Belka, Why Don't You Bark - By Hideo Furukawa Page 0,8

they were treated like kings.

February 10, 1944. Seven dogs. Having been stationed for approximately six months on the island, the troops were ordered on to their next field of battle. As they boarded the transport ships that had pulled into Kiska Harbor, the seven dogs went with them.

The twentieth century: a century of war, a century of war dogs. These dogs did more than simply die on the battlefields. They took prisoners and were taken. It happened all the time on the front lines. Dogs were captured. Trained in battle, bred in all sorts of ways, developed, perfected, the dogs were crucial, secret weapons. In the second decade of the twentieth century, Germany seized mastiffs from all over Belgium, which it had conquered, and inducted them into their military, where they were used to pull guns and carts—tasks German dogs were unable to perform. All along the Eastern and Western Fronts, Europe’s great powers busied themselves snatching whatever types of dogs their own armies lacked. The situation was the same during the Second World War. Germany, for instance, still the most advanced nation in terms of its dogs, had compelled almost every dog in the French military to turn on its homeland by the time Germany conquered France.

The seven dogs on Kiska would be sent to the mainland. Two as “prisoners” captured on the front lines, the remaining five to be trained as “candidate military dogs.” The dog-training unit of the Marine Corps was especially interested in the puppies. They couldn’t wait to see how good these animals would be—a new generation born of two purebred German shepherds, the first (Explosion) American and the second (Masao) a sample of the sort of dog that Japan, with its admittedly greater experience in this area, was sending into the field. The order had been issued for the dogs to be shipped to the mainland precisely for this reason.

If things went well, all seven dogs would be retrained at a Marine Corps camp and emerge from the experience as American military dogs.

Not prisoners, not candidates. Full-fledged military dogs.

The seven dogs had been brought onto one of the transport ships, but no kennels or beds had been prepared. For the time being, they were simply chained to the bridge. The puppies, less than four months old, were terrified. Not that this mattered, of course; the fleet departed anyway. The ship’s first stop would be Dutch Harbor, on Unalaska Island, over four hundred miles away.

Three miles brought it outside Kiska Harbor.

The seven dogs would never return.

And they were seasick.

Violently seasick. Tracing the arc of the Aleutian Islands, the boat pushed relentlessly eastward through the North Pacific Ocean. The body of the boat itself, however, rocked in all directions: not just east but west, south, and north. The Aleutians’ unique climate played with it, preyed upon it. Clouds hung a mere ten meters or so above the waves; fierce gusts of wind dashed snow across the deck. And the weather kept changing suddenly, then suddenly changing again. First the puppies felt it. They vomited, shivered; their eyes were blank. What terrible punishment was this? Incapable of comprehending what was happening, what it meant to be seasick, the five puppies succumbed. Kita, the Hokkaido, was the next to go. He was the only non–German shepherd, and his symptoms were even worse. Masao, meanwhile, was fine. He remembered having made this crossing to the Aleutians once before. Boarding a similar ship, a transport ship or a destroyer or whatever it was, part of the Northern Command’s Hokkai Task Force—he remembered that experience, the long passage from Mutsu Bay. That knowledge kept him from getting sick. Kita remembered too, of course, but it didn’t help him.

Kita’s nerves were shot.

The men on the bridge assumed, as they made for Unalaska, that he had succumbed to the depression that sometimes comes over dogs in harsh environments.

Depression. Once it hits, a dog loses all will to live.

Still, at root it was just a different form of seasickness. So the humans told themselves. And why shouldn’t they? After all, several of the soldiers on board, some among the troops heading home and some being transferred, were vomiting, groaning, lying spattered by their own puke, and by that of their comrades. But their diagnosis was wrong. Yes, Kita was seasick. But this was more than ordinary seasickness. The true cause was the rabies vaccine he had been given before they left Kiska. The vaccination had become obligatory as soon as their relocation to the