The Professional Soldier

The nicked, lead-colored barrel of Will's rifle protruding over the jeep's front seat seemed covered with tiny, silvery wings in the blazing sun. Jorge and the dog were sitting in the back. The dog was a German shepherd named Ana. Jorge put out his hand to touch Ana's dense winter coat, and it felt dry and even hotter than the air. Incredible, he thought, that only a few days before, he'd still been over there, on the other side of the world, training with the dog, marching for hours over the broken snow of a rock-hard landscape and fording a swift, nearly frozen river.

He tapped Ana's nose. It was damp and cool, but her breath was heavy and warm. He took off his cap and wiped his slick brow with his arm. On the front of the cap was a small, shield-shaped pin that depicted a Germanic soldier who didn't look anything like Jorge, standing next to a proudly seated dog that very much resembled Ana. That pin--if he was killed, it would be what they'd send home to his mother, unless the enemy reached him first and plucked it as a souvenir. He stared at it glumly. Then he put his cap on again.

The jeep was parked in front of the brigade headquarters in Wiwili, and they were waiting for the driver to come out and take them up to Wamblan, where Jorge and the dog were going to be stationed. They had been transferred up from Managua the previous day.

"How was it over there?" asked Wili, who was a sublieutenant stationed in Wamblan. "Did you like Berlin?".

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"You can't imagine such a city," said Jorge enthusiastically, though he'd spent only one day there, followed by nine at the canine-corps training base, which was in a frigid rural area near the Polish border. What he remembered mostly about Berlin were multitudes of pink-faced people and pink-gray buildings and the unearthly sensation of being in a place where all the streets were paved.

"And the snow," said Jorge, widening his eyes. "The snow is beautiful."

Wili slowly shook his head and hissed "Phissst" through his teeth. "The only country they've ever sent me to," he said, "is Honduras."

Jorge smiled. He liked Wili and was glad he was going to be one of his officers. Wili was the type who made you feel less afraid. Under thick, arched brows, his eyes showed an expectant, confiding humorousness. His face had the shape of cherubic plumpness, but his deeply browned skin looked hard and taut and his chin was evenly stubbled. Jorge's face was smooth. He was 16 and Wili was five years older. Lately, Jorge always felt wide-eyed, and he was: He looked as if he even listened with his eyes, and as if he were easily enthralled by what went by. His ears stuck out like damp, overdone potato chips, and he was so thin that when he rolled up the sleeves of his uniform, it didn't take long for them to unravel around his elbows like falling socks.

"That dog," said Wili, resting his chin on his arm and gazing thoughtfully at Ana, "is a tank."

"Ana isn't used to the heat," said Jorge. She was panting and had been shedding from the moment they'd landed in Managua. Wherever Ana sat or lay down, she left it looking like she'd just had a haircut.

"A very elegant tank," said Wili.

Ana's muscular back and barreling ribs were black, so that if you looked at her from the front, the protruding black flanks did resemble a kind of armor-fortified saddle, a tank dog. Her chest and legs were tobacco-brown, and when she sat, her front legs resembled long, sinewy human arms.

Ana yawned, emitting a weary whine from the back of her throat, and her tongue fell out, fat, pink, dripping saliva. She panted as if she'd just finished a hard run but otherwise did not really seem so discomforted by the heat. She sat as erect as a stone lion, with her ears as prominent as black steeples, and her eyes, black pupils in tea-colored coronas, were, as usual, alert. Whenever Jorge noticed the dog's alertness, it automatically affected him like a command; he became alert, too; it was a kind of mimicry. He stared in whatever direction the dog's heavy, conical, bearish face was pointed, and he always saw the same thing: a transparent emptiness waiting one step ahead of Ana and several steps ahead of himself, waiting to be filled in by her perfected canine talents. A supposedly infallible sense of smell was the dog's main military talent--that and endurance.

"Is there much combat around Wamblan?" blurted Jorge, instantly regretting the anxiety in his voice.

"Hah," said Wili. "We're four kilometers from the border. Them and us, we can practically hear each other thinking."

"Well," said Jorge, "Ana can smell a Contra at least a kilometer away."

"Ooof!" said Wili. "Ana will be turning circles."

"But they won't be able to get close," Jorge loyally persisted. "I mean, they won't be able to surprise us."

"Compa," said Wili, "if that were true, then everybody would have these dogs, and instead of war, we'd have thousands of sons of whores wandering around unable to get within a kilometer of each other. The war would look like this"--and he pointed both of his index fingers down and squiggled many little circles twirling away from one another.

When the soldier who was driving came out, he was carrying a rifle with the clip in and a belted bullet pouch. He was a chubby, light-skinned adolescent in a neatly pressed uniform, with cheeks that looked like pink sponges oozing water over the rest of his face and small, dark eyes that went startled as Ana emitted a low growl at his approach--which Jorge quieted by touching her hard nape.

"Don't worry, compa, Ana just doesn't know your smell yet," said Jorge.

"There's been an ambush on the road to Wamblan," said the soldier, glancing distrustfully back at the dog as he got into the jeep. "We've been on the radio. The T.P.U.s were coming down in trucks and they were ambushed"--the Tropas Pablo Ubeda was a special counterinsurgency battalion and Wili said it'd been on a two-week mission around Wamblan; the soldiers stationed at Wamblan were army regulars--"and the ones from Wamblan came down right away for the fighting."

"Puta" said Wili.

"Puta," said Jorge, trying to echo the tough-sounding nonchalance of Wili's drawled "Whore," but his came out like a whisper. Wili detached one of the clips from the harnesslike straps he wore and slid it into his rifle. Then he gave the rifle a shake. Jorge had a .45 pistol in a hip holster, and on missions with Ana, it was the only weapon he'd carry. But not having a rifle now made him feel suddenly childish and dependent.

The driver, whose name was Severo, started the jeep, and soon they were rolling down a steep, muddy road toward the river at the northern edge of Wiwili. The river was high and wide, its brownish currents gleaming. Women were washing laundry on flat rocks near the shore, their skirts pulled up and knotted between their thighs, and a dark-skinned girl up to her waist in the water turned her naked back to the jeep and went on soaping her hair with her elbows high. Ana was casually attentive to the stunted, mustard-colored dog chasing the jeep, yelping and sniveling, as Severo drove along the bank a short way before turning into the river where he knew the crossing would be shallowest. The jeep plowed in like a bull; and Ana stared down, seemingly perplexed for once, as the floor filled with murky water. Jorge could feel the jeep verging on floating and fighting the currents as if swimming with animal tenacity.

"Even through a river like this," Jorge announced excitedly, "Ana can track the enemy."

On the other side, there were two roads, one running along the river and the other climbing into the forested terrain--that was the one they took, and it just went up and up, while the land around it fell away with increasing steepness, so that after two hours of driving, the road was nothing more than the muddy spine of a ridge, lined on both sides with the tops of trees rising from the forest floor below. For Severo, driving was like clawing his way to the top. The jeep's wheels collapsed through muddy chunks in the road; the hood was always tilted at an angle. Occasionally, the wheels got stuck and they spun and shrieked as if trying to burn the sinking mud into glass and, finally catching, leaped forward as if trying to fly.

Stretches of road were so precariously narrow and soft that one careless or unlucky move would have toppled them over the side. But sometimes the road evened out for a while, and the forest floor elevated gradually and presented a dark, lushly tangled underbrush. They passed very few huts or peasants along the way. The forest was like cloud banks, hiding everything and nothing but more of itself, and Jorge concentrated on it expressionlessly, too spooked by the possibility of ambush, at first, to pay much attention to the conversation and laughter in the front, where Wili was passing the time by bragging.

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"Wili," laughed Severo, "you're such a bullshitter."

"No," said Wili. "You can't even imagine the life I've already lived. On top of everything else, I have a black belt in karate...."

Wili claimed to have been a center fielder on the junior national baseball team, a guerrilla, a university student for two years following the triumph of the revolution, and then to have been sent into Honduras for nearly as long to spy on Contras and CIA agents.

Wili was so breathless, he was warbling; it was as if he were turning his past into a song. Jorge was struck by the notion of a past so full of adventure and heroics that it could fill in a song; where would his own song begin?

"So now, instead of going back to the university, I am here. And do you know why? Because I was a spy; if those shitheads ever win, they will kill me. So I am fighting for my life. I can't let others fight for my life.... I have women everywhere. Severo, if you knew how to touch a woman like I do, hah, I bet you wouldn't even be here; you'd have run off to Miami by now to make a fortune as a gigolo."

"Bullshitter!" shouted Severo. "¡Jode-dor!"

Wili laughed loudly and patted Severo's arm.

"Were you really a spy?" asked Jorge.

"Of course. And you?" asked Wili, turning his head sideways and looking at Jorge out of one amused eye. "Is that really why you went into the army? To train dogs?"

"The dog was ready. They had to train me," said Jorge. "I'd hoped to become a helicopter pilot."

The road had been flat for a while when Severo pulled the jeep over and stopped.

"Look," he said. "I think the ambush happened about ten kilometers from here."

"I don't hear anything, do you?" said Wili. "The fighting must have stopped."

Severo shrugged. "It should have by now. But let's wait a little."

So they all got out of the jeep, urinated onto the road and stood there, listening for the faraway sound of resumed combat.

After they'd been waiting awhile, Wili's face suddenly went still, and he held his breath and slightly cocked his head in concentration. "Here come the trucks," he said finally.

Jorge was puzzled.

Severo was staring at the ground, and at least a minute went by before he looked up and said, "Now I hear them."

"You hear trucks?" Jorge was bewildered to the edge of panic.

Wili grinned. "After you've been up here awhile," he said, "you'll even be able to tell the time with your ears. And if you've left a girl at home, you'll be able to hear it all the way up here the minute she forgets about you."

Jorge didn't have a girl.

But finally he heard the faraway rumbling of army-truck engines. It was not Ana's purpose to pay attention to the sound of trucks, and she stood passively and did not lift her head to look up the road until they were already in sight. The trucks bore down through the dark trees with the captivating force of a huge iron train. There were three trucks, the first two jammed with jostled soldiers wearing the light-green, brown-speckled uniforms of the T.P.U.s, and the third was less crowded. They had to slow down to squeeze past the jeep, but they didn't stop. The driver of the first truck leaned out the window and shouted, "Go ahead, it's all clear! We can't stop; we have wounded!"

The first two trucks passed, and then came the third, with one soldier standing up in back, resting his rifle on the roof of the cab; a few others were sitting on the benches inside the fenced sides, but Jorge couldn't see into the back as it passed, because the rear gate was up.

"Wounded compas" said Wili matter-of-factly, "and also dead compas."

The three soldiers were solemn-faced as they listened to the noise of the trucks fade.

Dead, thought Jorge. And what is that? He stared down the empty road.

They got back into the jeep and hadn't driven far when they came upon the truck that had been hit in the ambush. How odd it looked. A propelled grenade had ripped open the flat steel in front like a monstrous, pinching claw; bullets had punched shiny holes through the cab, and the frame around what had been the windshield was grotesquely twisted. War had exposed the baffling flimsiness of a once-sturdy-looking truck, transforming it into a big, somehow ridiculous scrap of torn metal at the side of a road.

Ana became rigid--smelling the enemy? The quivering nose was held high, and she got up from the jeep as if to follow some tantalizing scent into the air. When they got out, the dog paced a restless, tugging semicircle in front of Jorge. He pulled the leash taut and commanded her to be still.

But he wondered if it weren't foolish to be standing out in the open like this.

Wili was wandering casually up the road, his rifle slung from his shoulder and his arm resting on top of it.

In the back of the truck, the floor planks were sprinkled with the discharged bullet casings, and more glittered in the road--the ambushed soldiers had had to fight their way off the truck through a hornet swarm of enemy fire and down into the cover of the forest.

Severo picked up one of the brass casings, sniffed it, then blew across its top, making it whistle. The dog stared. Severo looked at her and dropped his hand from his mouth.

Wili came walking back down the road.

"Evidently, they screwed up their ambush," he said. "That's what I think. Instead of waiting until they had all four trucks inside the ambush, they hit the first. Stupids. In the end, they were the ones who were surprised--by everyone coming down after."

•

When they entered Wamblan an hour later, it was dusk and the sky had clouded over. The forested hills surrounding the town cast shadows that seemed dissolved into the light, giving it a greenish, watery translucence. Wamblan was too deep in the war zone to be at all thriving anymore: Much of the population had left, and its few shops sold little that wasn't grown nearby. Wili said you couldn't even get beer or cigarettes anymore. The base was at the far end of town, where it took up a short side road. There was another grouping of barracks and a watchtower on a cleared hill overlooking a quietly flowing green river. Soldiers were milling in the muddy, puddle-gleaming road in front of the crumbling buildings of mud brick and pastel-enameled stucco, some of which were painted with slogans of the revolution and bright murals. It was almost a festive scene--the first thing Jorge thought of was soldiers waiting to go in to a dance. When Severo cut the engine, Jorge heard their chatter and laughter.

Of course, the army regulars of Wamblan were happy--they'd fought in a battle and none of them had been killed. Four of the T.P.U.s had been killed, and several wounded, but the rest of it had gone just as Wili had said. One soldier had a bandage wound around his head from a bullet that had grazed him, and though he stood in the midst of the celebration with the rest, he had a stunned, quiet expression.

"We killed fifteen--"

"No, twenty-five!"

"We killed a lot. They stand up when they shoot!"

The soldiers surrounded the jeep, and their voices excited Jorge as being still raw (continued on page 150) Professional Soldier (continued from page 146) and vibrant with the important experience or battle.

Ana's thoroughbred beauty, her shaggy bulk and ferocious aura impressed and even amazed them, they who came from a country of mutant mongrels and hairless pariahs. Jorge and the dog stepped down from the jeep, and the soldiers crowded around.

"That looks like a circus animal!"

"¡Elegante!"

"What does it do?"

Jorge knelt by the dog, one hand on her nape, murmuring soothingly. Of course it made Ana nervous to be surrounded by so many new soldiers. But it was a good thing for her to familiarize herself with their scents right away, in order to distinguish them from the enemies' later.

"This dog tracks the enemy," explained Jorge.

"Oh, you need a big dog for that," said an eager soldier who seemed no older than 14. "Don't you?"

"And a very specialized nose," said Wili, bemused and touching his own nose. "Made in the German Democratic Republic, no less."

"Yes, the nose. Germany," said the young soldier, nodding vigorously. "Germany, how could it not be? Things like that have to be better over there, right? Our dogs are not useful. No, they're not useful."

"It's just a nose," said another soldier. "Our dogs have noses. We could teach our dogs to have such noses, right?"

"But that is too much dog just to hold up a nose," said another.

"Show us a trick, compa. Can this dog do tricks?"

Ana growled--it was all too much for her--and several of the soldiers jumped back and got laughed at by the rest.

"That dog has shark's teeth!"

"¡Elegante!"

The base had been informed of the dog's arrival days in advance, and Jacinto, the commanding lieutenant, had already had a chicken-wire pen constructed. The pen had a tin roof, a gate that locked, and it was under a tree, next to an outhouse.

"It's possible that this was a mistake," said a soldier. "What if the stink ruins the dog's nose?"

"No," said another seriously. "All dogs like bad smells."

Then Ana was in the pen, pacing in circles, pantherlike, over the dark dirt. She found her spot to sit down, straightened up and stared back at the soldiers.

For the first time that day, Jorge could relinquish his tight hold of the leash. It was a silently draining job in itself, just holding that leash all day. He folded it up and stuck it under his belt, by his holster. His freed hand floated.

•

Later, after he fed Ana and was shown to his bunk, Jorge went into the mess, which was nothing more than a wooden shed with an iron stove where a local peasant woman dished out servings of red beans, emaciated chicken parts and tortillas. The mess was crowded with soldiers, and there Jorge met Jacinto. The broad-shouldered lieutenant was easily the tallest man in the battalion. There was something of the stillness and depth of the forest in his dark, Indian-featured face and large, candid eyes, something of its transparent solitude; though in his 20s, he'd been a commanding officer at Wamblan for four years. Jacinto's words had an unforced, simple precision and grace, and whenever he spoke, the others fell silent. Even Wili was deferential around him. Watching and listening to Jacinto, it was suddenly obvious to Jorge why the word elegante was so popular among the troops at Wamblan. It was Jacinto who had imposed on them the conscious theme of elegante. They used the word so often that it seemed to run through them like a common current, uniting them as much as the color of their uniforms. When Jorge noticed that U.S. army was stamped into his fork, one of the soldiers remarked that many of their eating utensils came from captured enemy knapsacks; they were superior eating utensils, he said; they were elegant, and it was an elegant joke to be eating with them.

"We'll go after them tomorrow," said Jacinto, and Jorge's heart jumped. They were going after the enemy tomorrow.

Candlelight reflected off the greasy, plastic-sheeted table. Outside, the tree frogs had erupted into a loud, relentless, hammering racket. It was, to Jorge, truly an unworldly sound, as if an evil wind from off the moon had rained a plague of tree frogs into that forest. He'd never heard so much noisiness coming from the night all at once, and it made him feel how remote and faraway--far away from everything but war--Wamblan really was.

One of the soldiers went to get his tape player and his three American rock-'n'-roll tapes. Then they listened to the tree frogs drowning out the music from the little tape player. They talked and found more things to refer to as elegant. The soldiers thought Jorge's canine-corps pin was elegant, and they passed his cap around.

Ana sat up in the pen, her eyes opaquely glowing in the dark. Green fireflies shifted over the grass all the way down to the black, shining river; on its opposite bank, the forest rose steeply, a somber-looking monument full of tree frogs; at the top of that long hill, the tree line made a sharp-etched blackness against the night-flooded layer of clouds weighing down. Stepping into the pen, Jorge felt himself stepping into the transparent emptiness in front of Ana's nose. It seemed precisely to fit the pen and was all the more tangible because he was holding his breath against the outhouse smell; and when he exhaled, it was as if he could see his breath disappearing into it. What was that emptiness, he thought, but the mystery of what would happen tomorrow when he finally followed the dog into it?

Ana watched him with enlarged, black-gem pupils as he crouched in front of her, whispering the usual friendly words. "Schneeball, Schneeball," he singsonged; it meant snowball in German and was just a thing he'd gotten into the habit of saying when no other words came to mind.

He rubbed the dog's neck, plunged his fingers into the dense, furry folds under her jaw, thumpingly patted the sturdy chest.

•

At dawn, 31 soldiers left in the back of a truck to return to the site of the previous day's ambush. It had rained heavily during the night and the forest was misty in the early heat. Jacinto had appointed Wili to lead the patrol. Most of the soldiers were armed with automatic rifles and extra clips, some had grenade launchers slung over their backs and two carried heavy machine guns on their shoulders, cartridge belts draped around their necks. Jorge sat on a spare tire in the back, holding the leash, Ana seated between his knees.

"You look like a cookie," Wili said, and then he mimicked Jorge's bland, apprehensive stare.

As soon as they'd all climbed down from the truck and into the forest, Jorge could feel through the leash how Ana was being pulled along by the hundreds of invisible enemy boots that had fled through the wet, soft underbrush almost 24 hours before. There wasn't any special urgency to the dog's pulling, nor had her nose yet become attached to any singularly pursuable trail. They walked awhile, to the very edge of where the fighting had spread, where, without Ana, the soldiers would have had to fan out and read with their eyes for some sign of the enemies' flight. Then they walked a little more before Wili received his first lesson in the dog's magical talent. Although Jorge knew it was inevitable, it still struck him with the force of a new revelation when Ana led them struggling through layers of thick vegetation and into a narrow, descending footpath of mud oozing up through flattened weeds and grass.

"Here?" said Wili, gaping, as if it were just too easy to be true.

"At least some of them went this way," said Jorge as calmly as he could. Inwardly, the thrill he felt was indistinguishable from his fright.

"Of course," said Wili. "It's a path."

It was a perfect path, walled by vegetation, and down they went into it, single file, Ana leading the way and Wili right behind Jorge. Before long, Ana's loping stride began to lengthen. Then the dog swerved off the path, through a layer of sun-dappled leaves, and, as if it were the exact and only thing they'd been looking for all along, she plunged her nose into a wet piece of cloth surrounded by flattened and recently hacked-out branches. Wili probed the cloth with the end of his rifle: It was blood- and rain-soaked; it was the bottom half of a pants leg cut away from an enemy uniform.

"Puta" said Wili. "This one got it right in the shin, and they cut the cloth off to tend to his wound."

He looked at the dog with an almost offended expression.

"The ones who stayed with their wounded will have to go slow," said Wili. He thought a moment and added, "And who knows how many there are?"

"How far is it to the border?" asked Jorge. He felt full of confidence in the dog now.

"About thirty kilometers," said Wili. "But the land goes up and down like a son of a whore."

They pushed on. For hours, they followed the dog along that ancient, twisting path that had probably been used by trappers, remote farmers, the mule trains of smugglers and even warring armies 60 years ago and before. The more they descended, the hotter and more tropical it became. The suffocating, bilious-green air steamed amid trees with tremendous, shaggy, dark trunks, paler, crooked palms, a disorder of vines and piled growths of drooping leaves; the bright-red, spiky sheaths of parasitical plants sat on branches like burning flames. Occasionally, small birds hopped quietly from one twig to another, too wearied by the heat to disrupt the heavy daytime silence of the jungle. Jorge's boots sucked green mud, and he heard 60 other boots doing the same in a long line behind him. A constant mask of sweat stung his eyes: Ahead of him, there was only the bouncing, plumed cobra of Ana's tail, the hinged churning of her rear legs driving the lung, prowling torso forward as she opened up her private tunnel through the jungle.

And so it went, as Wili had said, up and down like a son of a whore, out of the jungle and into the fierce sun as they marched along high, grassy ridges and saw hillside after hillside of lush, deserted pasture and the occasional farmhouse--and the hills going on and on, blue in the distance, all the way into Honduras. Half the sky was limpid blue and half of it, to the north, was an oncoming, slow-motion stampede of purplish clouds.

The dog led them off the path again, into a hilltop grove, where they found shaved sticks stuck into the ground in the pattern of some ancient, rudimentary device for reading the stars. They were from the makeshift lean-tos the enemy had camped under the night before. There was a barely damp cigarette-rolling paper clinging to a weed. Ana sniffed it and hoisted her head up, with the paper stuck to her nose. The soldiers grinned and giggled. It was the first funny thing Jorge had ever seen the dog do.

"Look, it won't come off," joked a soldier, pretending to try to peel the paper from Ana's nose, though he kept his hand well away. "Now the nose won't work anymore. It's a new kind of mine just for dogs. The bastards."

Ana shook her head and the paper fell off.

"Hah," said a soldier. "This dog can do anything."

•

They were down in the jungle again when it began to rain. The shimmering, driving rain fanned a rich breeze as it pushed through the broad leaves; it vanquished the heat, turning the jungle into a shivering, bright-green blur. It soaked through Jorge's uniform, drenched his skin and tired limbs, washed the sting out of his eyes and ran in fresh sheets over his face, over his lips. The rain was pure pleasure. It rained so heavily, and for so long, that its effect became trancelike. Jorge felt full of rain in a jungle full of rain. Ana flowed along the path like a fat black water snake.

But then the rain stopped. Jorge felt his uniform turn to warm, heavy mud. Steam rose from his shoulders and thighs. His wet boots began to chafe against the parts of his feet that already felt rubbed and raw. He stumbled over a slippery tree root and then over a loose stone in the mud. He felt the debris of the jungle sticking to his skin, deposited there, it seemed, by the swarms of tiny insects that had filled in the empty spaces left by the rain. He itched all over. He was stumbling more and more and wasn't sure, at first, if it was because he was becoming too tired or because the dog was pulling harder. Ana's tail swung rapidly back and forth. With every step she took, she seemed to be trying to pounce, catlike, on some speedily burrowing mole beneath the path. He pulled up short to slow the dog and felt his arm just about wrenched out of its socket; he tumbled forward again.

"I think they're close," gasped Jorge.

"How close?" hissed Wili behind him.

"Maybe very close," said Jorge.

Wili was right on Jorge's shoulder now; Jorge could see the barrel of his rifle protruding. And glancing back, he saw how all the humor had drained out of Wili's face. Wili was staring with a kind of mute consternation and frenzy into the jungle ahead of Ana.

The dog had warned them. And now the enemy was behind every broad leaf and trunk; the enemy had even squeezed behind every dangling liana and was clinging to the back of every black cloud of hanging moss.

"Close," whispered Jorge. How wrong to be walking in front, he suddenly thought, his vulnerable belly and pounding heart exposed, unshielded, to the enemy. Was it possible that for the next two years of his life, this was what he was going to be doing? He, Jorge, a boy? Walking alone in front? A long line of soldiers behind him, waiting like a mousetrap set to spring if the enemy took Jorge?

Ohhh, thought Jorge. Oh, no.

But now was when he was supposed to find bravery in his ability to hold tightly to the leash, to remain alert and attentive, trusting and calm.

Of course I'm ready to die! he thought. But how much better to be an ordinary soldier with a rifle, somewhere in the back of the line.

Then Wili kept ordering Jorge to stop; and each time Wili moved ahead, his rifle ready, he listened to the jungle, then gestured with his hand and several soldiers came forward and disappeared into the foliage on both sides of the path, going to scout for an enemy ambush. They were gone for minutes at a time.

And Ana waited rigidly, panting, her tongue hanging out the side of her mouth like a fresh cut of bright-pink ham. She stood waiting on the path, her path, the one path she'd singled out from all the paths in the jungle. And only to Ana was the enemy something more than invisible.

When the soldiers came back, the quiet column moved forward again; then, after a while, they stopped again, did it all over again. For an hour, they kept up in this painstaking way. It was late afternoon, and already the light in the jungle was beginning to dim. Wili seemed not to care if he was letting the enemy get ahead. He seemed to have fallen into a battle between the dog's unrelenting pursuit and his own habit of engaging in careful stalking tactics.

We won't catch the enemy now, thought Jorge. And his exhaustion overwhelmed him.

Why chase the enemy at all? he thought. Suddenly, it seemed a bit senseless, almost a comedy, to go tracking the enemy all day, knowing you might not catch them.

But wait, he thought. You have to chase the enemy, because what are you supposed to do, just let them come in and kill?

Then he felt himself on the verge of an important insight: Yes, it wasn't worth it to Wili to catch the enemy unless he was sure he could take them by surprise. So at this rate, they might go on patrol after patrol before he actually got it the way he wanted; they might walk thousands of kilometers, over weeks, months, continually refining their tracking strategies, their ears and their eyes, and waiting until they'd turned the jungle into one big trap for the enemy.

So it wasn't necessarily easy to get killed in war, even if you had to walk in front!

Elegante, thought Jorge.

It must make the enemy crazy, he thought, to know that they were always being pursued by soldiers who would attack only when they were sure that only their enemies would die.

Then maybe Wili doesn't like the dog, he thought suddenly. The notion alarmed him, and as he brooded over it, his lower lip hung heavy. But the dog helps, he insisted. The key was to thwart the dog a little, hold her back a little, as Jorge was doing.

They came to a river. It was a fairly wide, swift blue-green river digging its own deep, narrow valley through the jungle. On both banks, ash-yellow, green-spotted, symmetrical tree trunks made a pretty, gilded tunnel for the river. The fading light of the day filtered through the bowering leaves like long, pale-gold, translucent streamers.

Wili sent four soldiers across to scout the other side and let the rest take a break. The soldiers filed quietly down from the path and spread out on the bank. Jorge, emotionless with exhaustion now, slumped back against one of the yellowish trees. He closed his eyes, listened to the peaceful murmuring of the river. It made him think nostalgically of the rain; the rain seemed already to have happened some other day. Then he remembered that now-distant morning when the German officers, who were always looking for ways to display the hardiness of their Germanic-Communist-canine spirits, had swum naked in the nearly frozen river with the dogs, tossing sticks back and forth....

The memory of it must have made him smile, because he heard a soldier say, "You're happy with this dog, aren't you? Yes, this dog is useful. She doesn't get tired, does she? No, she doesn't get tired."

He opened his eyes and saw the very young soldier stroking the top of Ana's heavy, silent head.

"She could go like this for a week," said Jorge, "and not even have to eat."

When the soldiers signaled from the other side, the rest went across. Jorge unhooked the leash and the dog eagerly splashed in. Ana was a driven swimmer. Most of the soldiers had no trouble with the currents and powered themselves across in a straight line, their weapons held over their heads. But Jorge, holding up his pistol, felt the river flooding heavily around his waist and felt his boots constantly slithering on the slippery, rocky bottom; several times, he had to strain with all his might to keep from being pulled downstream. He was finally about to step up onto the bank when he relaxed, forgetting that the currents were strong where it was shallow, too, and they tripped him: He fell back into the water with a vision of the dog bounding off. When he scrambled up, some of the soldiers were grinning goofily at him. But the others were looking upriver, far from where the path resumed its climb into the jungle.

"The dog ran away," said Wili softly, pointing up at where Ana had vanished into the dense foliage behind the yellowish trees.

Then all the soldiers were gaping toward that spot.

"She's supposed to wait," said Jorge, fear sweeping through him with a terrible chill.

Wili gazed at him, almost cross-eyed with bewilderment. He seemed to have no idea what to do.

"And won't the dog come back?" asked Wili.

"I think yes," said Jorge.

"Ah," said Wili, as if relieved, and that was all he said.

They waited, all of them with their weapons ready. But there was no sign of Ana. There was only the murmuring of the river, the darkening jungle rising up before them and the first evening chattering of the birds.

"Well," said Wili expressionlessly.

"Do you want me to call the dog?" asked Jorge.

Wili shook his head no. And then he quickly pointed out eight soldiers and told them to spread out and to make their way quietly and slowly up through the jungle. He told the rest to wait and to be ready.

"Jorge," he said. "Come."

Wili, with Jorge behind him, entered the jungle at the precise spot Ana had vanished into it. Hunched over, they crept stealthily through the pathless, dark, quivering green. Jorge felt warm, wet leaves sliding like caresses against his face. He wanted to bury his face in each caress and hide forever. He was surrounded by endlessly winding foliage and shadow, and somewhere in all this was Ana.

Why not just go back without the dog? That was the absurdity of this predicament: No matter how great the danger, it seemed unimaginable to go back without the prize animal. How would he explain having lost Ana to Jacinto? He might even find himself sentenced to clean outhouses with the deserters and draft dodgers at one of the main military bases; it would be an understandable punishment. Somehow, he had failed; somehow, there on the river-bank, Ana had forgotten all about Jorge. Was it possible that Wili, who he was sure now despised the dog, was going after Ana just to try to save him from a completely dismal fate?

Up ahead, in front of Wili, he saw the light glowing intricately through a wall of vegetation. It was the edge of a clearing. Wili reached it first, on his knees and one hand, his other arm cradling his rifle. Then he motioned for Jorge to get down. And Jorge flattened out and stayed that way, buried in wet jungle.

Then he heard Wili whisper, softly, as if all the air inside him were slowly being drawn into that one word, "Puuutaaa."

Son of a thousand whores, what? Jorge silently screamed.

Wili turned his face toward him, his face partly obscured by leaves, but Jorge saw one of his eyes: dark, wide-open, as if haunted. Wili put his finger to his lips and gestured for him to come forward.

And Jorge floated up through that last bit of jungle on his hands and knees, gripping his pistol tight; and then he peered through that final, dense curtain of swollen leaves into the clearing formed by the sun-blotting shade of an immense jungle ceiba, and he could not believe what he saw: At the foot of the huge, dark trunk, between gnarled, spread roots, in clover-like weeds, in black-green, almost phosphorescent light, Ana was straddling an enemy soldier, her tail hanging limp. The enemy soldier lay flat on his back, his motionless arms and legs sprawled wide. The pants leg of his uniform was cut away and his shin was bloodily bandaged.

They dared not move a muscle. Jorge felt his cheek involuntarily begin to twitch.

Ana raised her head, her black ears stiffening, and she stepped gingerly off the enemy soldier and looked back over her shoulder at the spot where Jorge and Wili were hidden, and her snout was dark with blood.

And blood rose like a small, sloppy fountain from the fang-torn hole in the enemy soldier's throat.

"Shit," whispered Wili.

Jorge watched in openmouthed, breathless horror as the dog came loping toward them.

Ana pushed her bloody, conical nose, her glowing eyes through the leaves, and Jorge felt the dog's warm breath on his face, and the noise of her panting filled his ears.

" 'Is there much combat around Wamblan?' he blurted, instantly regretting the anxiety in his voice."

" 'I was a spy; if those shitheads ever win, they will kill me. So I am fighting for my life.' "

"U.S. army was stamped into his fork. Their eating utensils came from captured enemy knapsacks."