skull up and rested it on her head.
She was holding it in both hands. Over her head.
“See,” the girl said. “Kind of spiritual, right? Kind of religious?”
“Very amusing.” The old man chuckled.
Number 47 sat like a good dog.
“You are going to put that on, are you?” the old man said in Russian.
“What were you saying about Forty-seven?” the girl shot back in Japanese.
“As it happens, number forty-seven is the child of this Belka. Is that not right, old boy?”
The old man turned to look at Belka. The old dog barked in reply.
“He is old, but he still had what it took, luckily. We made it just in time.”
“Forty-seven is related to that old shit? Is that it?”
“I have the feeling we are getting through to each other. You understand me, little girl? You, with the skull of that great dog over your head, like a dog-clan shaman. Do you understand what I am saying? Seven puppies were born. A new generation. One of them will be our Belka. Or Strelka, if it is a bitch. That will be the name of the leader. Once they graduate from number to name. And number forty-seven may be the one, the next Belka, it looks to me. The possibility is there. There is a good chance.”
“He does look like him, come to think of it. Are you saying that old shit is his dad?”
“He is Belka,” the old man said, nodding at the old dog, to the girl.
And right away, the girl replied, “BEL-kah.”
“That is right. And you know what? I had a feeling. In this new litter there is no bitch who is fit to be the next Strelka. Number forty-seven might be the next Belka, but there is no Strelka—not, at any rate, among the dogs. None of them will take that name. And you know why not? Because—” For the third time he pointed, this time at the girl. “Because I am giving that name to you.”
Hey, dick, the girl, X years old, barked. She glared at the old man. Don’t fucking point your finger at me.
“Because you are Strelka,” the old man said, chuckling.
He had given the girl a dog name.
1958–1962
(Year 5 Anno Canis)
Dogs, dogs, where are you now?
1958. Still the world was divided along the same lines. Every patch of ground across the surface of the earth had been categorized as belonging to one of two ideologies. Either you were communist or you were capitalist. Or else you wanted to be one or the other. Except for you, dogs—you belonged to both sides.
First of all, four dogs entered communist territory. Three became Chinese. Originally American, these purebred German shepherds were captured on the Korean Peninsula by the People’s Liberation Army. They had been the pride of the US Army, part of the military dog elite: Jubilee, News News (aka E Venture), and Ogre, siblings by different mothers. They had been fathered by Bad News, which meant that their grandparents, on their father’s side, were Masao and Explosion. That was their lineage. And now they were Chinese. The last of the four dogs belonged to Kita’s line. But while his lineage could be traced back to Kita, a Hokkaido dog, his blood was far from pure; he was an Arctic mongrel, a “hybrid breed.” A wolfdog. And so far, he belonged to no nation. He was on Soviet land and was destined eventually to become a Soviet dog, but for now, in 1958, he still had no experience of the thing we call a nation.
Anubis, there you were on the Eurasian continent.
On that vast expanse of land, in Soviet territory.
But this was the Arctic. You hadn’t yet left Far East Siberia, though it was only a matter of weeks before you would. Already you had moved away from the coast of the East Siberian Sea, crossing the Kolyma River. You, Anubis, were pulling a dogsled. And in a little more than a year—between December 1956 and the beginning of 1958—you had passed from your fourth master to your fifth, and from your fifth to your sixth. Why? Because there was something wrong with you. It had nothing to do with your abilities; you were extraordinarily capable. Your senses were more acute than those of any ordinary dog, and you could anticipate all kinds of danger before they appeared. You identified passable routes faster than your masters, dashed easily over the most arduous terrain. You were a magnificent sled dog. The problem, Anubis, was that the dogs you ran with