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 mainland was decided upon. The Army Air Corps supply unit delivered the vaccinations in the course of their usual duties. There was nothing wrong with the vaccine itself. The problem was that this was Kita’s third vaccination, and not enough time had elapsed since his previous shot when he first shipped off with the navy for Kiska/Narukami.
Kita was having a reaction. He had absorbed too much of the vaccine. He grew feverish, lethargic, incapable of controlling his appetite—he was in agony. And so he became depressed, and they misunderstood.
When the ship arrived at Unalaska, Kita was unloaded with the other six dogs, but unlike them he wasn’t passed on to the Aleutians’ permanent garrison.
“This one’s no good,” someone said, “don’t bother with him.”
And so he was separated from the rest.
He remained on Unalaska Island, unable even to watch when, after spending a few days at the Dutch Harbor Naval Operations Facility, the other six dogs were sent off to Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina.
Left behind.
Kita, all alone, on the Aleutian archipelago.
He didn’t recover. People still interpreted his symptoms as signs of depression. He showed no desire to live. But they didn’t put him to sleep. He was just a dog, so why bother killing him? They tied him up like a guard dog outside a warehouse on a wharf the military used.
Kita, Kita, what are you feeling?
He was a military dog from a lineage of acknowledged superiority. He was strong. A dog among dogs, selected with the utmost care from among his peers. He had been trained to carry out an array of tasks: to be a watchdog, to attack, to search out and rescue wounded soldiers. And then he had been sent to the battlefield. But once he was there, what job was he assigned? On Kiska/Narukami, he had been made to work as a taster, demonstrating to his masters that the island’s plants weren’t poisonous. He would eat them, show them with his body that they weren’t poisonous. That was all. Naturally, it was a very important job. It was only because he served that role that the forces on Kiska/Narukami managed to remain free from scurvy when even basic food supplies were not reliably available in these far-flung occupied areas. But how much did people appreciate his work? His masters, the men to whom he remained so loyal, had left him behind during the Ke-gō Operation. They abandoned him and the other three dogs. And then there were those days spent in the company of others of his kind. Days of freedom on a nameless, uninhabited island. Timeless days. And then his new masters had appeared. They brought food, and when Kita learned English commands, they adored him. Kita trusted them.
Kita was a dog.
So he trusted them.
And now he was sick, and here he was. And once again his masters were gone. Not a single man he recognized. They had shunned him again. Abandoned him again. And the other dogs, from the island… he had been separated from them too. WHY? he keened. Shivering from the chills that wracked his body, he keened as though he had contracted a case of pseudo-rabies. WHY MUST I SUFFER LIKE THIS? Masters appeared, disappeared. They taught him loyalty, then heartlessly cast him aside. What had been the point of all that training? He had been the cream of the crop, an elite among military dogs. There was no point. No value. And now he was sick and depressed.
WHAT SENSE IS THERE IN LIVING?
Utter, irresistible apathy. There by the harbor, Kita acknowledged hardly anything. He was living in a nightmare. Reality itself was a dream.
But he had food. He wouldn’t be allowed to starve.
Though Kita didn’t realize it, there was a young man taking care of him. He was twenty-two, a land-based member of the air corps. He had been conscripted in 1942. He loved dogs, so he looked after Kita. He was fascinated by Kita—by his appearance. He had never seen a dog like this back home. It was totally unlike other northern breeds he was familiar with, like Samoyeds or malamutes. This was only to be expected, since the young man had never seen a Japanese dog—or rather, a dog of Japanese origins. The Hokkaido is like a Spitz, with upright ears and a tail that curves up over its back, so courageous and ferocious that it was long used to hunt brown bears. There is an unmistakable aura of wildness in its appearance. What kind of dog is this? the young man wondered.
His curiosity piqued, he made a practice of visiting Kita twice every day.
Kita wouldn’t die.
He got his strength back, but still he continued to wander in a dream world, as if his spirit had yet to heal. His consciousness was trapped in its nightmare state.
One day in April 1944, two men came and stood before Kita. One was the young man, the other was a mail pilot. The pilot was thirty years old. “Incredible,” he muttered. “I’ve never seen anything like him either.” He checked the dog over.
The young man stood off to one side. “I felt bad for him, you know?” he said. “They just sorta left him here, no doghouse or anything, like those two blankets were enough. This is the Aleutians, for Chrissake.”
Then: “You can really take him?”
The pilot glanced up. “Sure I can.”
“You like him?”
“Absolutely. I’ll put him in the post office kennel. It’s sort of a hobby—I’ve got all kinds of dogs. A rare animal like him will give me bragging rights, that’s for sure.”
“Good news, huh?” the young man said to Kita. “You’ll have friends. Mail dogs.”
Three days later, the pilot was back. He had taken care of the minimal paperwork necessary for him to take charge of Kita, over at the facility’s central office. It was a matter of signing a form, that was all. And then Kita was on a plane. Loaded into the space where the mail had been before it was delivered. Now Kita was an airborne dog.
The weight of a Hokkaido dog on a plane, in place of a few hundred items of mail.
Still Kita hadn’t returned from dreamland. He had no idea what was happening—that now, two months after being sick on that boat, he was flying along the eastern tip of the Aleutian arc. He felt only an unfamiliar pull on his body, an unmistakably mechanical shaking.
The nose of the airplane pointed toward Alaska. Toward Anchorage.
In 1944, Alaska wasn’t yet a state of the United States. It was no more than a peripheral territory. A territory that nonetheless occupied fully a fifth the area of the United States. In the summer, the sun rose in the north northeast and sank in the north northwest; in the winter it rose in the south southeast and sank in the south southwest.