I turn my nose to the wind.
The cool air that sucks past the moisture in my nostrils is busy with stories, directions, convoluted half-finished conversations. My vision fuzzes out, becomes irrelevant. Sound snaps through here and there, but I am thinking now with my olfactory bulb:
Broken power line burn reaching this way fitfully due to unpredictable wind pattern shifts
Torn sod broken grass wet turned soil chemicals down further raw sewage must be septic systems in some of these prefab units but trapped not seeping yet
Old human-trails anxiety adrenaline panic the lingering scent of cadaver which has been removed not my target
Broken concrete split shredded pine timber sodden plywood soaked furniture batting
Burst of char as the burn kicks up on the wind then turns back in on itself
The detritus of wind distance age broken-down-ness places happenings irrelevant
Girl
North very faint filtered through quite a bit of green sap fresh branches downed trees but
I ping Carol. Interest. Mark location, north northwest. I take another deep suck of air through my nose to confirm. This way.
“Wait for support.” Even over the DAT, Carol sounds out of breath.
I can’t wait. I need to do my job. Carol and Devin the field assistant can find me via the DAT’s GPS. I must follow this hint of Girl.
Through a hedge and I’ve already lost the scent, but in a moment a memory of Girl passes on the air, and my head turns toward the smell so rapidly it tweaks a muscle in my neck before my body can follow. I am moving as quickly as my nose will allow, every step picked out for me by the scent and what it says I should do.
The world fades to almost nothing, just my nose and the scent and stimulus-response, until a semi looses a roar from twenty meters away and jerks me back into audio/visual.
I have been following cyclone fencing along a housing development’s edge. The storm has punched through the fence in places, and beyond the openings, cars on the interstate are slowing to gawk at the damage. The semi honks again, trapped behind the slowdown.
Its bellow makes me think about Mack and the way his hot dark blood stank as it spread against the asphalt. I remember feeling in my skin and muscles that I would very much like to roll in that smell. A dog’s instinct. I should not have stopped to look at him when it happened, but I needed confirmation he was dead.
Irrelevant to my current search. I shake my head to clear wind-driven grit from my eyes and turn into the current again, reaching. I ping Carol my location—a reminder only, she knows how to find me—then hunt the wind.
It is still there, but its story is conflicted; the stream of its path, eddies and pools and lines all broken by the weather, a puzzle of color and feel. Perhaps a human with a computer might be able to map parts of the puzzle out. But time and movement have danced and shivered and jolted and coughed these trails out of the human spectrum of sense.
Dogs are better than machines at untangling this kind of mess. But all this broken human detritus, and the storms growing greater and more frequent now year by year, and the endless desire for more perfect work: these things make the job too tricky for a dog’s nose. A normal dog’s, at least.
This is why I am the solution. It’s why I am a good dog, better than Mack was. It’s why Carol should do things my way.
Carol’s voice carries over the DAT. “Devin and I are a hundred yards out. If the trail crosses the freeway, Sera, do not follow. That’s an order.”
Before I can respond, the wind twists through my nostrils: Girl.
That trickle of target scent wraps itself around my olfactory center. My target is my primary objective. I send Carol my heading as I run, an automatic part of my brain remembering fieldwork directives. I am required to communicate relevant information to my handler, but I am only required to follow handler commands within reason. I find very few of my handler commands reasonable today.
Deep in the scent cone now, I hardly see, not thinking with that part of my mind. Scent is brighter than any color in this muted, cloud-heavy weather. It is a viscous, thickened path, easy to follow. I can turn my head now and I don’t lose the trail, but feel it pull and contort through time and space. It strengthens this way, grades off in the other, torques around on itself. I know that if it was untwisted, it would move differently. I understand how it bent and broke over time. It is all a trick of the wind.
I come to an eddy. A lesser dog—a normal dog, like Mack—would hesitate or lose themselves. I move through the scent-trap and scrabble over a broken segment of roof. The trail shimmers on the other side, where the ground is cool and sodden beneath my paw pads.
Five yards farther, an oscillation in the wind unfolds back through time and I move with it through a heavy stand of pines, thick with bright acid resin smell. I have my teeth in it, I can feel the track itch behind my
Girl
Indication, I ping. I push beneath a wind-felled pine and its broken-wood smells. Needles brush against my face. Target scent strong.
Carol’s voice: “Where are you?”
Question irrelevant. She has GPS access.
Twist of track to the left through
Old Girl smell relevant
Other child smells a broad collection of small human life scents in this patch of forest Broken boards rotting garbage leaf mold
Girl
I step up and over another felled tree rich smell of rot and my ears move on their own because there is human sound close by I push my head deep into the space beneath the tree with the old smells and the deep Girl smell and
Alert
Girl
Target acquired primary objective
Yes
I am a good dog
Target Girl wheezes quietly she says “Help” I breathe her scent deeply
Alert
But will Carol
“Acknowledged,” Carol responds. “On our way.”
Good yes
I am a good dog
I send Carol my GPS coordinates again to reconfirm even though I can see from the DAT that she is approximately one hundred yards across the rubble field. “Help me, doggy,” target Girl says. Her voice sounds like the wind, soft and leaky. That’s a good Is Like. The rot-scented tree pins her in a rubble of boards and magazines and a blanket in a dense stand of brush and pines, some distance from the neighborhood. Her one small free hand reaches for my mud-slicked head. “Good doggy,” she says. “I’m stuck. Help.”
In this dense visual screen it may be difficult for my team to locate me. I back out of the target Girl’s location and head toward the forest’s edge.
“Doggy,” she whispers. “Wait, doggy, no, wait.” There’s a gurgle to her wheeze, perhaps a punctured lung. Which is why she can’t cry for help, at this distance from habitation. She is likely in dire physical danger. Only an EI dog could have found her so quickly.