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canyon the easy way. He was small, so his weight wasn’t the issue—I guessed he was maybe five months old and weighed about seventeen pounds, soaking wet. What I feared was the act of simply placing him in my backpack and climbing back out. His positioning inside (scrunched up and folded over himself), paired with possible jostling as I worked quickly to get him out of there, could have resulted in broken bones and other probable traumas. I was going to have to lift him in some kind of crate, straight up and out of the canyon.
    I hollowed out five depressions in the soft caked mud at the bottom of the pothole and then set a Styrofoam bowl in each, testing to make sure the dog wouldn’t be able to tip the bowls over and spill the contents. When I was satisfied, I filled three bowls with water and two with dog food. I briefly worried that the strong aroma of the dog food would attract predators, or perhaps vultures from high above who might see the dog and think they wouldn’t have to wait very long for a meal, but it was a risk I couldn’t avoid. I had to trust that the bottom of a slot canyon was the last place any creature in the food chain was going to look for sustenance.
    I looked up, out of instinct, to gauge how much daylight I had left, even though from the bottom of a slot canyon, it’s impossible to tell time that way. I looked at my watch. It was a little after 4:30 p.m. I took a blue towel from my pack, one I carry for those occasions when a lake or stream presents me with the opportunity to bathe, set it on the canyon floor folded in half, then moved to where the dog was lying. I slid my hands under him and gently lifted. He was almost literally a bag of bones. If he were healthy, I thought, he ought to weight thirty or more pounds, but he was light as a kitten and limp in my hands. I set him down carefully on the center of the towel, which would insulate him from the cold mud that would otherwise conduct heat away from his body. It was hard to understand how he hadn’t already succumbed to hypothermia, sleeping for however many days down here. If he had the strength, the food and water were there for him.
    “I’ll be back tomorrow morning,” I told him. “I promise.”
    I wondered what the sound of my voice did for him. I wondered if he could tell that today had been better than yesterday, and tomorrow would be better than today. I could clearly recall days when nobody could have convinced me of that, but perhaps this was where my human intelligence and the dog’s diverged. Humans who experience trauma learn from it, over and over again, reviewing the traumatic experience and reliving it as a memory, carrying the pain and the hurt over from one day to the next. I wondered how the canine intelligence handles something like this—how traumatized would the dog be? Would he be mentally and emotionally damaged, even if he recovered his physical health, or would he find a way to forget?
    On my way back up the rope, I negotiated the free-hangs and the ledges and, in perhaps fifteen minutes, maybe less, I was back at the top. My arms were weary. How was I going to do the same climb tomorrow with the dog in tow? I would have to find a way.
    On the hour-long drive back to Page, I thought of how the dog’s life was now in my hands. I had a responsibility to him. I didn’t choose it, but I couldn’t turn away from it, either. As I drove, an ember of anger burned inside me. The more I thought about it, the more certain I was that the dog at the bottom of the canyon did not arrive there by accident. Someone put him there quite intentionally.
    I considered, again, the obstacles I had to overcome to find him in the first place, a twenty-foot free-hanging rappel and a ten-foot sheer wall at an eighty-degree incline in pitch blackness. No. The dog did not wander down the canyon on his own—he would have broken a leg at the very least. He did not get washed to where I found him in a flood—he would have been