Kamoshika sighting

Today the weather was beautiful, the skies clear and pleasantly scented with the ubiquitous smell of wood smoke (lot's of trees being processed into lumber around here, because of all the.... well, trees). So we decided to take Tito for a little stroll up the "hill" at the end of the block. We like taking him up there 'cause there's a little park up top, usually sparsely attended and we can let the little freak off the leash for a bit of catch and manic pee marking. I qualify the "hill" because it's more like a mini-mountain. You know how in Japanese landscape painting there are often these seemingly improbable scenes of little cartoon mountains mushrooming up out of flat plains? Well, during my first trip here I was shocked to find myself facing landscapes that looked exactly like those paintings.... these sharp, volcanic little mountains just erupting up between convenience store and pachinko palaces.

So it's a nice stroll up; there's a winding road that runs up it, but it's faster to take the little trails and switchbacks that it's riddled with. And today we found this:



It's like a little hobbit tunnel!

But the real surprise was when we went through and disturbed this guy's lunch:



I know it doesn't look like much, some bad bigfoot footage, but it's from my cellphone's movie function. What we actually disturbed was a "kamoshika":



which is some scary looking wooly deer-goat-antelope thing, but from a middle distance looks like a way too placid wolf or big ass dog. I'm just glad Tito is too tuned into peeing on the entire world to have taken notice of his guy, before I could chase him with my little cell phone in hand, muttering, "oh shit, oh shit, can I google this?"

So, Takayama... beautiful, AND filled with wooly deer-cows.