was somehow more intense. Curious, I padded to the back of the house. Yes! There was a pile of blankets in the corner, from which came a strong Vernon scent, full of sweat and heat and goats. I raced back to Maya. “Show!” she urged.
She followed me at a run, and when she peeled back the blankets Vernon leaped up, laughing.
“You found me! Good dog, Ellie!” he shouted, rolling on the blankets with me. I jumped on him and licked his face, and we played with the rubber bone for a while.
Maya and I worked all night and we Found more people, including Vernon, who became better and better at hiding—but I’d worked with Wally, so no one could fool me for very long. Everyone else Maya and I found was dead.
The sun was coming up when we came to a building from which sharp, acrid smoke still rose. I was back on the leash, my eyes watering at an intense chemical smell coming out from the collapsed concrete.
I Found a dead man lying crushed beneath a flat section of wall and alerted Maya.
“We know about him,” someone told Maya. “We can’t get him out just yet; whatever is in those barrels is toxic. Going to need a cleanup crew.”
Some metal barrels leaked a steady stream of liquid that filled my nose with a scalding odor. I concentrated on pushing the scent away, trying to Find.
“Okay, good dog. Let’s go somewhere else, Ellie.”
There! I smelled another person and alerted, going rigid. It was a woman, and her scent was faint, riding out just behind the chemicals clogging the air.
“It’s okay, Ellie. We’re going to leave this one here. Come on,” Maya said. She tugged gently on my leash. “Come, Ellie.”
I alerted again, agitated. We couldn’t leave!
This one was alive.
{ TWENTY-THREE }
We see the victim, Ellie. We’re going to have to leave him here. Come on,” Maya said.
I understood that she wanted to leave and wondered if perhaps she thought that I was alerting because of the dead person.
“Does she want to Find me again?” Vernon asked.
I stared up at Maya, willing her to understand.
Maya glanced around. “Here? Everything’s collapsed; it’s too dangerous. Tell you what, though, it would be fun for her to chase you a little. Go up the street a little bit and call her, and I’ll let her off the leash.”
I didn’t pay attention to Vernon as he trotted away. My focus was on the person hidden in the rubble. I could smell fear, though the biting odor from the chemicals was clawing at my nose the way I’d once felt the spray from a skunk. Maya unsnapped my leash. “Ellie? What’s Vernon doing? Where’s he going?”
“Hey, Ellie! Look!” Vernon shouted. He started to run slowly up the street. I stared after him: I wanted to chase him and play, but I had work to do. I turned back to the collapsed building.
“Ellie! No!” Maya called.
Had it been Jakob, the word “no” would have stopped me dead, but Maya didn’t command me with the same hard tones. I dove headfirst into a narrow space next to the dead person, digging my way forward. My feet encountered a wet spill and started to sting, and the smell from the chemicals was so intense it blotted out everything else. I was reminded of playing rescue with Ethan, how I could find him in the depths by the merest whisper of his scent in the water.
Choking, I tunneled ahead. Cooler air touched my face, and I squirmed though a hole and dropped into a narrow shaft. An updraft brought cleaner air into this area, though my nostrils were still aflame with the burning wet acid that had splashed on my snout.
After a moment, I saw a woman huddled in the corner of the shaft, pressing a cloth to her face. Her eyes were big as they regarded me.
I barked, unable to return to Maya to Show.
“Ellie!” Maya called, coughing.
“Get back, Maya,” Vernon warned.
I kept barking. “Ellie!” Maya shouted again, sounding closer. This time the woman heard her and started screaming back, the terror tumbling out of her.
“There’s someone in there, someone alive!” Maya yelled.
I sat patiently with the woman, feeling her fear turn to hope when a man wearing a helmet and a mask poked a flashlight into the shaft and waved the light over both of us. My eyes were watering and my nose was running, my whole face still stinging from whatever it was I’d gotten on myself. Soon the sounds of digging and hammering reverberated through the space, and then a square of daylight broke into the shaft from above and a man lowered himself down on a rope.
The woman had obviously never practiced being lifted with a rope harness and was very afraid when the fireman tied her up and they hoisted her out, but I’d been through the maneuver several times and stepped unhesitatingly into the loops of rope when it was my turn. Maya was there at the top when they hauled me through the hole they’d dug in the wall, but her relief turned to alarm when she saw me.
“Oh my God, Ellie, your nose!”
