Maseta

I already knew where to bury her: that was the easiest part. If my name were Seattle, wouldn´t you bury me there? It just seemed proper.

A 45 minute walk up the valley from her namesake was a place where Mayan priests stil worship mountain gods. Her namesake itself was a black boulder with a tree growing fromt e top. La Maseta: "the flower pot" locals called it. If you want to see it for yourself, just tell the bus driver to let you off at La Maseta.

But when she died, it suddenly didn´t seem like the best idea to wait to catch the 6AM bus the following morning. That and rigor mortis had already set in. To tell the truth, her joints had started stiffening hours before she actually died. I noticed that her legs were streched awkwardly while I was carrying her on the way to pick up my laundry.

Kaileah had decided we should bury her then and there, and 40 minutes after her heart had stopped beating, we were standing at the edge of a small cornfield surrounded by adobe houses surrounded by clouds surrounded by mountains. The four of us: Kaileah, Matt, Maseta and I.

This was the fifth grave Matt had dug. Without fail, he said, it had always rained. The day of Maseta´s death was no exception- a light mist fell over us as we dug the grave just deep enough to discourage the neighborhood dogs from digging her up.

Matt was passing through town and had been just unlucky enough to witness the death and just nice enough to offer to help dig. "Goodnight little doggy", he said as he scooped the first shovel-full of dirt over the tiny puppy´s body.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Maseta was wimpering in the corner, huddled in a pool of her own urine as it slowly saturated the wooden floor. It was the exact spot we´d found her in nine days earlier, sleeping comfortably.

I´d spent the day in the city. At 3:00 I caught a bus home and fell asleep until we jerked to a stop and most everyone around me started getting off. I asked someone what was going on. "The driver is drunk", the person said. I grabbed my bag and jumped off before the bus continued on, still carrying some of its passengers, and waited in the street for a few hours till the next bus passed.

By the time I got back to Todos Santos is was dark- really dark. The power had gone out and there was a funny feeling in the air- like anything could happen.

As I turned the corner, I saw a group of people gathered outside my school, the door open. I´d given the key to Kaileah so she could watch a movie while I was gone. Now she was standing in the middle of the group, holding a tiny brown puppy with a black snout.

I´d left one of the windows unlocked in the morning. Maybe one of the kids had thrown her in as a practical joke. I know one or two kids I wouldn´t put it past. Or maybe she´d crawled in the day before when the door was open. However she got there, we were now in charge.

I wanted nothing to do with her. Sure she was damn cute curled up Kaileah´s arms, but my reaction was to see her as just another responsiblity. I knew if I didn´t give in to the temptation to ask to hold her, Kaileah would eventually decide she´d have to take care of it on her own. The plan worked and Kaileah took the puppy home with her that night. We knew she´d die if we left her in the street.

The next day we spent asking around town if anyone knew where the puppy had come from, and trying to get ideas as to what we should do. My next door neighbor Martina told us that most people leave their unwanted puppies at the trashdump. Somehow, that didn´t seem like the right thing to do. She was so young, she´d die there without someone taking care of her.

But from the beginning, Maseta, as we named her, was never sure she wanted to live. She wouldn´t come near tortillas, the national dog food. The only thing she ate was fried chicken, probably not the most nutritional thing for a puppy that should have been breast feeding. After six days I noticed Maseta couldn´t walk straight. After seven, she could barely hold herself up as she went to the bathroom. We started injecting baby formula and rice milk into her mouth with a needleless syringe.

If you ever see a foreign looking person standing next to you in line at the bank with a small dying pig tucked in their arms, please, please don´t laugh. It will hurt their feelings and it hurt mine. The people here view dogs the same way they do pigs. Very few locals care for their dogs, and most underfeed and beat them without a thought, as if they were smacking a tree rather than an animal.

But there I was, standing in line, holding Maseta, waiting to get change (something no one here seems to have) so I could buy a syringe to replace the one I´d lost. People were pointing. Giggling. I wasn´t really in the mood.

On the eighth day we took Maseta to the vet in the nearest city, Huehuetenango, 2 and a half hours away. He said she was anemic, a condition common in puppies weened too quickly, and recommended baby formula for 2 weeks, after which she´d been a normal healthy puppy. That night she seemed so much better. For the first time in days she walked on her own. Thank god it was just anemia.

The next morning Maseta died, lying in her basket on a blue bench in the kitchen when she stopped breathing. She was just too far gone to be brought back to health. Forty minutes after her heart had stopped beating, we were standing at the edge of a small cornfield surrounded by adobe houses surrounded by clouds surrounded by mountains.

"Goodnight little doggy", Matt said.