice when the trailer’s wheels rolled over the body of an animal. The body of a dog on the road, run over, flattened. And then, suddenly—you are seeing something. You are gripped by what you see, this scene. Puppies, abandoned on the roadside. Seven puppies, huddled together, shivering. WE’RE WAITING. WE’RE WAITING, JUST LIKE YOU TOLD US TO. WE’RE STILL WAITING, they seem to be saying. And you hear them. You recognize this scene. Something seizes you, moves you. Seven hungry puppies, waiting for their mother’s ghost.
It speaks to you. Go, it says. Wake up.
Suddenly, you understand. Those puppies have lost their mother. And so—
At last, Sumer, your blood stirred within you. You were never just a pretty dog. Your father was Bad News: one of the greatest war dogs ever to fight in the Second World War, one of the few who returned unscathed from the battlegrounds of the Pacific. Explosion was your grandmother, and Masao was your grandfather. Two war dogs, one American, one Japanese, who had survived those timeless days at the westernmost tip of the Aleutians. Slumbering deep within you was the power to attack. Sleeping within you. And now it had awoken. Your teeth were meant to chew through ropes tying you down. Your muscular legs were built to hurl you against the wall of this trailer, shaking it, tilting it. Your agitation roused the other dogs, tied up around you, destined for death—it was infectious, and one after the next they rose, joined in your rebellion. Still tied up, they flung themselves against the walls, over and over. The trailer skidded, rocked. The dogs were barking. The trailer’s driver noticed, hit the brakes, and the agent got out of the cab, opened the door, and stuck his head in. And then, Sumer, you leapt. You attacked. GET BACK, you said. GET OUT OF MY WAY. DON’T INTERFERE. I’LL KILL YOU.
Yes, Sumer, you were awake. You left the agent badly wounded, and you ran. You fled.
Yes, Sumer, you made a break for it.
You were running.
At last, seven puppies waiting by the roadside found their phantom mother.
She didn’t look at all like Ice, but she had come to protect them, and they gathered around her, keening.
Their mother had come.
With her full teats, milk enough for seven. With her love.
Sumer: earth goddess and, her father’s blood awakened within her, destroyer.
The seven pups raised their heads, gazing up at you. And you told them.
GO ON, you said. SUCK. DRINK MY MILK. GATHER AT MY TEATS.
You suckled them, Sumer.
Starting that very night, you were on the run. You were a mother again, and they were your children. You crossed the highway, all but empty now that night had come. Crossed to the far side, forded that river. And so Ice’s final wishes were carried out. Beyond all expectation, a second mother realized the intentions of the first. You made an odd group, of course. The mother, a German shepherd enlisted in the pursuit of pureblooded beauty; her children, seven puppies who looked nothing alike, offspring of a belief in monstrosity and the power of mongrelization. One puppy had the smile of a Samoyed; another had a mane the color of sesame seeds; another had the face of a Labrador retriever, the chest of a Siberian husky, and the high shoulder joints and thick curl of the tail of a Hokkaido dog.
When you joined them, you united two different worlds with different values.
Your mutual love obliterated every meaning that had been invested in you.
The destinies of two bloodlines crossed, and you were a family.
You lived as a family in a “nest” that Sumer found. In a railroad switchyard, at the edge of the classification yard, where the freight trains stood as though abandoned. Almost no one came here behind the arrival tracks. Sumer settled on a boxcar. She led the children in through the cracked-open door. HIDE HERE IN THE DARKNESS, GET USED TO THE DARKNESS, she told them. THIS IS OUR NEST. She knew they would be well protected in this place. And she was right: it was as sturdy as a fortress. Steel walls surrounded them, raised off the ground. It wasn’t very clean, but it reminded Sumer of her cage at the kennel. This was a good place to raise her children. Her old cage had been brightly lit; here there was only darkness. That was fine. Sumer cared for the puppies. For her own mongrel puppies. No one cared for Sumer now. She hunted for food. For the whole family. The puppies were ready to be weaned. Late at night, Sumer poked through garbage around the station. In the late 1950s, people loved the wholesomeness of their American lifestyle, their way was the best, and food left over was emerging as a symbol of their victory, a validation of capitalism. Frozen vegetables had come to seem natural; they were always available, there was always more. This culture of excess was what allowed Sumer to care for her family, her nest. Sumer didn’t look like a “wild dog,” and she didn’t rove in a pack, so humans didn’t pursue her. She lived quietly. She kept going, quietly. The puppies kept growing. In the nest in the boxcar, they frolicked and tangled in the shadow of Sumer’s protective aura.
Sumer, destiny’s toy, you were the mother of seven puppies.
For a month.
But destiny wasn’t finished with you.
This was 1957. A year that will remain etched in dog history.
One day, you returned from an excursion in search of food to find the door to the boxcar pushed wide open. A man sat on the ledge, his feet dangling in pointy-toed cowboy boots, smoking a cigarette and reading a book. He had a mustache and wore an oddly shaped hat. He was obviously a drifter, probably in his mid-thirties. Not that you, Sumer, had any notion of his age. The thing that got your attention, stunned you, was your children, who were clustered around him. Frisking, frolicking, around him. The man looked up. He stared at you, cocked his head.
What’re you doing here? he asked, speaking your thoughts. You’re a shepherd. You can’t be related to these kids.
YES, I AM, you barked. Was it best to threaten him? The puppies were within reach, and he didn’t seem to have harmed them. And that smell—the foul odor of his cigarettes. That same smell clung to the walls of your nest. Your sensitive nose noticed that instantly.
The puppies saw you and started barking: MOM, MOM, MOM!
You’re kidding me, the man said. You’re their mother? He grinned.
THEY’RE MY CHILDREN, you barked.
Looks that way, the man said, answering his own question with a nod. All right, then. C’mon over. I got food.
THEY’RE MY CHILDREN, you barked.
Listen here, dog, the man said clearly, shutting his book and looking you straight in the eye. This is my train.
On October 22, 1957, the boxcar you had chosen as your nest was coupled to an electric engine and became a link in a very, very, very long chain. You were inside. Your children were with you: they were still too young to make it on their own, of course, and since they were less than two months old it would have been dangerous to try and leave the nest. The man adored them, he loved their mixed-up mongrel appearance, and he treated you with respect. He saw you for what you were: the elegance of your comportment, your physical beauty as a purebred, a perfect German shepherd, and at the same time, the terrible violence your beauty concealed, the instincts that ran, invisible, in your blood. The man fed you. He made all eight of you, the whole family, his pets.
He said you would make a good guard dog.
You didn’t yet understand what that meant. But you acknowledged him, just as he did you. And so you became his pet. You felt no hesitation about being a pet. It was only natural: your nest belonged to him.
You slid along the iron rails. Traversed the continent without ever leaving home.
Heading south.
The man who claimed ownership of the train belonged to the transport underworld: he ran a smuggling operation, bribing conductors and overseeing a vast network of migrant laborers. He shipped goods brought in from across the continent south of the border. The operation was much larger than he could have managed on his own. He had a sponsor: a prominent Mexican-American who lived in Texas. His family had been living on the same land since before the Mexican-American War; they were Catholics, and they ran an orchard of orange and lemon trees, the product of sophisticated irrigation techniques. The orchard was harvested by gringo laborers the man in the train provided, and by illegal workers brought up over the border from Mexico. Since at the time United States law didn’t prohibit the employment of illegal immigrants, the Texan had no need to conceal what he was doing, hiring men and women who would have been his compatriots in the last century—until the 1840s, at any rate. The illegality lay, not in employing the immigrants, but in “shipping” them into the country in the first place, and this task was left to the man in the train. That was how he had developed his underworld transport network.
The man hadn’t been lying: the train was his. Usually, it carried products destined to be sold. Sometimes it carried people. Even now, the other cars in the train were full. Only this boxcar was different: there was nothing here but a family of dogs, lying in the corner.
On October 26, the nest stopped moving. The man, Sumer, and the puppies were close to the border now. Listen here, the man said to Sumer. I’m going to see you live a good life, okay? You’re not like other dogs, you’re smart—I can see that. So here’s what I’m going to do. You listening? I’m going to give you to the Don and you’ll be his guard dog, watch his orchard. The puppies too, of course. You’ll do a good job, right? You can do it? You do that, and he’ll be grateful to me, see, and that’ll be your repayment. You can do that, right?
You won’t let me down, will you?
When the man, Sumer, and the seven puppies descended from the nest at the station, the Don’s men were waiting, rifles in their hands. And after that, Sumer, you took your children and went to work at the orchard. You understood what was being asked of you. You spent a day on the orchard, a second day, a third day, and gradually you got used to it. A fourth day, a fifth day, a sixth day. Your children were growing. They were doing fine. All seven survived to the end of their second month.
November. November 1957.
Horses whinnied. Frogs croaked. Roosters crowed in the mornings. A dozen ducks swam in the pond in the mansion’s courtyard. There were times when the orchard misted over, and you were struck by its beauty. Your children too, with the high concentration of northern blood in their veins, loved these moments. THE MIST IS GOOD, they thought. COOL AND GOOD.
The beauty of an orchard in November.
In 1957—a year that would go down in the history of a race of dogs that first came into being here, on this earth, more than ten thousand years ago.
It was night. There was a television in the Don’s mansion, and the whole family was inside staring at its screen. They were in the living room, gasping in wonder. In awe, in disbelief. The servants were in the garden, gazing up at the sky. Their expressions focused, intent, as if they were hoping, somewhere up there, to find the truth. Is that it? No, no. How about that, over there? Hey, we’re not looking for a falling star, okay?
And you, Sumer, and your children—you felt it.
A kind of buzzing in your hearts that made you lift your heads to the clear, starry sky.
A man-made satellite flew overhead. It took about 103 minutes for it to orbit the earth. The previous month, the Soviet Union had beaten America in the Space Race. The Soviet Union, having poured astonishing amounts of money into the program, had succeeded in launching into orbit the very first man-made satellite: Sputnik 1. Now, less than a month later, in an effort to demonstrate the overwhelming superiority of Communism to the entire world, it had done something even more extraordinary. Sputnik 2 had been outfitted with an airtight chamber, and a living creature had been loaded inside. The first Earthling to experience space flight. The creature was not human. It was a dog. A bitch.
The airtight chamber had a window.
The bitch looked down at the earth.
She was a Russian laika. In the initial reports of her flight, conflicting information was given regarding her name. She was said to be named Damka, Limonchik, and Kudryavka, but within a few days Laika had stuck. She was Laika, the laika. Laika the space dog. One of the USSR’s top-secret national projects. A dog.
She orbited the globe, alive.
Gazing out, down, in zero gravity.
You felt her gaze.
You, Sumer, and your children: you felt it. And so, there on the Mexican-American border, you raised your heads to look up at the sky. You and several thousand others. On November 3, 1957, all at once, 3,733 descendants of a Hokkaido dog named Kita and 2,928 descendants of a German shepherd named Bad News, scattered across the surface of the globe, unaware of the lines that separated communist and capitalist spheres, all those dogs raised their heads to peer into the vastness of the sky.