Martha Sherrill - Dog Man: An Uncommon Life on a Faraway Mountain

T here are mountain villages and green valleys throughout Japan, and very few people live in them. The cities teem and buzz with lifeeach year with increasing speed and sophistication, more crowds and smaller cell phones and a dizzying parade of manmade pleasures. But far away, the snow country world moves quietly, almost forgotten except as a dream. This is the story of that dream. Its about one mans devotion to a place and way of being, however preposterous it may seem to others, and how he gently, and not so gently, steers his life there.

Dogs were part of the dreamand came along. Every morning and evening Morie ( Mor-ee-ay ) walked with them into the dark woods and snowy mountains. Together, they traveled into a deeper place, the world of instinct and survival, investigating the subtleties of mountain life as well as its thrills and dangers. In the mountains, they encountered growling beasts and dead carcasses, poisonous mushrooms, flying pheasants and lost hikers. They fought off bugs and snakes and bears, and always came home, always, even if theyd gotten very lost themselves. Morie and his dogs were heroes every morning, and heroes again every night. With each walk into the wild, they were bold and resourceful. They were alive and alert, their senses acute, poised for the natural excitements that the rest of us must crave when we turn to flickering screens for adventures and when we ache to connect with nature and animals. We yearn for the company of dogs because they return us to an ancient way of life, vanishing now. It is the power of the natural world to reacquaint us with our quieter selves, the part now buried alive in the noise and glare of modern life and the new habit of nonstop connection with others.

If Morie lived in Alabama, he would have gone into the swamps with a coonhound. If he lived in Russia or Norway, hed have crossed the tundra with a Karelian bear dog or a laika. Since he spent most of his life in the snow country of Japan, he roamed the rice fields and mountains with a traditional snow country dog, an ancient dog type or breed thats gone by different names over the centuries but has been called the Akita since 1927. Canine geneticists suspect the dogs came to the main island of Japan with the first tribes of migratory hunters two thousand years ago. They survived as companions to Ainu hunters, or matagi, who traveled the primeval forests and volcanic ranges in search of large game like bear and deer. After centuries of migrating, as people settled into the towns and small ports in the north, the dogs settled with themand became primarily fighting dogs. They competed in village dog rings and other more casual gambling venues. Feudal lords collected them as living trophies and for several hundred years, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, the warrior class, the samurai, were inspired by the dogs courage and rugged fighting spirit. For a particular type of samurai infantryman in training, an Akita dog was his teacher.

It never really mattered what the dogs looked like. Their essence or spirit was the quality most sought afterand valued. A good dog was quiet and fearless, could approach a cornered bear and prompt it to chase, and was virtually weatherproof. In recent times theres been a rather heated debate about what an Akita should look like, but from centuries ago, and still today, they share certain traits: a tightly curled tail, erect or prick ears, long and heavy legs. They resemble in many ways the dogs from the North all over the globedogs from cold climates and snowy Arctic regions, working dogs that have been used for centuries to pull sleds or hunt big game. They have hearty appetites, eating as much as eight or nine pounds of food a day, great stamina, sharp hunting instincts, and a thick double coat of fur thats heavy enough to allow them to burrow deep in the snow and sleep there. During a blizzard, flakes of wet snow stick to their coat and cover it completely, insulation that keeps them even warmer.

From a certain perspective, they can seem out of sync with modern times. The Akita is a noble dog, graceful and quiet, as well as an ancient dogrecent genetic studies have shown it to be one of a handful of the most primitive breeds, linked closely to the wolfbut some of its traits can make it a little rough for polite company. Vestigial instincts lead it to confrontation and overprotection. Until just ninety years ago, the small towns and villages in the snow country competed against each other in the dog ring, which explains why Akitas today can display aggressiveness toward other dogs and small animals, usually less dominant ones. In its milder expression, an Akitas overprotectiveness can resemble devotion or emotional attachment. It can look like love. Unlike some of the other ancient breeds, an Akita forms an unusually strong bond with its owner. They are famously loyal to the human families or the packs to which they belong.