Depending how you look at it, Russell Peterson’s Christmas gift was either 16 or 11 years in the works.
In 2001, Peterson created it. Soon afterward, it was lost. In 2006, fellow Juneauite Guy Holt found it washed ashore on Sandy Beach. For 11 years, Holt tried to track down the rightful owner.
This week, he found him.
Holt sat at Coppa on Tuesday with the gift on the table in front of him, wrapped up with a bow. The red wrapping paper depicted Santa putting a top hat on a smiling snowman, surrounded by shining stars. The tag proclaimed, “To Dad, From Taka.”
Holt spotted Peterson walking to the front door, picked up the gift and greeted Peterson. As he looked at the carefully wrapped gift, Peterson’s eyes widened.
“This is the only Christmas present I needed,” he said.
‘You saved my life’
Peterson remembers the day when he buried his beloved dog, Taka. It was in 2001, and Taka lay dead in front of him.
Peterson had borrowed a chisel from a friend of his and had gotten a small board, and began to carve Taka’s grave marker. As he recalls it, he was crying so hard as he carved his dog’s name that his tears fell on the wood. He joked that the wood was easier to carve after it had been wet with his tears.
He carved the dog’s name — which is short for Kushtaka, a shape-shifting creature of Tlingit legend — in large capital letters. He flanked the name with a heart on each side, one displaying the date (2/2/2001) and one containing the words “My best friend.” Below it, Peterson carved, “You saved my life. I will love you and miss you always.”
It’s been almost 22 years since he and Taka were in a life-threatening situation together but Peterson still remembers it vividly. On an April night in 1996, he was the owner of a store called The Copy Shop, and lived in the same building that housed the business. He was relaxing in a back room one night, watching the 1994 action movie “The Specialist,” when Taka started acting strangely.
“She started growling, but I didn’t see anybody,” Peterson recalled, “but I knew to trust her instincts better than mine.”
He started to look around, wondering what had spooked his dog. A moment later, the door to the back room started to creak open and a man stuck his head in, wearing a ski mask. Peterson, on alert after Taka’s warning, stiffened his arm under the comforter and pointed it at the intruder to make it look like he had a gun.
The intruder believed Peterson’s ruse and ran from the building. Peterson then located his actual shotgun and walked into the back room where store manager Jake Lofton had been working, according to an account from the Empire in 1996. There, he found a second intruder who had a gun to Lofton’s head. A standoff ensued, with the intruder eventually putting down his gun and Lofton and Peterson wrestling him to the ground. The police came soon afterward.
Peterson, now in his early 50s, recounted the story as if it had happened a week ago. He told other stories about his and Taka’s time together, pausing occasionally to admire the former grave marker that had been in Holt’s workshop for the past 11 years.
There was the story about how a wolf chased Taka at Glacier Bay. There was another time on Admiralty Island when the two of them ran from a brown bear, splashing their way to their boat as the bear roared from the shore.
There was also the time, as reported in the Empire, in 2000 when the two of them ended up sleeping on the courthouse lawn as a protest when Peterson was in a legal battle over his boat on which he lived at the time.
“I’ve never shared more adventures than with Taka,” Peterson told Holt on Tuesday. “You can’t even imagine all of the things we did together. I sat and thought about it so much last night.”
Finding each other again
Taka, who struggled with health problems including epilepsy during her later years, died in 2001 and Peterson buried her on an area of beach along Thane Road. He piled rocks over Taka, placing the grave marker on a post that stood in the middle of the pile of rocks.
At some point in the years that followed, a storm came through and dragged the rocks and grave marker into the sea. Peterson said he still can’t find the exact location of Taka’s final resting place.
In 2006, as Holt was walking his dog on the other side of the channel, he found the plaque and decided to try and find the owner. Since the discovery, Holt has posted regularly on Craigslist to try and track the owner down. It wasn’t until this Monday that news of the discovery reached Peterson.
A story ran in Monday’s edition of the Empire with a photo of the carving, and friends reached out to Peterson via email and on Facebook asking if the piece of wood belonged to him. Peterson was overwhelmed with emotion as people reached out, and as he sat with Holt on Tuesday he had to wipe tears from his eyes multiple times.
Peterson printed out a photo of Taka and brought it to their meeting as a gift for Holt. Holt beamed as he said that the photo can take the place of where the plaque has stood in his workshop for more than a decade.
Peterson ran his hands over the wood, worn by years on the beach and time in the water. He still looks for Taka’s grave from time to time, and the return of the grave marker, Peterson said, indicated that Taka might have been doing some searching of her own these past few years.
“It sounds so corny, but it’s true,” Peterson said to Holt, “I really believe that our love was so real that she never gave up trying to find me through you. I think that’s so real.”
• Contact reporter Alex McCarthy at 523-2271 or alex.mccarthy@juneauempire.com. Follow him on Twitter at @akmccarthy.
The gravesite for Juneau man Russell Peterson’s dog, Taka, taken in the early 2000s. The paw prints nearby are from Peterson’s other dog Miaku. (Courtesy photo | Russell Peterson)
