Belka, Why Don't You Bark? (15 page)

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.