If someone had asked me, eight months ago, if I would enjoy having a companion whose idea of fun was to hunker down in a field, chewing on a piece of cow poop, waiting with a twinkle in his eye for the chase and the scolding to begin, I would have slapped them with a large dead fish (the kind dogs love to roll in) and said, “Are you crazy?”

So why am I, on this Tuesday morning, April 17th in the year 2007, racing around in a field surrounded by curious neighbors, trying to catch a mischievous Golden Retriever as he dashes about scooping up mouthfuls of dung, daring me to try to come and pry it out of his mouth? “If only I had a lasso… or a gun,” I muse grimly. I am supposed to be in bed recovering from a bladder infection. But the dog has no sympathy or understanding of my discomfort. He is just pleased as punch that he escaped into the field just as the girls were leaving for school, and has no intention of cutting his romp short.

I pretend that I am leaving on a walk without him. He doesn’t buy it. Shaking the snack bag doesn’t help either. The smell of victory poop in his maw is too strong. He’s staying in the field. I want to just leave him there, but I’m sure someone would complain. Dogs can’t run free. Being in the middle of Tokyo has its disadvantages. So I step gingerly over the barbed wire that is supposed to remind people that the field is off-limits, and I attempt to corral the manure-drunk mongrel and convince him that I have his best interests in mind.

Bjorn, who is named after the Norwegian word for “bear,” is interested in racing about in berserker mode. Perhaps he somehow knows about the berserkers, clad in bearskins, madly rushing into battle, hungry for danger and action. When berserker warrior were stuck on ships, they would sometimes beg to be let loose at some landfall so that they could gallumph about smashing things. My furry berserker does seem to have a daily desperate need to chew on things. He races past my legs, a bit of dung-mingled straw hanging out of the side of his mouth, like a dangling cigarette. I suppose he thinks he looks cool, like an adolescent trying a smoke on for size. He passes close enough to me that I think I might catch him, then pauses in a corner of the field every once in a while to laugh at me while sticking his tongue out disrespectfully. He is only pretending to pant; we both know that he’s gloating.

Finally realizing that my arms are too short to grab him in the midst of one of his wild but calculated orbits, he dares to race by even closer. The loop of leash in my hand snaps out far enough to sting his backside and I holler for the umpteenth time, “Sit!” He finally gets it. I am mad and it’s the end of play time. Grabbing his collar, I smack his furry back and give him a two-finger snap on the nose, which he hates. I am blowing hard with anger and frustration. I do not want to take him on a walk, but I know he needs one. So off we go to the quiet roads and trails of Tama Cemetery. What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger, right? Could be, though, that it just makes you insane.