“Big Dog”
Owen Yager

Siberia isn’t Russia, really. At least not in my mind. There’s a stern barrier in the Ural mountains between the Tsars’ homeland and the empire that they built, sprawling out towards the Pacific. That empire is a warren of endless plains and trees and rivers. It used to be valued for its sable. Now it’s valued for its lumber and ore and oil.

Mongolia lies just below Siberia, and a few towns lie along that border. In the Russian empire’s glory days, they were bustling with goods and merchants traveling between Beijing and Moscow. Today they’re military outposts, tensely aware of China’s expansive ambitions and the immense natural resources that lie within Siberia. Walking around them, you see soldiers and prostitutes and not a lot else.

One of these towns, Kyakhta, lies along a route that China would likely travel if it moved up through Mongolia to take Siberia. The Kyakhta garrison has the men and the tanks to stave off a Chinese attack for two hours. No one talks about what happens next. No one talks about that possibility at all, actually. It’s just the sort of thing that stirs in the back of your mind when you think too hard about the town.

When 11 other students and I drove in Kyakhta, I was in the middle of writing a fairytale about a boy who climbed a staircase into the sky and became snow. The town was gray and quiet and tense. I spent one night there, hiking up to see the twin barbed wire fences that marked the Mongolian-Russian border and sleeping in a little hotel with eleven other students. I didn’t sleep very well. The next morning, characteristically cold for Siberia’s May, we got in our old Mitsubishi bus and drove out east for an hour.

“The oldest datsan in Russia is nearby,” our professors told us as we were starting to drive. I didn’t remember what sort of building a datsan was. I’d been looking out the window at the trees during that part of the history lesson. For that matter, I’d been looking out the window at the trees during most of the history lessons.

The road to the datsan rambled through rolling, open hills and a few copses of dense pine. The barbed-wire border fence was a near constant presence on our right. Every once in a while we’d see tanks parked on a ridge to our left. I started to think about a story I wanted to write about a hunter and a deer.

After maybe an hour – time didn’t really matter to me then – we hit a fork and turned left. My professors were talking quietly in the seat in front of me. I pieced together that a datsan is a Tibetan Buddhist monastery. We kept driving. The sun shone brightly. Eventually we stopped in a village. The monastery, a loosely fenced cluster of dorms sitting around a single central hall, sat on a little hillock above the village.

At the datsan we walked around and spun prayer wheels and saw a slab of sacred rock. A few monks were reading aloud in the main building. One one of them told us about the monastery. There had been a thousand monks there in the monastery’s heyday, he said, and then Mr. Stalin, in the middle of his religious purges, came around. Now there are fifteen, give or take a few, living in the few dormitories that hadn’t faded into villagers’ houses. He showed us a few pictures from its heyday, black and white and full of life.

There was a little canteen nearby, barely more than a wooden building with a few tables in it and a small kitchen in the back, where we ate lunch. The fare was standard Siberian. A salad of cucumber and tomatoes opened the meal, followed closely by soup. The soup was hot, flecked with herbs and strands of meat that peeled off the bones at the bottom. Then came the main course.

Buuzi are big dumplings. They’re doughy, filled with a heart-warming amalgam of muscle and fat. Their skins aren’t twisted tightly at the top, and broth is poured into the little opening that’s left. You’re supposed to bite one on the side, holding it delicately so that the broth stays in an unbitten corner. Then you tilt the dumpling towards your mouth, drinking the broth. You wait a minute for it to settle in your stomach. In your head, you know that it has to get digested, that it doesn’t just spread out into your body, that you have veins and arteries and capillaries that are filled with blood not broth. It fills your soul in a far simpler way, though, and your body is quite sated by that broth. The meat’s simple and good and warm, too. I don’t know if they’d be any good in the hands of a chef de cuisine at a high falootin’ restaurant in Moscow or Paris or New York, but they’re just right when you eat them with your hands out in the steppe.

I went outside after lunch. The canteen had a good porch with a fence to lean against. I wanted to sit on it and write. I brought a little more food me to snack on, and I sat and looked out at the town and the grassy expanses rolling behind it and had a cookie before I opened my Moleskine.

I’d written a few sentences before the dogs showed up. There were three, all healthy, two skittish, one friendly. I threw them a few scraps. The two skittish ones hung around for a moment longer then started to wrestle. There was no menace in their growls. The friendly one came closer.

“Hi,” I said. It had been too long since I’d had a good conversation with a dog.

The dog looked back at me.

“Pretty nice spot you got here,” I said.

She wagged.

“Seen any tanks recently?”

She blinked.

“Me neither,” I said. “That’s nice, huh?”

She came closer and nuzzled into my palm.

“I don’t have any more food for you, girl. Sorry.” I ran my hand down her side. Her fur, long and black on the sides and tan on her nose and legs, was warm. She sat down, half on me and half next to me. I put an arm around her.

“You’ve got a nice spot here,” I said again.

She yawned. I stopped talking and wrote. The boy in my fairytale had just climbed up the staircase and was watching a pair of big wind-beings arguing.

I have a tendency, I’ve realized, to kill animals in my stories for dramatic effect. It’s easy enough to use them to show a side of humanity that’s ruthlessly survivalist at best, cruel at worst, and to remind myself that we’re all animals too. There’s no need for that here. That afternoon in Siberia, all that mattered was that I could sit with a big, yawning dog and remember to slow down and breathe deeply and be warmed by the sun.