Ice was frightening. Her father had been a Hokkaido dog, her mother a Siberian husky, and one of her grandmothers was a Samoyed. She had a face like a fox’s with brilliant blue eyes, a sturdy bone structure, hair on her back that the wind whipped like a mane. She looked odd, even eerie, resembling the standard image of no breed. No one owned her. She roamed freely across a wide swath of Minnesota, bound by nothing. Until they came after her with rifles.
Sumer bore puppies who were contenders to the throne. Any number of them, blessed creatures with everything going for them, expected by dint of their distinguished lineage to dominate the dog shows. She was getting on in age, but the planned mating continued; she got pregnant and gave birth again and again and raised her pups until they were four or five months old. She was, in short, a mother.
Ice obeyed her instincts, mating with pet dogs in residential developments when she was in heat, absorbing into her own bloodline the strengths of dogs whose looks and personalities suited hers. The puppies she gave birth to were another step away from purity. Their looks were unclassifiable; they had a dangerous, untamed strength. Ice led her children, and she led those of the other dogs in her pack. Five dogs from the team that had once pulled a sled in Far North Alaska and their children. They were all “wild dogs” now, regarded with unease by the humans, and she was the top dog. The leader of the pack.
A beautiful German shepherd who was, above all, a mother.
A freakish mongrel who was a mother, yes, but also a queen.
Queen of the freaks, of the monsters.
Ice, Ice—they came after you with rifles. The townspeople despised you. They hated you, and they hated your pack. Human society could not countenance your existence. You were evil. Monsters stalking the towns. Dogs unleashed were beasts, natural that they be destroyed. But you were not destroyed. You were too clever. Sometimes you retreated into the mountains, sometimes you set upon the towns. You never rested for long. Because to do so was dangerous. Because you felt how dangerous it could be. Though you had no knowledge of this—of course you didn’t—the blood that coursed through your father’s veins was the blood of a victor. You were descended from a long line of Hokkaido dogs who kept to this side of the line. Survivors. For thousands of years, the Ainu, the natives of Hokkaido, had used your ancestors to hunt large game. Your ancestors were the hunters. Hokkaido dogs who fought with bears and lived. These were your ancestors. Hokkaido dogs who brought down mighty deer. These were your ancestors. Every one of them survived the process of unnatural selection that hunting became. They had made it, they abided on this side of the line. And so you understood. You understood what it was to be on the side of the hunters, and you made sense of it all. You could almost tell what people were going to do before they did it. There was no way they would ever eliminate you.
Every bullet the rifles fired was another wasted bullet.
IDIOTS, you said. And you told the pack you led, WE WILL NOT BE CAUGHT.
WE WILL KEEP RUNNING.
Yes, you kept running. You “wild dogs” ran and ran, dashed ahead the way you had in Far North Alaska, over the land, over the fields of snow, over the ice floes. Minneapolis was far behind you now. You roamed through Minnesota, but you did not go north. The situation—their attempts to eradicate you, and your evasions—led you in an altogether different direction. You headed south. Yes, south. Do you grasp what that means? You, Ice, and you, former sled dogs, members of Ice’s pack, you were banished from the land of your birth, sent far, far to the south, and now, of necessity, you moved further south.
Do you understand what that means? It means this: destiny.
The pack had swelled to a few dozen. A pack of monsters, “wild dogs,” growing ever more mongrelized, following the dictates of Ice’s wisdom, her instinct, obeying the queen as they ran up and down, hither and yon, across a region that spanned four states, southern Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois.
You galloped.
You lived. You ran like lightning. You weren’t going to die.
But in America, in 1957, the gun barrels were always there, tracking you.
Ice ran. Sumer did not. Sumer busied herself caring for her children in a clean and spacious cage that had been specially made for her. She moved lethargically, offering her pups her teats. She helped her newborns eliminate their waste. She was dignified, relaxed. She had the majesty of an earth goddess, the confident glow that was the sign of her productivity, her fertility. And this was the perfect environment for raising her pups, it was kept utterly clean, uncontaminated, and every last one of her children was pure as well. Perfect German shepherds, every one.
In the world Sumer inhabited, of course, mongrels were abhorred.
There was no reason, in its value system, for a mongrel to be born.
You, Sumer, do not run. You are waited upon. The owner of the kennel you live in—its owner as well as yours—lavishes attention upon you because you are the mother of her future champions. She places enormous value in your existence. You are cared for. You care for your children, and the woman who ought to be your master but is instead your breeder and handler, she cares for you.
Because you give birth to a beautiful elite.
Because you give birth to dogs of the highest quality, a second generation that is gorgeous above all else, possessed from birth of the qualities necessary to meet even the most stringent dog show standards and to remain unfazed by the judges’ stern, appraising gazes.
The puppies milled around your teats.
And then, when they had drunk their fill, they frolicked and tangled in the shadow of your protective aura.
Until 1957, when at last fate began playing its tricks with you.
What happened? Your master did something she shouldn’t have. Your master and the master of your fellow dogs, and of your children, the owner of your spotlessly clean kennel, she did something unclean, morally contaminated. Her patience had finally reached its limit. She wasn’t taking the trophy. She had been breeding all these dogs with the sole aim of winning the highest title, and here she was, her aspirations still unfulfilled. Her dogs always took second, not first, place. Yes, they had won repeatedly in group judging, totally overwhelming the other dogs. But none had ever been Best in Show. Not one had managed to ascend to the pinnacle, to become the Number One Doggie in the United States. Your master had once been described as “the queen of the postwar American dog show universe” for her utterly masterful handling, her ability to become one with her dogs. But she didn’t have the crown. She was a celebrity who appeared regularly in dog magazines. But without the crown. Each time she became the focus of attention as “a young—and beautiful!—woman handler,” her self-esteem soared; each time the Best in Show ribbon slipped from her grasp, she was more spectacularly wounded. And now, to make matters worse, she was losing her youth. And so your master tried to bribe the judges. It didn’t work. Well then, what if she spread her legs for one of the bigwigs who ran the show? She tried, but she wasn’t young enough; the association chairman couldn’t get it up. I’m way too old, she thought. I’m running out of time. And once she had convinced herself of this, she got so overwrought that she began to lose it. Take your age, Sumer, for instance. Before long you would be too old to give birth, past the age when so-called “late pregnancy” was possible, and all of a sudden that came to seem, in her mind, like some sort of sign—a revelation. It was now or never. And so your master tried a third trick: she went into the paddock and slipped poison to all the other candidates for Best in Show—a Doberman pinscher, a cocker spaniel, a Scottish terrier, a boxer, an Afghan hound, a toy poodle—and then, just to be absolutely sure that everything was all right, put poison in their owners’ lunches too. Four dogs died and two of the owners were hospitalized. Her transgression was discovered with almost hilarious ease, and she was immediately found guilty and shipped off to prison.