Sowbelly is a sacred canyon high on an edge of the Northern Great Plains. I first met it in 1974.  Thirty years later, to my surprise, I was called there to to create a teaching facility for the organization I had founded and still led at that time. Two years after, in 2006, the canyon burned.  This wildfire fulfilled the very Dream that had led me there to begin with, though of course I only realized that once I found myself in the dreamscape, awake.  It turned out I'd been wrong about why this Land had called me:  it was not to found a facility, but to bear witness to a wildfire and the Story it told.  The Canyon was our Elder, beloved teacher and guide, and for fifteen months after the fire, we struggled to learn from its continuing wisdom.  That became harder and harder in the face of mounting pressures from the culture around us.  At the end of that time, we lost Sowbelly and had to leave it forever.  But its vision lives on, as does the Story it gave us with the last, tenacious strands of its life.  This is that Story.  It is one of fire burning through the roots of the trees, underground.  Those underground fires were and are stories -- living stories. One of them is of how the forests have been despoiled, protected, and “managed” to death and disease.  Another is of how the rivers and deep waters beneath ground have been choked to a dry, gasping death-rattle. Some stories are of the people who have lived on the Land, white and Indian alike, and some of those stories simmer in the Land’s hot depths, dark as blood. Eventually, firefighters put out the particular fire that burned Sowbelly Canyon. But the Land is still burning, underground, there and all over the world. The trees hold hands through their roots in the darkness of Earth that is deeper than soil, deeper than human culture, old enough to be thick with dust but every bit as young and as hot as red, streaming lava. And the fires still burn from one to the other, tree to tree, stone to stone through the dark there -- the fires and the stories that feed them.  Burning to be heard.  If you would live, listen.