Baekgu Comes Home

Nobody saw her go. All anyone knew was that one day the white dog was no longer in the yard of the person who had bought her.

Someone else's gate. Someone else's yard. Even the road in front of the gate was one she had never walked. It is easy to see a dog stopping in the middle of that road, nose lifted to sniff the wind. Every road has two ends, and from where she stood, both ends looked equally strange.

Then she set off.

No one knows what was in her head at that moment. All that is known is that the direction she chose was the direction of home, and home was very far away.

This happened in Daejeon, a large city near the very middle of South Korea. The white dog was called Baekgu. The name may sound unfamiliar, but its meaning could not be simpler: Baekgu means white dog. Naming a dog this way in Korea is much like a Vietnamese family calling the yellow dog in the yard Vàng, the word for yellow.

Baekgu's home was not in Daejeon. Her home was far away at the southwestern tip of the country, in a small village called Donji, on Jindo Island in South Jeolla Province. Her owner was an old woman named Park Bok-dan. Baekgu grew up in her yard from the time she was a puppy.

Then she was sold, and she was taken up to Daejeon. That is all there is to the story of how she left home.

On the way there, Baekgu did not walk. She was driven. That means she had never set a single paw on the road from the island to the city.

Jindo Island is home to a breed that almost any Korean recognizes at once, the Jindo dog. For a long time the island lay cut off from the mainland, so over many generations its dogs kept a fairly pure bloodline. In 1962, the South Korean government listed the Jindo dog as a protected natural monument. It is number 53 on that list.

They are not big dogs. A female stands about 45 to 50 centimeters tall, only as high as a grown-up's knee. But their noses are very keen, and their hearing is very sharp. And one trait comes up more than any other when people talk about this breed: the ability to find the way home.

From Daejeon down to Jindo Island is about 300 kilometers by road.

Three hundred kilometers is a drive an adult can make between morning and afternoon, with time to stop for lunch on the way. Baekgu walked. And it took her seven months.

Seven months is more than half a year. The weather changed several times in that stretch, and no one knows which seasons she passed through.

No one went with her, so no one can tell what she met along the way. The best way to see that road is through the land that lies between the two places.

Between Daejeon and Jindo lie long stretches of rice fields and low hills covered in pine. There are wide rivers, and big roads with traffic day and night. There are small towns, with the smell of food drifting out of roadside eateries. There are rains that can go on all day without stopping. A dog crossing all of that would have to find her own place to lie down every night. Every morning, she would have to choose her direction all over again.

To this day, no one has fully explained how dogs find their way home. Some say it is the nose. Some say it is memory. No one can say for certain, and perhaps that is exactly why the journey of Baekgu is retold so often.

There was one more place, the hardest of the whole way.

Jindo is an island. To reach the old woman's yard, Baekgu had to cross the water between the island and the mainland. No one saw her cross. No one knows how she did it. All that is known is that she made it.

Then one day, the white dog appeared at the gate of her old home.

She was gaunt, her coat ragged, and she was worn out. But she had come back to the very gate she had left seven months before, the very yard she grew up in, and the very old woman who had raised her from a puppy.

Park Bok-dan kept her. Baekgu stayed with her for the rest of her life, right there in that yard.

Later, the story of Baekgu was told all over South Korea, in books for children and in animation. Told so many times, it gained or lost a little with each telling, so some details are still not agreed on. One is how old she was when she left Daejeon. Another is how many kilometers she really walked. But the core is the same in every version: a dog taken very far away, and a dog that came home on her own.

At the southwestern tip of South Korea, in Donji village on Jindo Island, stands a statue put up in 2004. It shows an old woman resting her hand on the back of a dog. She is not hugging the dog tight, or holding it in place. Her hand simply rests on its back. People in the area wrap the whole long story into one very short saying: once an owner, an owner for life.

Looking back, the hardest part of the whole trip may not have been the 300 kilometers, or the last stretch of water. It may have been that first night, outside a strange gate, when the white dog stood still in the road. She had to choose a direction by herself, with nothing to go on but her nose and her memory.

She chose right. After that, over seven long months, no one knows how many times she had to choose again.