“Okay.” Al drew in a deep breath. “You’ve lost weight, Maya.”
“What?” Maya stared at him.
Al recoiled in horror. “Not that you were fat, I just noticed, in your shorts, your legs look so thin.” A gust of misery flowed off of him, and he was backing away. “I should go.”
“Thank you, Al; that was sweet,” Maya said.
He arrested his retreat and stood up straight. “In my opinion, you don’t need to exercise anymore; you are perfect the way you are.”
Maya laughed at this, and then Al laughed. I wagged my tail to show the cats at the window that I understood the joke and they didn’t.
A week or so later Maya and I did one of my favorite things, which was to go to the park with a lot of other dogs and work on the toys. At her command I crawled into the tight tube and up and down the tippy board. I climbed slowly down a ladder and demonstrated that I could sit patiently on a narrow beam two feet off the ground, all the while ignoring the other dogs.
Our Find consisted of locating a man who had dropped some old socks as he blundered off into the woods. Maya was bursting with eagerness, so I went at it full speed, even when she began to huff and sweat. I knew he was high in a tree even before I found him, because Wally had tried that on me a few times and it always affected the way the human scent drifted on the wind. Maya was a little mystified, though, that I was alerting at the base of the tree when clearly the man wasn’t standing there. I sat, patiently staring up at the grinning man, until she got it.
That night there was a big party at Mama’s house. Everyone was petting me and saying my name.
“Now that you are certified, you need to eat,” Mama told Maya.
The doorbell rang, which hardly ever happened at that house; people usually just burst in. I followed Mama to the door, and when she opened it Mama’s heart soared. It was Al, and he gave some flowers to Mama. I remembered Ethan giving Hannah flowers, and I was confused because I thought Al liked Maya, not Mama, but I’ll never really understand people when it comes to stuff like this.
The whole family grew quiet when Al stepped out into the backyard where the picnic tables were set up. Maya went over to Al and they both felt nervous as he briefly pressed his mouth to her face. Then Maya said everyone’s name and Al shook hands with the men and everyone started talking and laughing again.
Over the next several days we found and saved two children who had wandered away from their houses, plus backtracked a horse’s path to find a woman who had fallen off and hurt her leg. I remembered Flare dumping Ethan in the woods, and wondered why people even bothered to own horses, since they were obviously unreliable. If people had a dog or two and were still not satisfied, they should probably consider getting a donkey like Jasper the donkey, who at least made Grandpa laugh.
Maya and I also found an old man in the woods who was dead. I was depressed to sniff out his cold body lying in the dirt, because that wasn’t saving people, and though Maya praised me, neither one of us was much interested in playing with the stick afterward.
We went to Al’s house and he served Maya a chicken dinner and they both laughed and then ate a pizza a boy brought over. I sniffed at the chicken pieces Al put on the floor for me and ate them more out of politeness than anything, since they were so encrusted with what tasted like soot.
Later that evening I could tell she was telling him about the dead man, because her feeling of sadness was the same. Jakob and I had found a few dead people, too, but it never made him sad, the same way that finding people and saving them never really seemed to make him glad. He just did the work, not feeling much one way or the other.
When I thought about Jakob, I realized that his cold dedication to Find helped me get over my separation from Ethan—there was no time for grieving; I had too much work to do. Maya, though, was more complex, and the way she loved me made me miss my boy. Not with the same sharp, painful ache in my chest but with a wistful sadness that often came to me as I was lying down for the night and rode with me into my dreams.
One day Maya and I took a plane ride and then a chopper ride straight south. I thought about the day Jakob was taken away, and was glad I was back to being a chopper dog. She was both excited and uneasy on the flight, which wasn’t, frankly, nearly as much fun as a car ride, because the noise hurt my ears.
We landed in a place unlike any I’d ever been to before. There were lots of dogs and policemen, and the air was filled with the sound of sirens and the smell of smoke. Buildings everywhere were in a state of collapse, their roofs sometimes all the way on the ground.
Maya seemed stunned, and I pressed up against her, yawning anxiously. A man approached us; he was dirty and wore a plastic helmet. His hands, when he held them to me, smelled of ashes, blood, and clay. He shook hands with Maya.
“I’m coordinating the U.S. response in this sector; thanks for coming down.”
“I had no idea it was going to be this bad,” Maya said.
“Oh, this is just the tip of the iceberg. The El Salvadoran government is completely overwhelmed. We’ve got more than four thousand people injured, hundreds dead—and we’re still finding folks trapped. There’ve been more than a half dozen aftershocks since January 13, some of them pretty bad. Be careful going in these places.”
Maya put me on a leash and led me through the maze of rubble. We’d come to a house and some men who were following us would check it, and then sometimes Maya would let me off the leash and I’d go in and sometimes she’d keep me on the leash and we would just Find along the outside of the house.
“This one’s not safe, Ellie. I have to keep you on a leash so you don’t go in there,” Maya told me.
One of the men was named Vernon, and he smelled like goats, reminding me of trips to town with Ethan and Grandpa. It was one of the rare times I thought of Ethan while working—doing Find meant putting all of that away and concentrating on the job.
Over the next several hours, Maya and I Found four people. They were all dead. My excitement over Find soured after the second one; by the time I came across the fourth person, a young woman lying beneath a jumble of bricks, I almost didn’t alert Maya. She sensed my mood and tried to reassure me, petting me and waving the rubber bone at me, in which I had very little interest.
“Vernon, would you do me a favor and go hide somewhere?” she asked. I lay down tiredly at her feet.
“Hide?” he asked uncertainly.
“She needs to find someone alive. Would you go hide? Like over in that house we just searched. And when she locates you, act all excited.”
“Um, yeah, okay.”
I registered Vernon’s departure without interest. “Okay, Ellie, ready? Ready to Find?”
I wearily rose to my feet. “Let’s go, Ellie!” Maya said. Her excitement seemed fake, but I trotted over to a house we’d already searched. “Find!” Ellie commanded.
I went into the house and stopped, puzzled. Though we’d all been in here already, I thought Vernon’s smell 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!”
We ran together to a fire truck, where Maya, much to my disgust, talked one of the firefighters into giving me a bath! Well, it was more of a rinsing, cold water flowing down my face and bringing some relief to the burn on my nose.
Maya and I took another chopper ride that day, and then a plane ride, and then we went to the man in the cool room, the vet, who carefully looked at my nose and put some cream on it that smelled awful but felt wonderful.
“What was it, some kind of acid?” the vet asked Maya.
“I don’t know. Is she going to be okay?” I felt Maya’s love and concern, and closed my eyes when she stroked my neck. I wished there were some way I could let her know that the pain wasn’t all that bad.
“We’ll want to watch for any signs of infection, but I don’t see any reason why she shouldn’t heal up just fine,” he told Maya.
For the next two weeks or so, Maya would gently rub the cream into my nose. Emmet and Stella seemed to find this pretty amusing, and would sit on the counter and watch. Tinkerbell, though, loved it. She came out of wherever she’d been hiding and sniffed at the cream and then rubbed her head against mine, purring. When I’d lie down, Tinkerbell would sit and smell me, her tiny little nose bobbing up and down, and she even started curling up against me to sleep.
It was almost more than I could stand.
I was relieved to get away from the cats and go back to work. When Maya and I got to the park, I bounded up to Wally and Belinda, who were excited to see me.
“I hear you are the hero dog, Ellie! Good dog!”
I wagged, excited to be a good dog. Wally then ran off while Belinda and Maya sat at a picnic table.
“So how are you and Wally doing?” Maya said. I sat impatiently—if we went after him now, we could Find Wally right away!
“He’s taking me to meet his parents over the Fourth, so . . . ,” Belinda replied.
“That’s good.”
I groaned at all this conversation. Humans were capable of so many amazing things, but too often they just sat making words, not doing anything. “Down, Ellie,” Maya said. I reluctantly lay down, pointedly looking off in the direction Wally had taken.
After what seemed ages, Maya and I were finally allowed to Find. I joyously took off, not having to slow down, because she was able to keep pace with me.
Wally had done an excellent job of disguising his scent! I lifted my nose, searching for any trace of him. There were few odors on the air today to distract me, but I couldn’t Find Wally. I coursed back and forth, returning to Maya for direction. Carefully she worked the area, and when I didn’t pick up a scent she moved me to a new place and I tried there.
“What’s the matter, girl? You okay, Ellie?”
Oddly, though the wind was coming from behind him, I actually heard Wally before I smelled him. He was walking straight toward us. I rocketed forward until my nose told me it was him, and then returned to Maya, who had already started talking to Wally, her voice a shout.
“We’re having sort of an off day!” she said.
“I guess so. I’ve never seen her fail before. Hey, Ellie, how are you doing?” Wally said to me. We played a little with a stick.
“Tell you what, Maya. You focus her attention away from me. I’m going to go over that ridge, there, and double back a little. Give me about ten minutes,” Wally said.
“You sure?”
“She’s been out of action for a couple of weeks; let’s allow her to have an easy one.”
I was conscious of Wally leaving, even though Maya had handed me the rubber bone and was now trying to get it away from me. I could hear him and knew he was hiding again, which made me happy. When Maya finally shouted, “Find!” I took off eagerly, heading in the direction I’d heard him go.
I ran up a small hill and stopped, uncertain. I didn’t know how he was doing it, but somehow Wally was keeping his scent out of the air. I ran back to Maya for direction, and she sent me off to my right. I snaked back and forth, searching.
No Wally.
Then she directed me to the left. Again, no sign of
Wally. This time, she had me return left and walked with me, leading me around the base of the hill. I was virtually upon Wally when I found him—he moved, and I alerted. There was no need to run back, because Maya was standing there.
“This isn’t good, is it?” Maya asked. “The vet said she should be fully recovered by now.”
“Well . . . let’s give it another week, see if she gets any better,” Wally said. He felt sad, for some reason, so I nuzzled his hand.
Maya and I didn’t work very much over the next couple of weeks, and when we did, Wally continued to fool me, disguising his scent so that I could only pick it up when he was right there in front of me.
“What does it mean that Ellie is decertified? Does it mean you will lose your job?” Al asked one night. I’m not a big fan of feet, but I allowed Al to take off his shoes and rub my tummy with his toes because they didn’t smell as bad as usual.
“No, but I’ll be reassigned. I’ve been on a desk for the past several weeks, but I’m not really cut out for that. I’ll probably request a transfer to go back out on patrol,” Maya replied.
Stealthily Al dropped a tiny piece of meat on the carpet in front of me. It was the main reason why I liked to lie in front of him at dinner. I silently licked it up while Stella gave me dirty looks from the couch.
“I don’t like to think about you being on patrol. It is so dangerous.”
“Albert,” Maya sighed.
“What about Ellie?”
I looked up at my name, but Al didn’t hand down any more meat.
“I don’t know. She can’t work anymore; her sense of smell is too damaged. So she’ll be retired. She’ll live with me. Right, Ellie?”
I wagged, pleased with the way she said my name, full of affection.
After dinner we took a car ride to the ocean! The sun was setting, and Maya and Al set a blanket out between two trees and talked while the waves came in.
“It’s so beautiful,” Maya said.
I figured they probably wanted to play with a stick or a ball or something, but I was on a leash and couldn’t go find one for them. I felt bad that they had nothing to do.
A Dog's Purpose Page 18
