Belka, Why Don't You Bark - By Hideo Furukawa Page 0,11

far from any other human habitation, a few dozen miles northwest of Fairbanks.

Six months had passed since Kita left Kiska. The latitude here was even higher. The Arctic Circle was near. Kita, Kita, what are you feeling? You’re living in the north now, in the real north, as though your name marked your destiny. Kita. North. The musher trained you. Taught you how a sled dog was supposed to run, how to pull the flat practice sled known as a pulk. THIS IS TRAINING—I HAVEN’T DONE THIS IN A WHILE, you thought. I’M BEING TAUGHT, I’M LEARNING TO DO MY DUTY. Somewhere inside you, a switch was flipped. The mail dogs your master had brought back couldn’t keep up, but you didn’t stop. You felt no pain. No, not you. The strictness of this training agreed with you.

And then it happened. Winter came. You were harnessed and you ran. Before your master’s sled, perfectly in sync with the other dogs, your stride the same as theirs…you ran. You had gone from being a sled dog in training to a real, bona fide sled dog. You grasped the hierarchy that structured the team, followed the lead dog, ran. This, this was your duty. You felt it.

The musher had his sights set on first place in the next race. There was a war on, but the government wasn’t dumb enough to cancel an event with such a long tradition in Alaska. It wasn’t going to risk alienating the populace. If the musher was going to win, he had to practice like it was the real thing. He never took a day off. And so neither did his dogs. He was running them as hard as he could by February 1945. The master and his dogs were hardly ever at home. They must have covered half of Alaska—half a universe of white. Kita was on the move. He devoured the colorless scenery. The spruce trees, his own white breath and that of the other dogs, the great rivers now frozen solid—everything was perfect. An ideal sled route.

On February 17 there was an incident. The whole area was buried in snow. Suddenly the sled capsized. The dogs were baying. Something had scared them out of their wits. A moose. It hadn’t eaten in ages because of the snow. It had lunged wildly at the dogs. From their flank. The dogs were harnessed, of course. The moose was a female; she weighed more than seventeen hundred pounds. She was a beast, starved to the limit, aggressive. The lead dog was killed, then another two. All of a sudden, somewhere inside Kita, another switch was flipped. Just like that. While the other dogs darted back and forth in terror, Kita awoke.

Attack!

His instincts called to him. Now, now, he remembered the lessons that had been beaten into him when he belonged to the military—he remembered how to attack. THIS IS IT, he realized in this midst of his extreme agitation. THIS IS WHAT I WAS SUPPOSED TO DO ON THAT ISLAND, THIS IS MY DUTY! Kita tensed, then barked. NOW IS THE TIME. I’LL LIVE. YES, I’M LIVING!

Finally snapping back into reality, Kita sprang into action. His harness was loose, almost falling off. He leapt. He wasn’t intimidated by the enemy, despite the tremendous difference in their weight. The fight was on. Slipping through the moose’s hooves, he sank his teeth into its windpipe. The moose bled. The moose bellowed. The struggle continued for thirty minutes, until at last Kita emerged victorious, practically unscathed.

The team had lost three dogs. Six more were wounded. One had tried to flee. The sled was halfway destroyed.

Then a blizzard blew up. The musher was almost dead, and Kita warmed his body with his own. Gave his master his own warmth to keep him from freezing. The surviving dogs gathered around him.

Dogs, you other dogs from Kiska, where are you now?

By the end of the war, Kita had won himself a position as a sled dog on the snowfields of Alaska. But what happened to the dogs that had parted with Kita at Dutch Harbor? They continued to serve as military dogs. During the war, of course, and even after it. Except that only one of them was still alive when it ended. The others fell in action, here and there, across the Pacific. On the Marianas, in the Philippines, on Iwo Jima, on Okinawa.

From February 1944, the six dogs who had been sent to the American mainland via Dutch Harbor—Masao as