Korea Dispatch

Bokshiri after a trim

We’re down to our last week in Seoul’s southern ward and what I’m gonna miss the most is the raggedy little ball of fur that has occupied our backyard over the last year-and-a-half.

His high-pitched yelp was the first thing that greeted my family when we first stepped through the gate of the house we’ve been renting. Chained up in the corner of the yard, the little terrier looked more like folks I used to see hanging around Haight Street in San Francisco. There were nappy dreads dangling from various parts of his tiny frame, with bits of the nearby mountains tangled in for good measure. He was filthy!

But he had character. He bit for the first month or two we were there. The previous occupants had taken him in but decided they didn’t want him afterall and so the backyard became his permamnent home when they moved out. Through the heat of summer and the deep freeze of winter he stuck it out in his little doghouse, all the while maintaing his joie de vivre.

I often come out to offer him a treat at night, a peice of beef or smoked duck. He inhales it with this gusto that can’t help but make me smile. When my son comes out the two go running around the yard, with the little dog nipping at my son’s ankles. I’ve thought of bringing him in the house but my wife won’t have any of it. She says he’s too wild. I think it’s a compliment.

On my days off I hear him barking just under our window, this peircing sound that drives me up a wall. I go out to unchain him and he bolts off out the fence and down the street to attend to some business down there. The whole neighborhood knows him. One old man is constantly harassing him, while dogs in the other yards all greet him as he marks his territory under their noses. The little shit.

Still, maybe my wife is right. He is a wild creature and I don’t think he’d take to life indoors. He reminds me of the main character in Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala. There’s a scene where the Siberian hunter, dressed in raggedy skins, sits in this room just staring at the walls around him. Walls intended to provide comfort but that ultimately imprison. I couldn’t do that to the little guy.

Plus there’s a chihuahua that now pisses all over our floors. It too was taken in by the occupants downstairs before they decided he was a pain in the ass and stuck him outside. Ever seen a homeless chihuahua in the dead of a Korean winter? It’s not a pretty sight, all bones and whimpers. We took him in and he now runs the house alongside our son.

I’m worried once we leave for our new diggs north of the river he’ll be left to wither on the chain. Part of me thinks I should just set him free, but there was another dog in the house that once broke loose and was never seen again. Something in the mountains above must have gotten to him.

Today’s headlines:

Pyongyang hoping for seat at Obama inauguration

Minerva held for investigation

N. Korean official sent to chicken farm

Men and their purses