About another photo, she says, 'This is the one area we called the 'car graveyard.»
About a vast, sliding hillside of mud, she says, 'This is the soccer field that collapsed.'
In another photo, inside a house filled with mud, she says, 'Walking through this house that had been looted, there were handprints on the wall. All these mud prints where the looters had kept their balance.'
In a wide band along all the walls are countless perfect handprints in brown mud.
In other photos are the rooms where Yogi found bodies buried under fallen walls, under mattresses.
One photo shows a neighborhood of houses tumbling down a steep cliff of mud.
'This is up on the hill where all these houses had collapsed,' she says. 'They had hundreds of stories why people wouldn't leave: they didn't want looters to get their stuff, a woman with kids said her husband had gone to a bar and told her to stay here. Just awful, tragic stories.'
Another photo shows Valorie sleeping in the back of a pickup truck, dwarfed by a thick roll of dark plastic bags.
Michelle says, 'That's Valorie with the body bags, exhausted.'
She talks about her first search, saying, 'It was up in Kelso, and it was a fellow whose wife had disappeared. There was word that she was fooling around with all types of different people who were coming up to the house. So we drive up to this immaculately manicured farm. There's horses and a pasture with a bull in it. The dogs did a huge death alert in the barn. Their tail goes down and they pee. They swallow a lot. The natural part is the defecating, that and the peeing and the whining and the crying. It's making them nauseated, I think. Yogi pulls away. He doesn't want to go near it. Valorie goes toward it and she digs and barks more and more, and she gets frantic because she's trying to communicate something. 'It's right here!
'These people's little boy, he was about four, said something to the grandmother about 'Daddy put mommy underwater, and they whisked him away and nobody was able to be alone with him after that.'
In another picture from Tegucigalpa, a long slab of concrete lies on its side in the middle of a riverbed.
'That was a bridge,' Michelle says.
In all the pictures are scattered little packages of rancid lard, left everywhere by the water.
'The most profound search that I'll still get choked up about was this autistic child,' she says. 'The little guy was four years old, and they'd locked him in, but he'd found a way to unlock the door while his mom was ironing upstairs. He'd take all his clothes off, too, as soon as he got out the door. So all these people had volunteered to go look. And that's not optimal, because every time one more person walks across the trail, they can track the scent somewhere else.'
In these older photographs, Michelle is working with Rusty, another golden retriever. The photos show a heavy woods around a slow, dark slough of stagnant water.
'Within an hour of getting there, we got down to the slough. This is the primary spot because the little boy, he liked throwing a toy in repeatedly, and pulling it out. It was just a little bank above the slough with roots and trees around it.'
She says, 'By then Rust was real distraught and really sad. That was the first place where the kid went in, so there was a certain kind of scent there that wasn't as strong as when we followed the real slight current in the slough down to where it was getting stronger and stronger. That's when we called the divers in. There was a culvert between two parts of the slough.'
Looking at the photos, she says, 'What happened was the body had gotten wedged in this culvert, and it was under mud.'
Petting Yogi, she says, 'This is quite a large water area, and I'm going around, getting death alerts all around this huge marsh area. And I'm marking everywhere we get the hits. All that water that had touched the body had the smell of the death on it. Sometimes you can triangulate and determine where the body is by where the alerts are coming from.
'Putting a tag, and where the wind was coming from,' she says. 'What the temperature was. Who I was. What time it was. We put it all on a map. To figure out where the body had drifted to.
'Air scenting… In a case where you don't know exactly where the person started, there's still the scent in the air. There's a scent cone that goes like this'-she waves hands in the air-'and you can get the dog to work a Z pattern. They might do it naturally. You want them to go toward the source of the scent.'
Still petting Yogi, Michelle blinks, her eyes bright with tears. She says, 'I look up, and they're pulling him out of the culvert. That's the only victim I've ever seen, because most of the time, like in Honduras, they come in and dig the victims out after we've left. But I went into deep shock the moment I saw him, and I had this profound urge to just hold him, this little guy.'
She says, 'We got up to the house and did different interviews and then went into the house to cheer up the family-because the dogs are supposed to cheer up the family-and it was like walking through this aura, this energy-like an environmental condition… like being in a fog.
'We didn't process this like we should have,' Michelle says. 'I came back home and put Rusty with the other two dogs, to play, and I went off to work. I've always felt like that stuck with him too long because I didn't debrief him, and I don't think I knew how to process it. I don't think I understood what happened-as far as the deep shock-until I went to Honduras.
'You're supposed to let them go find a live person-and I did do that. You make sure, too, that you wash everything. Their jacket. My clothes. Everything that they have on. Wash everything in the car, everything that could've come in contact with the death scent. Just a little bit of that scent and they're depressed again.'
She says, 'Going back home, the scent pretty much permeated the car, so it would've been good to clean that out as well.'
Rusty and Murphy, Michelle's border collie/shepherd mix-like all the victims they found-are dead now. Murphy was put down when he was fourteen and a half years old, after suffering with back problem for three years. Rusty was put down after his kidneys failed.
Looking at photos of children, children hugging Yogi in picture after picture, Michelle talks about meeting a little girl in Tegucigalpa. Her legs running with staph infections, the girl was dipping water out of a puddle of sewage. Michelle put disinfecting tablets in the girl's water. A journalist rubbed antibiotic cream on the girl's legs.
'We had to walk most places because there was the mud, and everyone who saw Yogi would smile,' she says. 'And if we stopped somewhere, they'd just swarm around to touch him and say, 'Dame lo! Dame lo! Give him to me! And he was just thrilled with it. He loved the attention. I know he understood how important the work was, and I'd tried to explain to him along the way, 'This is very important. You're doing good things for people.»
In a picture of the collapsed soccer field, Michelle points out a crowd that stands at the far edge. 'People would stand up here on the edge of the field and just watch us, and this one little boy said, 'Thank you, in English.'
She says, 'Stuff like that would just destroy me. It was just too heartbreaking to have human contact like that.'
She smiles over one picture, saying, 'We went to an orphanage to cheer up the dogs. A kid would run and hide, and then the dogs would find him.'
Over the next picture, she says, 'This is an island. We drove two hours over washboard roads and hairpin turns in the back of a dump truck to get there. This is the back of the dump truck, it's real dusty. We found three bodies.'
She pets Yogi, saying, 'I think it aged him. He's seen and smelled things most two-year-old pups won't have to go through.'
In another photo album, Yogi sits with very thin, smiling men.
'I believe in Bodhisattvas,' Michelle says. 'In Buddhism, there are beings that are enlightened, and they come back to help others. I think Yogi's purpose in being with me is to help me be a better person and do things. For me, walking into Our House would've been difficult without him, but with him it was like home.'
Talking about the AIDS hospice where she now takes Yogi, Michelle says, 'I wanted something that was compelling and meaningful, and I kept hearing about Our House from people. At first I asked if they wanted someone to do Reiki, and they said no. Then I said I had this really neat dog, and they said come on over. And that was it. We just started going there every week.
'A lot of them have just lost a pet,' she says. 'Sometimes that's the mitigating factor: Well, if I have a pet I
