I trot out of the stand of pines and up onto the nearest high ground—a culvert near the road. I can hear target Girl now, since I am listening for her. “Come back,” she sobs. “Doggy, help. Please. Come back.”
Her weak voice will be easy for my excellent ears to locate for my team. Alert, I ping again, though I don’t need to. I allow myself a nice wag.
I am a good dog.
Sound carries strangely in storm-thickened air. From my place in the command tent I can clearly hear the baying voice of some small hound at least a mile away. However, the generator running out behind the team’s trucks sounds like it belongs to another time and place, and wind chokes the traffic noise from the freeway. I can still hear the difference between trucks like Carol’s and the smaller cars, and the sounds of big semitrucks like the one that hit and killed Mack. I know the sounds of those trucks well.
I lie with my head on my paws so that I look like I am resting and not eavesdropping. Overhead the wind rips at the surface of the command tent roof, which ripples and bucks. It is like there is a giant dog up there, digging and worrying at it, trying to get in.
Not a bad Is Like.
Is Like is a game I made up at ESAC. I didn’t make it all up myself; my trainer Dacy taught me the beginning. Though what Dacy taught me wasn’t quite the same. She taught me that “sit in the training center” Is Like “sit in the parking lot” and “find the box with this smell” Is Like “find the person with this smell.” So Dacy gave me the idea. I made up the part where I keep playing it forever in my head.
The way I play the game, it isn’t always about training. It doesn’t even have to be about real things. It can just be about thoughts. It keeps my mind busy when Carol leaves me in my crate, or tied to something, like I am now.
“I won’t do this anymore,” I hear Carol say to Anders, our team leader. She stands with her back to me on the far side of the command tent, well within my hearing range. I can tell she’s angry by context and by her elevated blood pressure, but I don’t know why. The search was successful and finished quickly. Our team performed well. Since Mack has been dead for almost two months now, the changes I had hoped to see in Carol’s behavior have slowly surfaced as she begins to forget how she used to work with Mack and learns, instead, how to work with me. She is a slow student, but there is still progress.
Medics load the target Girl into an ambulance in the parking lot. I hear a trio of vulture drones descending to snatch video of the gurney. The hair on my neck prickles with dislike. I am not afraid of drones. I simply find that they occupy the “uncanny valley.” Uncanny valley is a concept that Dacy told me about that means “both too much and not enough like me, and therefore unsettling.” Dacy also warned me many humans have the same uncomfortable reaction to EI animals.
I don’t know why, when I look exactly like a medium-yellow Labrador retriever. Yellow Labrador retrievers test extremely well with the public. When a Labrador finds a disaster victim, the positive cultural associations the victim has with the breed comfort them. Yellow is the best color, as well, because in dark areas I am easily identifiable. This is information that I learned on Modanet, after Dacy told me about Labrador retrievers when I was a puppy.
However, human reactions to dogs can be unpredictable. For example, the way they treated Mack. He often gave the team physical attention they didn’t want. Mack was smart for a normal dog, so I wonder why he chose to ignore their requests. They said things like, “Eww, Mack, get your slobbery Kong off of me, you dork,” and “Mind your own business, you big oaf.” Wouldn’t the humans on team like him more if he complied? He didn’t even have the excuse of being a yellow Labrador; he was an overlarge German shepherd with a dark and heavy face. Dark German shepherds don’t test nearly as well with the public, so I am not sure why everyone liked him so much.
“I’m done,” Carol says. “Retire me, I’m serious. Take me off the roster, Anders. No more searches.”
“Carol,” Anders says.
“No. I don’t want to argue with you about this.” She gestures toward me without looking. “This isn’t what I spent the last twenty years doing. I don’t like this future.”
“Come on. It’s a training problem,” he says. “You can teach her to work closer to you.”
“That defeats the point of the EI!” Carol tosses her radio onto the folding table. “But you know what, it is a training problem. She’s training me for EI SAR work, and I don’t want to do it.”
“Excuse me, please,” says a man. I look up at him. He stands just outside the tent and smells nicely of spicy food. He holds a camera and wears a press pass around his neck. He calls to my teammates. “Can I get a couple shots of the dog and handler?”
Anders looks at Carol. Carol sighs, steps over a cooler toward me, and unhooks my leash from the folding table’s leg. I wag at the journalist to make a good impression.
He looks at me curiously.
“It’s Enhanced, isn’t it?” he asks. “The dog?”
Carol casts a look over her shoulder to Anders. It’s Carol’s job to talk about me to the press because she is my handler, but she’s never seemed enthusiastic about the job. She’s particularly hesitant in this moment. I can feel her desire to cross the command tent and finish her conversation, but Anders is already busy with his tablet and radio. The tension between the two of them is unusual.
“Sera?” says Devin from outside the tent.
The man with the camera, who may have also sensed the tension, looks at Devin with relief. Carol does too. I am good at reading human expressions; it’s one of the things they teach at ESAC.
“She’s Enhanced Intelligence, yeah,” Devin says. “First EI SAR dog in the field in the US. First nonmilitary EI dog doing anything, actually.”
The photographer looks confused. “Sar?”
“Sorry. Search-and-Rescue. This is Sera’s seventh find already, and she’s only been on the team for half a year. Some dogs don’t make that record in a lifetime.”
The man taps something on his camera and points it at me. Carol kneels beside me in the pose we do for all our pictures, and I look at the camera and open my mouth so my tongue shows and I look like the dogs people have at home and they will relate to me.
“Search dogs don’t find people that often?” the man asks. There’s a series of ticks and flashes.
“Well, we train all the time, but we don’t deploy that often. Three, four times a year usually. These storms, though.” Devin shrugs. “It’s been insane. SAR teams in from all over the region. Law enforcement, military, everybody’s working the cleanup and rescue ops.”
The man nods in a big, knowing gesture. He’s ignoring Carol now. “What’s the dog’s name?”
“Sera. S-E-R-A, for Serendipity. And that’s Carol Ramos there, one of the team founders and the best dog handler in the Midwest.”
Carol rises from her photo-pose crouch and hooks my leash back to the table. She says, “Nice to meet you,” to the man, and turns. My gaze follows hers; Anders has left the command tent.
“Thanks,” the man calls as she walks away. Carol raises a hand but doesn’t answer.
Devin steps toward me and pats my side. I lean away from the physical contact, but give him a conciliatory wag. He talks with the photographer for a few more minutes, but I am not listening.
Instead I watch Carol find Anders next to his van and continue their discussion—their argument. I strain my hearing, but the stormy sound patterns intrude. Instead I hear wind picking up as the barometric pressure continues to drop, softening the hush-wash growling of the interstate; intruding human voices, high and yelping; the sounds of urban life—traffic, the percussion of comings and goings and doings, dogs and kids and shouts—held at a remove by the perimeter of the storm’s destruction. I hear no wildlife. Wild animals don’t emerge in weather like this.