Etna

Look! See the dogs . . .

*

I was born near water.

I was born on a farm where many other dogs and other animals were born and cared for and lived.

I would never learn what the farm was intending to do with me.

Maybe nothing at all. Maybe I was supposed to grow old there.

Or maybe I was always supposed to leave. To go work somewhere else and be with a new family.

But it was home to me. My mother was there. My brothers and my sisters. An early memory: waking up to a den of pale noses surrounding me before our mother came, the silhouette of her face looming over us in the sky, the tall triangles of her ears pocketing the smell of the coast.

Every day there was sand floating in daylight and the salt on our tongues. The sea wind over grass. The barn eaves where hornets made nests that resembled the empty shells of turtles hanging up there heavy in the wind.

The cloven hooves of goats and the enormous sleepy pig who never wanted to play with us.

And the birds. Birds everywhere. Their bright feathers and their music. Their shadows and all their shit, which I loved to eat.

I loved, too, listening to the farm owners talking to each other. I liked the softness of their two voices. The woman often speaking through strands of her hair. The way the man rubbed his finger over a button on his shirt when he was preoccupied or nervous. The way they both said weather and child and bucket and feed and bed and leak in the roof and don’t forget about the dogs and beautiful and happy birthday and see you soon, I love you.

Then there was a day when their voices changed. It reminded me of when the man told the woman that his father had died. There was more silence and space between them, and when they spoke, it was about people fighting along a far border.

As the days went on, the farm owners kept talking about it. Whispering outside as they went to fill our water bowls, to feed the animals. About the country next to this one and then about other countries coming here, too, to help, to fight.

And then one day, not long after, a young woman arrived. She was alone and driving a pickup truck. When she got out, we saw that she was in a uniform. She took off her hat, revealing the long braid of her hair down her back as she approached the couple and said that she was hoping to find dogs to join up with and assist the armies arriving from North America and Europe.

I pretended not to notice her. I stayed close to my mother, who stood tall in the grass, our ears following the humans. I held the sounds of the words join up and armies and North America and Europe. I listened to the fabric of the young woman’s uniform moving across her thighs as she walked around, the leafy smell of the back of her neck suddenly everywhere in the air, pushing away the floating particles of sand.

The pig sleeping. My mother’s ears going stiff, and then her heart beating faster. The air inside that empty turtle shell above me vibrating as three shadows rushed across the grass. The woman scooped me up, and suddenly I was in the air and leaving, my mother barking and following until she couldn’t follow us anymore.

Later, as we were speeding down a country road, the woman would say that she chose me because she could tell I would grow to be very fast and strong. I was sitting with her up in the front. A rifle was leaning upright between us, and she reached over as she drove and ran her hand down my front leg to my paw, which I did not like.

To my surprise, she apologized—the couple on the farm had never apologized when they touched my paws—and then the woman smiled and explained that she also chose me because we could speak to each other, which wasn’t always the case with every dog she met.

It meant that I was special. And that she was in search of dogs that were special.

I didn’t understand any of this. I was scared. I whimpered; I wanted to go back. I didn’t know where we were going and I had never been in a vehicle before. Everything shook. I was trying not to listen to the scream of the engine and the tires spitting gravel and deep inside me the echo of my mother in the field, stuck behind the fence, and I was trying not to stare at the other dog in the seat behind me, asleep on her belly, paws out, eyes tightly and uncomfortably shut.

The dog was around my age, ten or eleven months, and she carried a faraway smell on her coat that I couldn’t locate. Still, even though I had never seen her before today, her smell comforted me. It comforted me because I could no longer smell my mother and my brothers and sisters. My nose had emptied itself of them.

So I clung to the smell of the new dog behind me as the truck kept speeding and shaking and the trees appeared to fly by faster, like they were enormous kites, and the power line whipped up and down like a sea wave.

I licked the rifle barrel, but it tasted bad.

The woman smiled again. What’s your name? she said. Why should I tell you? I quickly said back.

Fair enough, she said. It doesn’t matter. You’re going to get a new one. A better one.

And then it happened. I stood up straighter and turned toward her, understanding in that moment that she hadn’t actually spoken out loud this time, that we were literally communicating with each other in a different way.

With other animals, the common language we were able to form between us, no matter the animal, was also always a silent one. Whenever we communicated, it was like dark shapes appeared and lived in a space between our eyes, shapes we could translate.

With this young woman, it was similar, but I felt her words more physically, and around me: it was like the air was pressing against my ears, and then a small door opened in my head into a corner I had never been inside before. The colors of the day got a little brighter, but less sharp, and it was as though her words, clear, were carried by those bright colors—like the words were currents, vibrating, and I was responding.

I faced the window again and went silent. I tried to focus on the power line outside, but my head now hurt.

It doesn’t last, she said, placing a hand on my head. Besides, you’ll get used to it. You’ll get used to all of this, my darling.

She then told me her own name: Soojin. She was in her late twenties, still young for a human, I knew even then. I focused on the dog’s smell behind me—different grass, vomit, clay, forest trees—as Soojin told me she was a doctor: a doctor now in this country’s army, but that the Americans had hired her temporarily because they had heard she was good with handling dogs.

They don’t know the half of it, she said, and tapped the side of her head and winked.

She said that she doubted I would meet another like her in my life. She had never met or heard about anyone else who could speak to dogs the way she could. She couldn’t explain why it was not with every dog, only some of them. Or why it wasn’t all animals. What it was about dogs.

She wondered how I felt about all this: whether she was scaring me or delighting me, whether I wanted to say something, anything, back to her right now.

I wanted to say something back, but I also didn’t. I could tell she was testing me in some way, but I wasn’t sure what the test was. I caught the silhouette of a bird in the air above the trees and I thought again about my mother and my brothers and sisters, and I thought about the couple on the farm and their soft voices even as they worried about the fighting along the border, and I focused again on the smell and the heartbeats of the dog behind me, and then the woman tapped the steering wheel and said it was hard to keep up with my mind.

She pointed her thumb behind us and told me not to worry. The dog had been nauseous from the moving truck—they had been on the road for days—but that she would be fine. She was from a fishing village Soojin had visited, much farther away. The dog was strong, like me.

I named her Fuji, she said. Fuji?

Her war name, Soojin said. You’re all getting war names. You’re now war dogs, my darling. You’re getting a new home and you’ll make new friends and you’re going to work hard and save a lot of lives. But we don’t have much time. So we have to hurry.

I didn’t want a new home. I wanted to go back to the farm. I began to pant.

I knew she could hear me thinking all this, but Soojin just turned a dial in the truck. Cold air hit my neck as she reached across to scratch my chest, which, with the cold air, suddenly felt good.

Briefly, everything vanished except the goodness of that feeling, the cold air, and her scratching. I tried to focus on that.

And then, as she accelerated, passing a line of trucks the same color as her uniform, she named me Etna.

Etna, she said again, letting it settle in her mouth and in the air between us.

Behind the window of one of the trucks, a young man waved.

I lost track of the bird.

I repeated my name, Etna, as Soojin explained to me what a volcano was and that the one I was named for was on an island called Sicily. She said she had been reading a travel book on Sicily that she had checked out of a library. She realized this morning that she would be very late in returning it.

Soojin scratched my chest one more time.

Did you know, Etna, that there were once hermits in Sicily? she said.

She had told me that it was hard to follow my thoughts, but now I couldn’t follow hers: What was she talking about? The woman on the farm sometimes told her husband that he was in his own world. Soojin was in her own world, too.

I turned to check on Fuji, who was stirring but had yet to open her eyes. She had rolled to her side; I could now see that she had a pale stripe of fur across her chest.

Soojin kept talking about hermits and cottages on the hillside outside a place called Palermo. She said that in the next life, she’d like to be a hermit. To be alone. To see no one. To be in that tremendous quiet. Or maybe be a hermit with some dogs.

Tell me, Etna, is one a hermit if they have dogs?

I watched cars appear. Many, many of them in the other lane with big bags and small pieces of furniture strapped to the tops, all of them heading in the opposite direction, toward the sea. I tried to smell the sea as a tiny hand reached out and waved. All the sky reflected in the windshields.

Soojin hadn’t stopped talking.

Like you, Etna, she said. How about it? Come be a hermit with me one day. And how about Fuji, too?

Fuji stirred again; Soojin glanced up at the small mirror above her. I looked back and my eyes met Fuji’s for the first time, and we stayed that way, fixed on each other as Soojin continued to speak:

That’s right, my darling, are you feeling better? We’re talking about you. Meet Etna. He’s strong, like you. Two strong dogs. The pair of you will live in my very own hermit kingdom. So, promise me this: survive. Both of you. Look out for each other. And when this is over, come find me. We’ll go to Sicily together.

She took out her phone. She lifted it to her mouth and recorded my new name, that I was a twelve-month-old mixed-breed shepherd, sixty-seven pounds. That I had some sensitivity when my legs and paws were handled, which they would have to work on. And then she commanded the phone to send the message as she drove farther inland, my head hurting less as I pushed my ears forward, catching the bursts of faraway jets.

I thought Fuji and I would be with her from then on. Instead, after driving and driving for hours, past more fields and power lines, Soojin dropped us off at a gas station parking lot, where there were even more trucks and more people in uniforms. More new, loud sounds. We squirmed and kicked and whimpered as she lifted each of us out of the truck and told us that it was going to be difficult but that we had each other now. That we would have to look out for each other and to never forget that we were strong.

She crouched, burying her face into our scruffs, and Fuji and I kept whimpering, unsure about what would happen next, not wanting to part with her, pushing our snouts against her. Then, as we focused on a spot under her chin for the last time—pollen, a pulsing vein, a stranger’s lips—Soojin reminded us to remember our promise before she handed us over to a group of uniformed men and left.

During those war years, I would only cross paths with Soojin one more time after that day. It was when I was lying on a cold metal table in a field hospital as a doctor lowered a bare lightbulb hanging on a rope and pulled a threaded needle through my skin. I felt the air begin to vibrate around my head. When I opened my eyes briefly, Soojin was there, leaning down, stroking my ear before my body shook and I passed out.

Every now and then I spotted a uniformed woman with her long hair braided, taking her hat off and ducking into a tent, and my ears and tail would lift, the sudden relief of a familiar person flooding into me, and I let out a whine, wanting to run to her, but Fuji would nip my shoulder lightly and tell me to remember my training.

Who would’ve believed it if I told them that Fuji would end up larger and stronger than me? That she would be the one who led us dogs, who charged into places first, who took the first step onto an unknown road? She was the one who fought the fiercest. Who was braver than the rest of us. Who fought and kept fighting.

But on that first day together, Fuji had been much more frightened than I was. Are we a pack now? she nervously asked as Soojin departed and the men slipped us into crates beside each other on the back of another truck. When they, too, were gone, when the truck started and we sped down another road, Fuji shifted over in her crate to be as close to me as possible.

I did the same, pressing my snout against my own crate until I could almost feel her damp nose against mine. The mole on the tip of her tongue whenever she tried to lick me. Her alert eyes, which were bright blue, staring back.

Are we a pack now?

__________________________________

From Etna by Paul Yoon. Copyright © 2026 by Paul Yoon. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.