At first, the pilot kept Kita in the post office kennel. There was a lot going on there. The same pen held a setter, a borzoi, a malamute, a Siberian husky, a Greenland dog, and a bull mastiff. Other dogs were constantly threatening him, sniffing him. Little by little, Kita began to notice the world. Still, during the next three months he didn’t make much progress.
On July 22, in Fairbanks, the pilot was shot dead by a robber.
The night before he was shot, the pilot had been at a bar with an old friend, urging him to come see his dogs. “You gotta come and see these boys,” he said. “C’mon, make a trip up to Anchorage! You’d understand what they’re worth.” The friend’s father was a legend in Alaskan mail circles, a pioneer in dog-sled mail delivery. For forty years, ever since the gold rush had turned this land into a madhouse, he had been carrying mail to isolated villages scattered in the interior, so remote that neither trains nor any other motored vehicle could possibly reach them. The pilot had gone to pay his respects to this living legend several times and got to know his son, who was about the same age he was. The son had grown up watching his father ride off with his dogs, he had played on sleds and cuddled up with the dogs in their kennel—he knew dogs. It seemed only natural that he become a musher himself when he got older, and he had taken first prize in a few local races. He lived off prize money and by trapping.
A week after the pilot’s death, this musher friend came to Anchorage as he had promised. He visited the post office kennel. The pilot’s prize collection was, truth be told, more than his colleagues could handle. Two or three dogs were all they could use, either at work or as pets. That was how things stood when this close friend of the deceased, a musher, turned up. They asked for his help.
“Sure thing,” he told them. “I’ll take any dogs that can pull a sled.”
In August, Kita was taken, as part of the pilot’s “estate,” to a place far from any other human habitation, a few dozen miles northwest of Fairbanks.
Six months had passed since Kita left Kiska. The latitude here was even higher. The Arctic Circle was near. Kita, Kita, what are you feeling? You’re living in the north now, in the real north, as though your name marked your destiny. Kita. North. The musher trained you. Taught you how a sled dog was supposed to run, how to pull the flat practice sled known as a pulk. THIS IS TRAINING—I HAVEN’T DONE THIS IN A WHILE, you thought. I’M BEING TAUGHT, I’M LEARNING TO DO MY DUTY. Somewhere inside you, a switch was flipped. The mail dogs your master had brought back couldn’t keep up, but you didn’t stop. You felt no pain. No, not you. The strictness of this training agreed with you.
And then it happened. Winter came. You were harnessed and you ran. Before your master’s sled, perfectly in sync with the other dogs, your stride the same as theirs… you ran. You had gone from being a sled dog in training to a real, bona fide sled dog. You grasped the hierarchy that structured the team, followed the lead dog, ran. This, this was your duty. You felt it.
The musher had his sights set on first place in the next race. There was a war on, but the government wasn’t dumb enough to cancel an event with such a long tradition in Alaska. It wasn’t going to risk alienating the populace. If the musher was going to win, he had to practice like it was the real thing. He never took a day off. And so neither did his dogs. He was running them as hard as he could by February 1945. The master and his dogs were hardly ever at home. They must have covered half of Alaska—half a universe of white. Kita was on the move. He devoured the colorless scenery. The spruce trees, his own white breath and that of the other dogs, the great rivers now frozen solid—everything was perfect. An ideal sled route.
On February 17 there was an incident. The whole area was buried in snow. Suddenly the sled capsized. The dogs were baying. Something had scared them out of their wits. A moose. It hadn’t eaten in ages because of the snow. It had lunged wildly at the dogs. From their flank. The dogs were harnessed, of course. The moose was a female; she weighed more than seventeen hundred pounds. She was a beast, starved to the limit, aggressive. The lead dog was killed, then another two. All of a sudden, somewhere inside Kita, another switch was flipped. Just like that. While the other dogs darted back and forth in terror, Kita awoke.
Attack!
His instincts called to him. Now, now, he remembered the lessons that had been beaten into him when he belonged to the military—he remembered how to attack. THIS IS IT, he realized in this midst of his extreme agitation. THIS IS WHAT I WAS SUPPOSED TO DO ON THAT ISLAND, THIS IS MY DUTY! Kita tensed, then barked. NOW IS THE TIME. I’LL LIVE. YES, I’M LIVING!
Finally snapping back into reality, Kita sprang into action. His harness was loose, almost falling off. He leapt. He wasn’t intimidated by the enemy, despite the tremendous difference in their weight. The fight was on. Slipping through the moose’s hooves, he sank his teeth into its windpipe. The moose bled. The moose bellowed. The struggle continued for thirty minutes, until at last Kita emerged victorious, practically unscathed.
The team had lost three dogs. Six more were wounded. One had tried to flee. The sled was halfway destroyed.
Then a blizzard blew up. The musher was almost dead, and Kita warmed his body with his own. Gave his master his own warmth to keep him from freezing. The surviving dogs gathered around him.
Dogs, you other dogs from Kiska, where are you now?
By the end of the war, Kita had won himself a position as a sled dog on the snowfields of Alaska. But what happened to the dogs that had parted with Kita at Dutch Harbor? They continued to serve as military dogs. During the war, of course, and even after it. Except that only one of them was still alive when it ended. The others fell in action, here and there, across the Pacific. On the Marianas, in the Philippines, on Iwo Jima, on Okinawa.
From February 1944, the six dogs who had been sent to the American mainland via Dutch Harbor—Masao as a “prisoner” dog and the five four-month-old purebred German shepherds as “candidate” military dogs—were housed in the spacious training center at Camp Lejeune. All six went on to become American military dogs—following, as it were, the script that had been written for them. Explosion’s unplanned union with a Japanese dog (Masao) had, as it happened, yielded an outstanding litter. It was hardly a surprise that the pups exhibited all the usual traits of the breed and were free from imperfections. Indeed, the superiority of their bloodline had come to an even fuller fruition in them. They seemed to have inherited only the best aspects of the latest breeding as it was practiced by the Japanese and American militaries. Having been tested in any number of areas, all five placed in the A class. Masao, too, exceeded expectations. The pups’ father adapted immediately to the commands his new American masters taught him. He made it abundantly clear how much he could do, almost as though he knew that this was an inspection, to see if he was fit to be admitted as an immigrant, to become an American. Within two months, the father and his pups were reunited, allowed to live together.
In order to be recognized as a full-fledged military dog, a pup must have reached a certain age. Military dogs can’t be too young. So it wasn’t until the fall, when the five pups were about a year old, that they were finally shipped off to the front lines. By then they had been thoroughly trained. They had learned how to carry out various tasks: guarding, reconnaissance, attacking, transport. They were sent onto mock battlefields where they were inured to bomb blasts, smoke, flames. They learned to crawl under barbed wire. All five were certified as A-class dogs and sent to various islands in the Pacific. Masao had gone off to war months earlier. He no longer felt any compunction about attacking the Japanese.