1950–1956
Dogs, dogs, where are you now?
There were seventeen on the Korean Peninsula. They had landed together in September 1950. American dogs, sent in as reinforcements with the UN “security operations,” members of an elite corps eager to achieve distinction on the battlefield. They were Bad News’s children, siblings by different mothers. Some bore names that marked their paternal lineage, some did not. There was Big News and Hard News. Hot News and Gospel. One named Speculation. Another named Listener. Jubilee, Argonaut, Gehenna. One had “E Venture” written on his collar, with a circle around the E, but was on the books as News News. The other seven were Natural Killer, Fear, Atmosphere, Ogre, Bonaparte, Raisin, and finally News News News. The last went by the nickname Mentallo, also written on his collar.
Obviously the peninsula needed help maintaining security. From the American perspective, that is. And so, without any declaration of war, a war began. On June 25, 1950, the army of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, aka North Korea, rolled into the peninsula’s southern half in Soviet tanks, launching an invasion of the Republic of Korea, aka South Korea, whose goal was to “reunify the homeland” forcibly and to spread communism throughout the peninsula.
Back in 1945, the Korean Peninsula had supposedly been liberated from Japan, which had ruled it since 1910. But the country split in two. No, that’s not right—it didn’t split, it had been split. Divided into two separate states along a temporary buffer at the 38th parallel north. The American military was stationed in the south; Soviet forces occupied the north, where they were working toward the establishment of a communist system. And so, through a mindlessly geometric process, the peninsula was divvied up between America and the USSR. The Republic of Korea came into being first, in 1948, with the proclamation of a liberalistic government in the south, and the US and other capitalist countries promptly recognized it as a legitimate state. Less than a month later, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was established as a communist regime in the north, and it was soon recognized as an independent state by various communist countries, with the USSR at the lead. And within two years, the war to liberate the homeland broke out.
The dogs entered the picture right before UN forces retook Seoul. Most of the UN forces were American, and their commander-in-chief was Douglas MacArthur, the same man who, as the supreme commander of the Allied Forces, had headed GHQ in Japan. The dogs came under MacArthur’s command as part of what was known as Operation Chromite, in the Battle of Inchon.
The surprise attack was a success. Seoul was returned to Korea, whose capital it became. But things didn’t end there. The Americans got greedy. All of a sudden, they changed their strategy, decided that now they were going to pursue the military reunification of the peninsula—the same “reunification of the homeland” that the north had wanted, only under a liberalistic government. UN forces crossed the 38th parallel, invading North Korea, and immediately took Pyongyang, its capital. Indeed, they kept going north, rapidly approaching the border with China.
But here they made a miscalculation. In October 1950, the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army joined the fight in support of North Korea with 180,000 troops. Their slogan was Kang Mei Yuan Chao: “Resist the US, Aid Korea!”
The People’s Republic of China, popularly known as China, had come into being just one year earlier. It hadn’t simply sprouted up overnight in the wake of Japan’s defeat in 1945. The nationalist Kuomintang and the Communist Party, led by Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong respectively, had fought together during the Second Sino-Japanese War, but the moment they achieved their goal the alliance collapsed. In July 1946, after a year of sporadic fighting during which each side struggled frantically to secure the support of the Americans and the Russians, they plunged into an all-out civil war. In three years, three million people died. Early on, America lent its full support to the Kuomintang, and yet its army still found itself losing. Then, in 1949, the Nationalists finally retreated to Taiwan. Taiwan, by the way, had been a Japanese colony from 1895 until 1943, when the United Kingdom, the United States, and China decided at the so-called Cairo Conference that it would be returned to China. Chiang Kai-shek had participated in the Cairo Conference as China’s representative.
In October 1949, Mao Zedong announced the birth of the People’s Republic of China.
The communist countries immediately recognized it as a state.
America declined to have diplomatic relations with China. Instead, it continued to recognize the Kuomintang government Chiang Kai-shek had reestablished in Taiwan.
In February 1950, Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin signed the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance.
Four months later, the Korean War broke out. Another four months and China joined the fray. Five years after the conclusion of World War II, along the western edge of the Pacific Ocean, the tug-of-war continued. And everything that was happening had its roots in a single dynamic: the tension between the US and the USSR. Harry S. Truman, who was in favor of combating the communist menace with force, was president at the time. Truman detested Stalin. Stalin detested Truman. Who knows, perhaps ultimately the intense personal dislike these two men had for each other was wreaking havoc with…
The Pacific Ocean.
History.
And the dogs.
Yes, even the dogs.
Seventeen dogs with no sense of how they were being used. Their fates might intersect in the most mysterious ways, there on the Korean Peninsula, on the site of a proxy war between East and West, part of the broader Cold War, but they would never know. It was the season for war. The twentieth century, a century of war dogs. The dogs were played with, toyed with, exploited. As the fighting intensified, dragged on, devolved into a quagmire, UN forces began procuring dogs from closer by. In January 1952, America’s Far East Air Force purchased its first dogs from Japan: sixty German shepherds. They had been selected from a group of more than two hundred dogs brought to Ueno Park from throughout the Kantō region. More than a third had passed the first battery of inspections and tests, which included height and overall physical condition, the ability to remain calm in the presence of close-range gunfire, the willingness to attack people clad in protective gear, and the absence of filariasis. Both the commissioned officer in charge of the Far East Air Force’s dogs and the veterinarian were surprised that so many animals passed the test, but given their ancestry it shouldn’t have been a surprise. These were the descendants of war dogs that had not only lived during but also through the Fifteen Years’ War, which included both the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War. And, of course, they were purebred German shepherds. Purebred Japanese German shepherds.
There were no dogs left in Tokyo in the immediate wake of the defeat. There were no dogs in Osaka either. Or in Hakata, Nagoya, Kanazawa—zero. In the two years leading up to the surrender, dogs had disappeared from Japan’s cities. There was nothing to feed them. With the food situation as dire as it was for humans, fretting over dogs was out of the picture. War dogs were the only exception—they had rations. But they were destined for the battlefield. And then, toward the end of the war, citizens were ordered to turn in their dogs. These weren’t war dogs, just ordinary pets. They weren’t deployed as reinforcements. They were procured as military supplies. They were valued, now, for their fur. Dogs from all across Japan were offered up for the Japanese military to kill and skin. Between ten and twenty percent of Japan’s civilian dogs survived. These lucky dogs lived in rural areas where their owners could feed them.
As for the war dogs, only those strong enough, fierce enough, lucky enough to escape death on the battlefield, not just once but time after time, survived.
By and large, the dogs that gathered in Ueno Park in January 1952 were descended from the second of these two groups.
Something rather amazing happened as a result. American dogs ended up fighting on the front lines and living in the camps with these formerly Japanese dogs, newly incorporated into the UN forces. And among the Japanese dogs were some that, if you traced their lineage, had as their great-great-grandfather the same German shepherd who had sired Katsu. Katsu, the dog that had served in the army garrison manning the Kiska/Narukami antiaircraft battery. The same German shepherd that had kept his distance from the three other dogs left behind on the island, that had ultimately sacrificed himself in a banzai attack, leading the American soldiers into a minefield. And that wasn’t all. There were, in addition, a few dogs descended on their mother’s side from Masao. Yes, that same Masao—Bad News’s father, the grandfather of those seventeen dogs sent into South Korea. But so what? Brought together in this unexpected place by the purest of coincidences, the dogs themselves remained oblivious.
The dogs’ owners kept breed registries, but the dogs didn’t. They knew nothing about their pedigrees, their history.
The very uneventfulness of the dogs’ reunion marked their subjection to their destiny.
To the tense dynamic playing out between the US and the Soviet Union. Or, perhaps, to Truman’s and Stalin’s intense personal hatred of each other.
The hand of fate played in its fickle way with Bad News’s children elsewhere too, not only on the Korean Peninsula.
In autumn 1951, in the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois, a female dog started giving birth to puppies that would have a shot at the top. Her name was Sumer, and she was a sister by the same mother of Gospel and Jubilee, then fighting on the Korean Peninsula. Sumer had never been sent to the front. She wasn’t an elite dog—in fact, she wasn’t even a war dog. She was tested when she was six months old, and she had failed. Naturally each puppy in a litter has its own character and abilities, even though it and its siblings are born of the same seed. By the close of 1949, Bad News had fathered some 277 puppies; of that total no more than 150 were judged appropriate for military use—though among those who were, a good half proved to be extraordinarily capable on the battlefield. Most of the pups that were rejected—on the grounds that they were too friendly, say, or too excitable—were given away for free to ordinary households, or sometimes sold for a small sum. And there were buyers. These were purebred German shepherds, after all. They might not have been suited for war, but they were certified purebreds. And they were pups, and they were adorable.
So that’s how it was. The puppies scattered. They left the training center kennels behind and went out into the great wide world to live their lives as ordinary pets.
Sumer, however, ended up in another large kennel like the one she had left. Caged.
Her owner was a young woman who maintained the kennel at her own expense. She was a breeder, though more often she referred to herself as a handler. She brought her dogs to shows, walked them around the ring. Held their leashes, handled them. The “shows” were, of course, dog shows. She was a regular at venues all across the United States, an up-and-coming breeder whose dogs took, and continued to take, prize after prize.
She had first become interested in the puppies that didn’t make the grade as war dogs—second-generation rejects, so to speak—two years earlier, and by now she had acquired twenty-four by this route. She treasured them. These rejects might not have had what it took to succeed as war dogs, but they came from an extremely attractive lineage; they might have been tossed out as failures in the world of military breeding, but they were ideally suited to dog shows that were focused, above all, on bodily form. When the military breeders branded these dogs as “standard but useless,” they were in fact certifying that they possessed the fine external appearance that was most valued in the dog shows, and that was, more than anything, what it took to make a dog a king.
Unmistakably pure, perfectly proportioned.
Unadulterated formal beauty.
Of the twenty-four puppies the woman acquired, half were Bad News’s children. Sumer was by far the most beautiful. She was hopeless as a war dog, true, but she was outstanding as a plaything, a pet. Such a gorgeous coat, the handler murmured. Just look at how perfect her bite is. At the same time, the handler had also spotted her weaknesses. She had been doing this ever since she graduated from high school, an up-and-coming breeder, a twenty-five-year-old pro. She entered Sumer in several local shows, to see how she would do, but the best she ever placed was third in her group. No surprise there, the handler thought. She needs a bit more pizzazz, a sort of a sensuousness, something to catch the judge’s eyes. If only the handler could bring that out, she would have a perfect champion dog.
She would have, that is, a brand.
Just one more step.
In order to bring out what she needed, the handler started breeding Sumer. If only this last step could be achieved with this bitch, the next generation would be able to take the grand prize at any dog show in the land. And so Sumer began giving birth to litter after litter by different fathers, twice every year. She was given all the care she needed so she could focus on raising her children.
The dogs who straddled Sumer over the next five years were all certified purebred German shepherds. She had intercourse with seven different dogs, but every one of the puppies that emerged from her womb belonged to the same breed.
The purity of her blood was preserved.
The German shepherd line continued unadulterated. But what of the other dogs?
Dogs, you dogs in Kita’s line, where are you now?
Most of your number—124 by the end of 1949—remained in Far North Alaska. You were pulling sleds. Half the blood coursing through your veins derived from the Hokkaido breed; half came from other Northern breeds. You were mongrels, every one of you. But you were a mongrel aristocracy—the sons and daughters of Kita, the greatest sled-racing hero of the late 1940s—and as such everyone in the region associated in any way with sled racing knew of your existence. You were nobility, and you were priced accordingly. You might fetch two hundred, five hundred, even a thousand dollars. And you found buyers, every one of you. A few dozen ambitious mushers, new faces in the evolving world of dog sledding, shelled out the cash and bought you. One day you would be their lead dogs.
You were dispersed. Mostly around Alaska and the Arctic Circle.
And you mongrelized your line ever further.
One dog left the territory behind and descended far to the south. Her name was Ice. Her mother, a Siberian husky, had given her a foxlike face and blue eyes. Her maternal grandmother had a touch of Samoyed blood in her, however, and from her Ice had inherited a snow-white coat of long hair, light and fluffy, especially from the ridge between her shoulders down along her spine. She looked a little like a wild beast you might find roaming the snowfields.
Ice had left the territory over which Kita’s children ruled, it was true, but not by accident—it wasn’t as if she had gotten lost. Though in the end, she might as well have been lost. That, more or less, was her fate…but that wasn’t how it began. The musher who bought her realized it would be foolish for someone so inexperienced—and his new team of sled dogs, with Ice at its head—to commit to an endurance race without adequate preparation, so he made the wise decision to enter his team in shorter competitions. That, at any rate, was what he did the first two winters. And they did impressively well. Ice was the master of her team, she took pride in her leadership, skillfully kept the other dogs in line. And so they moved on to the next stage. In January 1953, Ice went south—or, rather, was taken south—to participate in a competition in Minnesota. Her master always picked races he was convinced they could win, but he had never actually taken the prize. The competition was too stiff in Alaska, in both the American and the Canadian regions. Ice had far too many worthy opponents. There was no guarantee that she would emerge supreme. But her master wanted that, he wanted it so badly…He wanted her to be recognized as a winner in a short- to mid-distance race, and then, if possible, to make a dazzling debut in the world of long-distance racing. Consumed with ambition, Ice’s master searched for just the right race. And he found it. In the snowy Minnesota highlands, where dog sledding was just catching on as a winter sport. Just below the border with Canada.
Who would ever take a real team that far?
No one.
No one but me.
So he rented a truck and drove his twelve dogs down.
In January, Ice and her team attempted the three-hundred-mile Minnesota Dog Sled Marathon. The dogs were in mint physical condition and they encountered no particular difficulties along the way, but still they came in second, losing by fifteen minutes. Ice and the other dogs expected their master to shower them with praise, since second place was still awfully good, but he was clearly disappointed; his shoulders drooped. They got no medal, no prize money—he couldn’t even cover the cost of transporting the dogs. He had screwed up. He was overcome by despair. And then, two days later, he was over it. He had met the woman he was destined for. She was twenty-eight years old and single and lived eighteen miles south of Minneapolis. She didn’t have any dogs. She had, instead, twenty cats that lived with her in a house on land inherited from an aunt. They exchanged glances, for no particular reason, and they realized in a flash that they had been in love in some previous life, and that was that. They got married. The musher moved in with her, bringing his twelve sled dogs, and he put down big, thick roots in Minnesota. He didn’t care about racing anymore. Winning, losing. So what? Love was all that mattered. Medals and prize money? Pshaw—all you need is love. No more of this dog sledding shit for him.
Early in February 1953, Ice and her eleven teammates settled in the low-lying plains of Minnesota, reduced to the status of pets. They were in America now, the home front of the Korean War, in an age when the mood of the country was tense from red-baiting. Everyone was watching I Love Lucy on TV—such a riot. Everything went slow and easy here in the lazy, lukewarm heartland. Totally different from life up in Far North Alaska. Down here in the south.
It got stressful.
There were no ice floes. No vast expanses of snow. You couldn’t run. Not only couldn’t you run, you were ordered not to run. WHAT’S GOING ON HERE? Ice wondered. WHERE THE HELL ARE WE? One member of the team, overcome by the same feelings, fell sick, grew progressively weaker. The depression spread. Still the sled dogs remained obedient to the musher. Except he was no longer a musher. Their master had abandoned his sled, he was no musher. He was their owner, plain and simple. And he knew this, and he felt a little bad. The former musher thought he knew what had made his dogs so disconsolate—it was because he no longer had them pull the sled. But, hey, love wins out in the end! The new wife trumps the dogs. When four dogs finally died, the former musher actually found himself thinking dogs could be kind of a pain.
The sled dogs were no longer loved. But Ice and the other seven loved their master.
The cats were worst of all. Time and again, the twenty housecats attacked the chained-up dogs. There was a malamute with a shredded ear, a husky who had lost an eye. Retaliation was impossible. Because their master’s wife was cat crazy. She was the problem. Their master was still the leader of their pack, of course. Ice, as lead dog, was number two. But now their master made it clear he wanted them to obey his wife. So where did that leave Ice? Number three? And what about the cats, basking in the wife’s affection? Just you try and touch us, they seemed to be saying, leering at the dogs. You’ll catch it from the master’s wife.
So in this world, the dogs…were they all the way at the bottom?
Unwilling to accept this, two more dogs died. Fell sick and died.
A year passed. In winter, a sparkling white blanket of snow allowed the survivors to feel a modicum of their former happiness. But their master was even more overjoyed. He had gotten it on with a nineteen-year-old waitress in town, and he was up to his ears in love. “In the end, love is all that matters,” he told his still new wife, and scrammed, leaving her behind. Leaving the dogs behind too, of course. Ice and the other five.
The dogs no longer had a master.
They couldn’t stand being below the cats.
Finally, in February 1954, Ice directed them to make their escape. She barked and barked until the woman (now a twenty-nine-year-old divorcée) felt she had no choice but to take them for a walk, and when she testily unhooked their chains and led them outside, Ice suddenly leapt at her. RUN! she ordered the others. WE’RE ESCAPING! There was authority in Ice’s barking. The six dogs fell naturally into line and dashed gallantly off across the asphalt-paved road that wound through the housing development.
Hope!
At last, the dogs set out.
And so six “wild dogs” began their struggle to survive. Basically, they yearned to return to nature. The town was a little too hot. They had all been bred, these “wild dogs”—both as breeds and as individuals—to withstand the cold. So they aimed for the highlands. They didn’t make it anywhere as cold as Alaska, but they got used to it. Ice was clever. She led the pack, found food. She took advantage of the town. Sometimes they snuck quietly into residential neighborhoods, like American black bears in the hungry season. They lived along the edge of human territory, though of course they spent most of their time in the mountains. When their hormones stirred, Ice and the other five dogs obeyed their instincts. They mated with each other, yes, but they also pursued dogs in town. People’s dogs. Pets. Whenever Ice caught the scent of a dog she liked, she leapt the fence. She stood outside the doghouse, drawing him to her.
Naturally, she became pregnant.
One spring passed, another came. She had given birth twice. Ice, the second generation in Kita’s line, was spawning a third generation, more mongrelized than the second. Dogs, you dogs who care nothing for the purity of your blood, what turbulent lives you lead! You have become “wild dogs,” and over time the townspeople have come to despise you. They grow wary. Ice, just look at you, how gorgeous. Your foxlike face, your white mane—your appearance strikes fear into people’s hearts. Look at that ferocious animal! people cry, shuddering, at the sight of you. You are almost a wolf.
The mountain dogs had begun attacking the town.
And so it was decided. You were to be eliminated. You were dangerous “wild dogs,” rumored to have bred with wolves.
They came after you with rifles. You kept fighting.
Wolves. Of course, the dogs in Ice’s pack had no way of knowing, but in fact by 1952 the blood of a bona fide wolf had indeed entered Kita’s line. One of the dogs who inherited it had found his way into the northernmost regions of Far North Alaska, as if he were living out the fate suggested by his grandfather’s name. Here’s how it happened. Many of the new mushers, inspired to dreams of glory by Kita’s fame, bought dogs belonging to the second generation—Ice’s siblings, some by the same mother, others by different mothers—but not all had substantial financial resources to draw upon. One musher, having found a way to do a favor for Kita’s owner, managed to buy a dog with her noble blood at the bargain basement price of twenty dollars. Unfortunately the rest of the team he had put together was, in a word, worthless. So this new musher hit upon a method by which he might increase his stock of the noble blood without spending a penny—a breeding program that would instantly turn the game in his favor. First, after congratulating himself on the fact that the puppy he had acquired was a bitch, he waited until she was nine or ten months old. Then he hiked into the forest and set up camp, preparing to stay for as long as it took, intentionally leaving the young bitch tied up outside the tent. He was going to get her pregnant by a wolf. This rather primitive and violent mating technique had a venerable history in Alaska and Greenland as a means of boosting sled dogs’ speed and endurance, and this poor new musher had decided to give it a try. He had blown just about all he had buying just one of Kita’s children, but that wasn’t enough for him—the dreamer had bigger dreams. He could do it. One day he would be a top musher.
Dogs, you dogs in Kita’s line, look at you—mongrelized almost beyond belief, with wolf seed part of the mix. The story keeps unfolding: seven wolfdogs join the family tree.
These seven dogs, he told himself, would be his redemption. Imagine the team I can put together now! At the head a child of Kita’s, the hero, followed by seven dogs who are not only Kita’s grandchildren, but are the strongest possible hybrid. He was delirious with excitement. How strong, he wondered, are these seven puppies? What miracle of heredity is theirs? He was their master now, and he was dying to put them to the test. And so, incredibly, when they were still only three-and-a-half-months old, he harnessed them up and began their training. The puppies endured it; they had no other choice. Then, when the seven dogs were ten months old, the dreamer became obsessed by a new and glorious notion. The time had come to try them out for real.
He didn’t enter them in a race.
The dreamer decided to test his team’s true strength by taking them, Kita’s child and the seven wolfdogs, on a legendary route. Half a century earlier, a brilliant musher had run his dogs as far as the islands of the Canadian Arctic and made it back alive. I’ll duplicate that run, he thought. That’s what this man was like—he loved to try out old customs, see how he measured up to legends. He couldn’t restrain himself. Dazzled by dreams of glory and adventure, he often lost his sense of what was completely stupid and what was not.
By the time we return from this trip, I’ll have one of the best teams around!
The dogs were in trouble. Seven ten-month-old puppies following the lead of their mother, joined by four more completely worthless dogs, bound for the ice floes of the Arctic Ocean. This was an adventure, yes—the same adventure a brilliant musher had set out on fifty years earlier, in full knowledge that he was risking his life. The dreamer, of course, had no sense at this point that he was seriously gambling with his life. He and his twelve dogs crossed the Brooks Range and set out across the Arctic Ocean. And then came forty days of hell. One of the dogs put a leg through a patch of thin ice and drowned. Another ended up alone on a large chunk of ice while the team was sleeping one night and drifted off. One tumbled down a crevice in the ice and dragged several down with it as it fell. The tangled harness strangled another dog. Of the seven wolfdogs, only two lived to see their eleventh month. The survivors were utterly fatigued. Their master had started drilling them at three and a half months. It was too early. And too intense. He had pushed them too hard.
The two surviving puppies lost their mother.
The sled was hardly moving. Some days the dogs’ bodies would be frozen stiff, each hair on their bodies like an icicle. A fierce blizzard gusted down over them, and the dogs’ master, the dreamer, came down with bronchitis. F*ck, I’m done for, he thought. Whiteout. I can’t see anything, I don’t know where I am.
I’m dying.
He died. It was their fortieth day on the Arctic Ocean. Only one of the wolfdogs was still alive. His name was Anubis; he was now almost a year old. Amazingly enough, three of the worthless dogs had survived. These four surviving dogs lay in a circle around their master’s corpse. They couldn’t have run away if they wanted to—they were still tied to the harness. They survived for four days on their master’s flesh.
And then they were saved.
They were hunters, members of one of the tribes of Arctic natives that would later come to be known collectively as the Inuit. Residents of these regions had no government. They weren’t Canadians, they weren’t Americans. Neither were they citizens of the Soviet Union. Until 1960, they had no fixed abode. During the winter—what they considered winter—they traversed the frozen sea from camp to camp hunting ringed seals and polar bears, setting out on an occasional trip to kill musk oxen. They traveled by dogsled. Eventually they would switch to snowmobiles, but at this point, when the hunters saved Anubis and the three others, dogs were still their only means of transport. They could see what had happened. Some stupid white guy had died. An adventurer who fell victim to his own incompetence. Leaving the dogs behind. Four of them!
Hilarious.
The dogs were teetering on the verge of starvation. The hunters fed them just a little, took possession of them.
Two years passed. Anubis was still alive. The other team members, too, were alive, with the exception of one dog that had died in an accident. The hunters, their new masters, directed their sleds with whips. It stung, but the dogs got used to it. Anubis learned to read the weather. He could pull a sled to the hunting grounds and back, but he also showed himself to be a capable hunter, able to find game, chase it down, attack. He noticed that when he helped his masters hunt, they treated him somewhat better, so he tried even harder. He exhibited a special ability to sense various impending dangers. This, the hunters realized, was no ordinary dog. He was made of different stuff from the other three they had found him with—they were worthless. There was something in this animal, hidden deep inside…a rare talent for doing exactly what he was told. Not only that—faithful as he was to his human masters, he also had a wild animal’s instinct for battle.
This was how they saw Anubis two years later.
In November 1955, an unusual man visited the camp where Anubis’s masters were living at the time—one of several they moved between. Anubis’s masters were citizens of no country; this man was a citizen of the USSR. He was a researcher at the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in Leningrad, commonly known as AARI. The Soviet Union was gathering secret data about the Arctic Ocean for military purposes. The Soviet Union wasn’t alone—its greatest enemy, the US, was using its intelligence agencies and military to collect the same sort of information. Both countries acted covertly. The Soviet Union had erected numerous observation stations in the Arctic, building them on the ice floes. “Drifting ice stations,” they were called. They were constantly moving. It was a dangerous business. The AARI researchers were having problems with the polar bears that turned up at their bases from time to time. Hence the visit to the camp where Anubis’s masters lived. The man drove up in a snow tractor. The camp and the observation station were adjacent to each other then—a mere twenty miles apart, which made them neighbors by Arctic standards—but this was purely a coincidence, owing to the drifting of the station and the movement of the camp.
The AARI researcher said he wanted to buy a dog to keep the bears away.
They negotiated a deal. In exchange for supplies that had been brought in on a transport plane the previous week, the researcher got the best dog for the purpose.
Anubis was three years and one month old.
He spent the next year or so drifting on the Arctic Ocean, between 73 degrees and 84 degrees north latitude, and between 120 degrees east and 160 degrees west longitude. Early in December 1956, they were to the east of Wrangel Island, on the Chukchi Sea. The Bering Strait lay somewhere way off to the south, and beyond it the Bering Sea. The Bering Sea came to an end at a line of islands. The Aleutians. But Anubis felt no longing for home.
I’M AN ARCTIC OCEAN DOG, he thought.
He lost that sense of himself. The researchers completed their surveys, and the ice stations were dismantled. They took Anubis on the icebreaker with them. But that was the end. They sold him at a small harbor town at the eastern edge of Siberia. The town’s inhabitants were all dressed in reindeer hides. They used reindeer bones to beat the snow from the hides they wore. These people became Anubis’s new masters. For the fourth time.
He was in the middle of nowhere, but still he had made it to the mainland, the great Soviet continent. He was walking, now, on Eurasian soil.
But tell me, dogs, you other dogs—what has become of you?
Three other dogs ended up in the communist sphere. Jubilee, News News (known as E Venture), and Ogre were captured on the Korean Peninsula by the People’s Liberation Army. The pure German shepherds changed their nationality. In 1953, the situation was totally different. Truman was no longer president of the United States. Stalin, former general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, had died of a brain hemorrhage on March 5. The two men no longer had a personal relationship. In the confusion that accompanied the UN forces’ retreat, these three dogs were left behind on the “other side” of the 38th parallel. They would never return. An armistice was signed in July, but the dogs were not handed over like other prisoners.
Come 1956, all three dogs were still among the dogs of the People’s Liberation Army War Dog Battalion. The two males, News News (E Venture) and Ogre, had been castrated; the bitch, Jubilee, remained as she had been born. She had not yet given birth.
And what of the capitalist sphere?
Two lines of dogs lived in its center, on the American mainland.
Sumer and Ice.