Dragon-dog pictograph, 2000 years old, from among the Buckthorn Wash pictographs in Utah. A dog-headed serpent recurs throughout the petroglyph cultures' artworks, and sometimes the tail of an otherwise normal dog is shown to be serpentine with a secondary dog's head.

The meaning is unknown, but clearly shamanistic and transformative. That this serpent-dog further forms a labyrinth is indictive of "mysteries" of stellar night descending into the underworld by day.

The labyrinth in Native American art often represents the dangers of rivers, lakes, and bays, similar to Mediterranean mythologies that make the sea as well as caverns pathways to the underworld. In Gulf State effigy pottery the image of the alligator and the dog sometimes merge, just as in Central America there are myths of the dog transforming into an axolotl in order to reach the land of the dead.