Path of Dogs

My husky's ashes came back from the crematorium yesterday and will be interred after a suitable plant has been found to the garden centre today. This story is mostly therapy for me (the research into it has also kept my mind occupied), but also might prove off interest to other canophilists.

The Chukchi people are an ancient tribal group living in the far north-east of what is now Russia, and one of their claims to fame is having bred huskies for some 3000 years now - hence my decision to record one of their dog stories. Unfortunately I have found it nigh on impossible to dig up such a story, just anecdotal scraps about their mythology and how certain themes recur in many different cultures - Yuri Berezkin's research was very helpful in this regard, along with a book by Yuri Rytkheu. Quite a lot of tribes have stories of otherworldy rivers composed of curious substances, with a number of references to seven rivers (though I could not dig up a reliable account of what all seven rivers were). The Chukchi, like many others, believe that dogs have their own afterlife and that they guard human access to the heavens - those who have been kind to canines pass on through to a happy land, whilst the cruel and sadistic either get chased away and bitten or pushed off a bridge into who-knows-what.
If an afterlife does exist (I have days when I think it does and others when I'm skeptical) then I want it to be one guarded by dogs and in which sadists are plunged into oblivion.

I am not sure how to pronounce the Chukchi names I nicked from a book, Omryn and Gitingev, but hopefully haven't mangled them too much. The totalitarian state has tried its best to obliterate Chukchi traditional culture and their shamanic religion (as well as pollute the hell out of their environment), and a lot of tension exists between the two. Like the past efforts to destroy aboriginal culture in Australia, some of this has been done via boarding schools to indoctrinate the young out of their ancestral ways under the guise of teaching them literacy, numeracy etc. Some of this tension has found its way into the story.


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