For a month.
But destiny wasn’t finished with you.
This was 1957. A year that will remain etched in dog history.
One day, you returned from an excursion in search of food to find the door to the boxcar pushed wide open. A man sat on the ledge, his feet dangling in pointy-toed cowboy boots, smoking a cigarette and reading a book. He had a mustache and wore an oddly shaped hat. He was obviously a drifter, probably in his mid-thirties. Not that you, Sumer, had any notion of his age. The thing that got your attention, stunned you, was your children, who were clustered around him. Frisking, frolicking, around him. The man looked up. He stared at you, cocked his head.
What’re you doing here? he asked, speaking your thoughts. You’re a shepherd. You can’t be related to these kids.
YES, I AM, you barked. Was it best to threaten him? The puppies were within reach, and he didn’t seem to have harmed them. And that smell—the foul odor of his cigarettes. That same smell clung to the walls of your nest. Your sensitive nose noticed that instantly.
The puppies saw you and started barking: MOM, MOM, MOM!
You’re kidding me, the man said. You’re their mother? He grinned.
THEY’RE MY CHILDREN, you barked.
Looks that way, the man said, answering his own question with a nod. All right, then. C’mon over. I got food.
THEY’RE MY CHILDREN, you barked.
Listen here, dog, the man said clearly, shutting his book and looking you straight in the eye. This is my train.
On October 22, 1957, the boxcar you had chosen as your nest was coupled to an electric engine and became a link in a very, very, very long chain. You were inside. Your children were with you: they were still too young to make it on their own, of course, and since they were less than two months old it would have been dangerous to try and leave the nest. The man adored them, he loved their mixed-up mongrel appearance, and he treated you with respect. He saw you for what you were: the elegance of your comportment, your physical beauty as a purebred, a perfect German shepherd, and at the same time, the terrible violence your beauty concealed, the instincts that ran, invisible, in your blood. The man fed you. He made all eight of you, the whole family, his pets.
He said you would make a good guard dog.
You didn’t yet understand what that meant. But you acknowledged him, just as he did you. And so you became his pet. You felt no hesitation about being a pet. It was only naturaclass="underline" your nest belonged to him.
You slid along the iron rails. Traversed the continent without ever leaving home.
Heading south.
The man who claimed ownership of the train belonged to the transport underworld: he ran a smuggling operation, bribing conductors and overseeing a vast network of migrant laborers. He shipped goods brought in from across the continent south of the border. The operation was much larger than he could have managed on his own. He had a sponsor: a prominent Mexican-American who lived in Texas. His family had been living on the same land since before the Mexican-American War; they were Catholics, and they ran an orchard of orange and lemon trees, the product of sophisticated irrigation techniques. The orchard was harvested by gringo laborers the man in the train provided, and by illegal workers brought up over the border from Mexico. Since at the time United States law didn’t prohibit the employment of illegal immigrants, the Texan had no need to conceal what he was doing, hiring men and women who would have been his compatriots in the last century—until the 1840s, at any rate. The illegality lay, not in employing the immigrants, but in “shipping” them into the country in the first place, and this task was left to the man in the train. That was how he had developed his underworld transport network.
The man hadn’t been lying: the train was his. Usually, it carried products destined to be sold. Sometimes it carried people. Even now, the other cars in the train were full. Only this boxcar was different: there was nothing here but a family of dogs, lying in the corner.
On October 26, the nest stopped moving. The man, Sumer, and the puppies were close to the border now. Listen here, the man said to Sumer. I’m going to see you live a good life, okay? You’re not like other dogs, you’re smart—I can see that. So here’s what I’m going to do. You listening? I’m going to give you to the Don and you’ll be his guard dog, watch his orchard. The puppies too, of course. You’ll do a good job, right? You can do it? You do that, and he’ll be grateful to me, see, and that’ll be your repayment. You can do that, right?
You won’t let me down, will you?
When the man, Sumer, and the seven puppies descended from the nest at the station, the Don’s men were waiting, rifles in their hands. And after that, Sumer, you took your children and went to work at the orchard. You understood what was being asked of you. You spent a day on the orchard, a second day, a third day, and gradually you got used to it. A fourth day, a fifth day, a sixth day. Your children were growing. They were doing fine. All seven survived to the end of their second month.
November. November 1957.
Horses whinnied. Frogs croaked. Roosters crowed in the mornings. A dozen ducks swam in the pond in the mansion’s courtyard. There were times when the orchard misted over, and you were struck by its beauty. Your children too, with the high concentration of northern blood in their veins, loved these moments. THE MIST IS GOOD, they thought. COOL AND GOOD.
The beauty of an orchard in November.
In 1957—a year that would go down in the history of a race of dogs that first came into being here, on this earth, more than ten thousand years ago.
It was night. There was a television in the Don’s mansion, and the whole family was inside staring at its screen. They were in the living room, gasping in wonder. In awe, in disbelief. The servants were in the garden, gazing up at the sky. Their expressions focused, intent, as if they were hoping, somewhere up there, to find the truth. Is that it? No, no. How about that, over there? Hey, we’re not looking for a falling star, okay?
And you, Sumer, and your children—you felt it.
A kind of buzzing in your hearts that made you lift your heads to the clear, starry sky.
A man-made satellite flew overhead. It took about 103 minutes for it to orbit the earth. The previous month, the Soviet Union had beaten America in the Space Race. The Soviet Union, having poured astonishing amounts of money into the program, had succeeded in launching into orbit the very first man-made satellite: Sputnik 1. Now, less than a month later, in an effort to demonstrate the overwhelming superiority of Communism to the entire world, it had done something even more extraordinary. Sputnik 2 had been outfitted with an airtight chamber, and a living creature had been loaded inside. The first Earthling to experience space flight. The creature was not human. It was a dog. A bitch.
The airtight chamber had a window.
The bitch looked down at the earth.
She was a Russian laika. In the initial reports of her flight, conflicting information was given regarding her name. She was said to be named Damka, Limonchik, and Kudryavka, but within a few days Laika had stuck. She was Laika, the laika. Laika the space dog. One of the USSR’s top-secret national projects. A dog.
She orbited the globe, alive.
Gazing out, down, in zero gravity.
You felt her gaze.
You, Sumer, and your children: you felt it. And so, there on the Mexican-American border, you raised your heads to look up at the sky. You and several thousand others. On November 3, 1957, all at once, 3,733 descendants of a Hokkaido dog named Kita and 2,928 descendants of a German shepherd named Bad News, scattered across the surface of the globe, unaware of the lines that separated communist and capitalist spheres, all those dogs raised their heads to peer into the vastness of the sky.