Belka, Why Don't You Bark - By Hideo Furukawa Page 0,10

the young man wondered.

His curiosity piqued, he made a practice of visiting Kita twice every day.

Kita wouldn’t die.

He got his strength back, but still he continued to wander in a dream world, as if his spirit had yet to heal. His consciousness was trapped in its nightmare state.

One day in April 1944, two men came and stood before Kita. One was the young man, the other was a mail pilot. The pilot was thirty years old. “Incredible,” he muttered. “I’ve never seen anything like him either.” He checked the dog over.

The young man stood off to one side. “I felt bad for him, you know?” he said. “They just sorta left him here, no doghouse or anything, like those two blankets were enough. This is the Aleutians, for Chrissake.”

Then: “You can really take him?”

The pilot glanced up. “Sure I can.”

“You like him?”

“Absolutely. I’ll put him in the post office kennel. It’s sort of a hobby—I’ve got all kinds of dogs. A rare animal like him will give me bragging rights, that’s for sure.”

“Good news, huh?” the young man said to Kita. “You’ll have friends. Mail dogs.”

Three days later, the pilot was back. He had taken care of the minimal paperwork necessary for him to take charge of Kita, over at the facility’s central office. It was a matter of signing a form, that was all. And then Kita was on a plane. Loaded into the space where the mail had been before it was delivered. Now Kita was an airborne dog.

The weight of a Hokkaido dog on a plane, in place of a few hundred items of mail.

Still Kita hadn’t returned from dreamland. He had no idea what was happening—that now, two months after being sick on that boat, he was flying along the eastern tip of the Aleutian arc. He felt only an unfamiliar pull on his body, an unmistakably mechanical shaking.

The nose of the airplane pointed toward Alaska. Toward Anchorage.

In 1944, Alaska wasn’t yet a state of the United States. It was no more than a peripheral territory. A territory that nonetheless occupied fully a fifth the area of the United States. In the summer, the sun rose in the north northeast and sank in the north northwest; in the winter it rose in the south southeast and sank in the south southwest.

At first, the pilot kept Kita in the post office kennel. There was a lot going on there. The same pen held a setter, a borzoi, a malamute, a Siberian husky, a Greenland dog, and a bull mastiff. Other dogs were constantly threatening him, sniffing him. Little by little, Kita began to notice the world. Still, during the next three months he didn’t make much progress.

On July 22, in Fairbanks, the pilot was shot dead by a robber.

The night before he was shot, the pilot had been at a bar with an old friend, urging him to come see his dogs. “You gotta come and see these boys,” he said. “C’mon, make a trip up to Anchorage! You’d understand what they’re worth.” The friend’s father was a legend in Alaskan mail circles, a pioneer in dog-sled mail delivery. For forty years, ever since the gold rush had turned this land into a madhouse, he had been carrying mail to isolated villages scattered in the interior, so remote that neither trains nor any other motored vehicle could possibly reach them. The pilot had gone to pay his respects to this living legend several times and got to know his son, who was about the same age he was. The son had grown up watching his father ride off with his dogs, he had played on sleds and cuddled up with the dogs in their kennel—he knew dogs. It seemed only natural that he become a musher himself when he got older, and he had taken first prize in a few local races. He lived off prize money and by trapping.

A week after the pilot’s death, this musher friend came to Anchorage as he had promised. He visited the post office kennel. The pilot’s prize collection was, truth be told, more than his colleagues could handle. Two or three dogs were all they could use, either at work or as pets. That was how things stood when this close friend of the deceased, a musher, turned up. They asked for his help.

“Sure thing,” he told them. “I’ll take any dogs that can pull a sled.”

In August, Kita was taken, as part of the pilot’s “estate,” to a place