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get away from whoever had been chasing them. One of the young females had managed to get only halfway under the fence before she was killed. Her body blocked the escape route for the two dogs that lay dead behind her.
    I laced my fingers through the rusting fence and held on, waves of nausea swelling up from my belly. It wasn’t just the smell that was making me feel ill; it was the sight of my friends’ broken bodies. I could only imagine the fear they must have felt as they were chased and tortured so brutally. I was overwhelmed with a fierce mixture of sadness and anger that made me dry heave.
    The dogs behind me whined and paced anxiously. I slid down the fence onto my knees. The dogs nudged my elbows, trying to lift my arms to pet them.
    I gathered myself and stood up. I needed to bury my dogs. They deserved in death the dignity they had been denied in life. But they were decomposing fast in the tropical heat, and there was no way I could carry them someplace appropriate to bury them. I walked back along the path again until it rejoined the main road to the beach. I turned into the entrance of the parking lot and made for the boathouse, figuring there might be something there I could use to carry sand from the beach. I found a five-gallon pail and returned to the beach to fetch sand. It would take a number of trips to bring enough back to where the dogs lay motionless. Leo and the others followed me as I trudged back and forth. It took more than an hour to bury my friends.
    Burials would become part of my daily routine at the beach. Every morning I’d find new dogs, and every morning I’d go in search of missing members of the pack. Every time I found another dead dog, its corpse was a heap of severely broken bones or had been cut into pieces and stuffed into plastic buckets or garbage bags. It was usually the dogs that had been less cautious of humans. I buried at least one dog every day.
    The dogs would watch quietly as I buried their friends. Despite all the things humans had done to them, the pack continued to trust me.
    We had been living in Puerto Rico for about three weeks when my friend Brandon, a nineteen-year-old whom I’d met at an indoor climbing gym in Rhode Island the previous winter, came to visit.
    The prospect of having some fun with a fellow athlete and adventure seeker, was just what I needed. Pam was having a tough time adjusting to her new life. She was feeling a bit homesick, under a lot of pressure at work, worried about my frequent visits to the beach and my growing involvement with the dogs. Frankly, I also needed a break from the heart-rending things I’d seen since moving to the island.
    The morning after Brandon arrived, we made plans to go snorkeling at Seven Seas Beach, which was about forty-five minutes from the house. But first I asked him if he’d like to meet my dogs.
    â€œWhoa, man, there are a lot more here than I expected,” he said as we pulled into the parking lot near the boathouse. The pack had nearly doubled since I’d first described it to him.
    The dogs, with their uncanny sixth sense, immediately pegged Brandon for a good guy and bonded with him right away. We spent the morning hanging out with the pack, and Brandon helped me name a few dogs that I hadn’t been able to come up with appropriate monikers for yet. Then we hit the road.
    I’d never been to the place we were going, and the incomplete, cartoonish road map Pam and I had gotten from the car rental depot in San Juan was no help whatsoever. Most of the roads we needed to travel weren’t even on it, and Brandon wasn’t much help since he’d never been outside the continental United States before. So we tooled around Fajardo, the community near where the Seven Seas Beach was supposed to be located. After several wrong turns through some questionable neighborhoods, we found our spot, a beautiful crescent-shaped bay begging us to get in and explore.
    We parked on a