Kazakh

For similarly named dogs in two other novels, see Kazak

A German shepherd

Kazakh was the name of Selena MacIntosh's female seeing-eye dog. A spayed German shepherd, she never barked, played with other dogs, or "investigated interesting smells or noises" since she had been trained since a puppy against engaging in "natural canine activities" so as to be useful to humans. Anyone who knew the MacIntoshes was also familiar with Kazakh, despite her lack of personality due to "surgery and training". When her father Andrew MacIntosh appeared on talk shows, Selena and Kazakh would watch on the backstage monitor. Bobby King, the publicity agent for the cruise, first met the MacIntoshes and Kazakh, who were already scheduled to attend, at Elaine's in New York City while they were dining with Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis and Rudolf Nureyev.

With Selena and her father, Kazakh visited Japan in 1985, and in 1986, she flew with the two, as well as Zenji and Hisako Hiroguchi from Mérida in Mexico to Quayaquil, Ecuador in a private Learjet piloted by the elder MacIntosh. At the El Dorado Hotel in Quayaquil, before the planned sailing of the Bahia de Darwin on "the Nature Cruise of the Century" to the Galapagos Islands, Andrew MacIntosh ordered two filet mignon steaks from room service. When Jesús Ortiz delivered them to the room, Kazakh, free and unharnessed, looked up at him hopefully and wagged her tail. MacIntosh's order that Ortiz put the steaks on the floor for Kazakh and leave the room, was so offensive to Ortiz given the mass starvation then plaguing Ecuador, that it led him to disconnect the hotel's phone lines, partially setting in motion the storming of the El Dorado Hotel and the escape of a few people to Santa Rosalia Island on the Bahia de Darwin. Kazakh and Selena stayed in their hotel room listening to the starving crowds gathered outside while her father and the Japanese engineer Zenji Hiroguchi were shot and killed by Ecuadorian soldier Geraldo Delgado.

Kazakh was evacuated from the hotel by Siegfried von Kleist along with Selena, Mary Hepburn, Hisako Hiroguchi, and James Wait, along with six Kanka-bono girls. When rioters attacked their bus, Hisako covered Selena and Kazakh with her body. Kazakh, like others on the bus, was covered with "seeming kernels of white corn" when the windows were blown out during the bombing of the city hospital, and was immobilized with shock as they approached the Bahia de Darwin. On the first night onboard, Selena slept on Kazakh like a pillow. The next morning, Kazakh continued to digest her meal of the previous day, but within days it had been so long since she'd eaten that she was "skin and bones" by then. Kazakh was choked to death, skinned, and gutted by the six Kanka-bono girls with their bare hands one night while Selena slept. They roasted her in an oven. Leon Trout observed them eating her during a visit from his deceased father Kilgore. Afterward, Selena continued to look for Kazakh, calling her name throughout the ship.