Belka, Why Don't You Bark? (6 page)

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.