THE SOURCE

In a valley surrounded by mountains in Guatemala's highlands sits one of the deepest lakes in the world. On the opposite shore from where three mighty volcanos pierce the sky, a river feeds into the lake. It is from the distant shore of the mountains of fire that, along this river, I walk alongside a pack of thirty wild dogs, the third-world mustangs of the canine species.

The pack continuously yelps, howls, and wrestles with one another in a never-ending struggle for hierarchy, yet one loyal and the most beautiful of the bitches of the pack walks right on my heels. Any other wild dog that approaches the pack along the way is greeted with snarls and brief wrestling matches before gradually being forgotten about and allowed to join the pilgrimage. I was initially greeted at the shore with the same snarls, but the nature of hierarchy soon made me the alpha, and they now walked in a pack surrounding and protecting me from every side as we headed upstream.

Despite their never-ending rivalries, these mountain, river, and street dogs lived off of the scraps of nature and man together from birth and will continue to do so until death. The darkness engulfed us as we left our heel prints on the gravel riverbank heading upstream, howling and yelping as we made our way toward the source. Just as the river has no agenda but to move forward and downhill, our mission was to walk uphill toward the source. As many streams become one river, many wild dogs become one pack, and one pack we had become.

Cutting our way through the obstacles of nature, no agenda but to yelp and howl and jump about on our way toward the source, life at its purest—the unconscious spiritual quest of man and beast alike. By now, the sun had just begun to shoot its faint golden rays over the volcano's peak over my shoulder and behind the thirty wildly wagging tails. We passed a tarp pitched on four wooden poles, a makeshift shelter for the man knee-deep in water, and silt in the middle of the river shoveling gravel. Filling wheel barrel after wheel barrel with the grit before the heat of the day begins to pound down upon his back, sending him to retreat to his tarp for shade and a siesta; he will soon return to the knee-deep silt to dig his life away. He will sell the gravel in town for a handful of quetzales to fill his empty stomach with fresh tortillas until his back finally breaks; he will also live off the scraps of nature and man.

The wild pack of dogs did not take even a moment's notice of the man as he had long ago become as much of the background as the river and grit itself. As my rambunctious pack continued upstream, leaving the man to his endless shoveling, the sun continued to rise, and the fireball was now visible over the mountain of fire. In the distance, roasters joined the chorus of yelping and chirping of hungry birds filling the trees of the enclosing valley.

Continuing forth, the pack expended all their energy before the heat of the day would send them off in different directions in search of tarps of their own to siesta. For now, we leave our paw prints along the bank until before us, from the heavens fell a mighty force of water from the cliff tops above. The beauty, the majesty, did not go unnoticed by one of the pack. Its calming spray, each individual life falling to earth as a drop before collecting once more and forming into the mighty force that would keep full one of the deepest and most mysterious lakes in the world. As the wild ones looked up, the yelping gradually ceased, replaced by the calming sound of the falling water, and in awe of creation and self-awareness, man and even in the crazed eyes of the beast, a reverence reflected, for we had together found the source.