I tore into the house. I found steps and galloped up them quickly, feeling like a good dog—starting Search at the top of the stairs was what Ben wanted.
An upstairs hallway led me down toward some open doors. The scent of humans was everywhere, difficult to separate into distinct individuals. I made my way into the first room, noting the bed and smelling carefully. People had recently been in the room, but there was nobody in there now. The next room was much the same way.
At the third room, the windows were closed and the door was ajar. When I padded in, I stopped dead.
Someone was in this room.
I made my way to the bed, jumped up on it, then leaped back down and sniffed under it. The person was not there.
Against the wall was a large wooden box with doors on it. I sniffed that and could smell the same person, who had touched this box often. I could catch enough of her scent to know she was a woman, but the odors were not so strong as to indicate that she was in the box.
That left the closet. The doors were the sliding kind and they were almost all the way shut. A tiny crack between the edge of the door and the wall drew me to one side of the sliders. I put my nose to that crack and inhaled deeply. Immediately I could smell her—the woman was hiding in this closet!
I thrust my nose carefully forward, and the door slid open a little bit. I couldn’t see anything, but I had her scent.
I did what I had been trained to do. I dashed swiftly down the stairs and into the living room, where Alvis and Ben were checking behind a sofa. I pawed at Ben’s leg.
“Good boy!” he praised me through his mask. He turned to Alvis. “Ripley’s found somebody. Let’s go!”
Ben gestured and I made my way back to the stairs. He and Alvis were moving urgently, so I quickened my pace, and the three of us burst into the room. I pawed the closet door and Ben flung it open. “Good dog. Good dog,” he praised me when he saw the woman. She was sleeping.
Alvis ran to the window and slammed it up. Cold air blew into the room. “Lieutenant,” he shouted. “We found somebody.”
I watched as Alvis and Ben bent over the woman and picked her up by her arms and legs. They made their way carefully and slowly, navigating the hallway and then down the stairs. By the time they reached the bottom floor, Roxie was there with a large metal bottle and a plastic mask. She slapped the mask on the woman’s face and then felt her neck and wrist.
“I’ve got a pulse,” she shouted. “Weak, one forty.”
Ben put his head on the woman’s chest. “She’s not breathing.”
Roxie grabbed the woman’s mask, lifted it up, and kissed the woman’s lips. Roxie’s cheeks expanded. The woman’s chest rose and fell. Ben yanked at the big phone on his belt. “Need a ventilator in here, stat,” he barked at it.
I was focused and intent because everyone was tense. Nobody had taken off my mask or given me a treat yet, and I had the sense that it was because Search wasn’t over.
I’d found the sleeping woman and brought Ben and Alvis to her, but that hadn’t been enough. More was needed.
Ben twisted something on the metal bottle and I heard a hiss.
The woman lay very still. She gave off the odors of a living person, but of a living person who is in a deep, deep sleep.
Nance burst into the house with a box and knelt beside Roxie, opening it. Ben grabbed the mask from the sleeping woman’s face, yanking it clean off the hose. He tossed the mask aside and I regarded it curiously.
“Tube her!” Ben commanded urgently, his voice strained.
Roxie held a short tube. “Tubing her,” she replied in clipped tones. I watched in surprise as Roxie lifted the woman’s jaw, put a spoon on the woman’s tongue, and then slid a tube right into the woman’s throat. Next, Ben attached the hose to the tube.
“All right.” Roxie fussed with the machine that Nance had brought. “Flushing one hundred percent oh-two.”
“Come on, come on,” Ben urged, leaning over the sleeping woman.
Roxie was holding the woman’s hand. “Still one hundred forty beats a minute,” she told Ben.
The woman’s chest was now rising and falling visibly. Every time it did so, there was a hiss from Nance’s machine.
I sat and watched. I was doing what I do. People perform complicated tasks that are not within a dog’s understanding, and all a dog can do is try to pay attention.
After a short while, Roxie and Nance went outside and when they returned, they were pushing the big rolling bed. They put the woman on it, set Nance’s machine next to her, and I followed them out of the house as they rolled it to the back of Roxie’s car.
I understood something now: Search wasn’t just about playing with my friends at Captain Bee’s house. Search had a purpose, and I had a purpose. This sleeping woman was in distress in ways no dog could comprehend but which required quick action by humans. My job was to do Search and find people like this woman so they could be helped.
Ben bent over, slid my mask off my face, and fed me a treat. “Good, Ripley. Good boy. Good, good dog,” he told me.
I wagged hard. I knew I was a good dog. I knew I’d done Search just like Ben wanted me to.
Ben looked up from petting me as Hutch came near. “How does she look?” he asked.
Ben pursed his lips and shook his head. “We’re doing what we can. No idea how long she’s been breathing in CO. Roxie put in an endotracheal tube and we’re pumping pure oxygen. She’s got a weak, rapid pulse.”
They closed the back doors of Roxie’s car. Ben whistled for me. I jumped into the front of the car and he clipped my harness into the restraints.
“Let’s go. Lights and siren,” he told Roxie.
Roxie was driving, and I felt a surge as the car drove off, a loud wail blasting from above. We soon arrived at the great big building where Roxie liked to go in with the people we’d been giving rides to.
This time, we were met by a cluster of humans in long coats. They ran up to the back doors of our car and opened them, and Roxie and Ben pulled the woman out. The people in the coats wheeled her rapidly through the big doors. Roxie followed the woman, while Ben came to be with me.
“You did a good job, Ripley.” He gave me another chicken treat. I loved Ben.
Roxie soon returned with the bed, but now it was empty. She closed the back doors on it and came around and jumped in the car to be with me.
“I stuck around long enough to see her breathing on her own,” Roxie announced. “She even opened her eyes. I think she’s going to be okay.”
As we drove, wind and snow pushed at the sides of the car. “So Ripley’s birthday is this week?” Roxie asked casually.
“Yah. The fourteenth.”
“Of February,” Roxie noted.
“Yah.”
“Is that the only thing that happens on the fourteenth of February?” Roxie prodded.
Ben looked puzzled. “You mean, are we throwing a party for a dog or something?”
“You never considered that Ripley was born on Valentine’s Day?” Roxie rolled her eyes.
Ben’s own eyes widened.
“This is why you’re lucky I’m your partner,” Roxie told him. “Yes. Valentine’s Day. Sammie and Lizzy.”
“Sammie and Lizzy,” Ben repeated. “This feels like a change of topic.”
“No, it’s exactly the same topic, you goof. How do you feel about them?”
“How do I feel? We have a rule: no talking about stuff like this,” Ben objected.
“No, you have a rule.” Roxie laughed. “I signed no such agreement. So what about them?”
Ben smiled. “Sammie is pretty much the most wonderful person I can ever imagine meeting.”
“Oh. Sure. Sammie. What about her mom?”
“No comment on Lizzy.”
Roxie laughed again.
“Snow’s turning to sleet. Guess we’re going to have to wash the ambulance after every call,” Ben noted ruefully. “Hope we don’t have to go out a lot.”
“Alvis will be in heaven,” Roxie agreed.
There was a silence. “What do you suppose was going on with the house? The woman alone, the van in the garage?” Roxie asked.
Ben regarded her grimly. “Best guess, she went to the garage, started the van, then remembered something and went back inside. Got distracted, and then the carbon monoxide detectors started blaring. Most people don’t know the difference between a smoke detector’s alarm and the CO detector, so she probably started wandering around, looking for smoke. Couldn’t find any. Starts feeling sick, dizzy, headachy. Figures out it’s from fumes and gets confused and decides she’ll be safe in the closet.”
“But nowhere is safe from carbon monoxide,” Roxie finished for him.
He nodded. “Exactly.”
“You said ‘best guess.’ What are you thinking?”
Ben’s grin was sheepish. “Yah, well, I read too many mysteries, don’tcha know, but it occurred to me that if you wanted to murder someone, starting their vehicle in a closed garage might be a good way to go about it. No one would know it was anything but an accident.”
Roxie stared. “You’re right!”
Ben shrugged and his smile broadened. “And that’s the thing about our job. Most of the time we only see the beginning of the story. We see the fire, or the accident. It’s pretty rare that we find out what happened afterward. We just have to guess.”
I loved the snow, but I was just as happy with the sunshine and the warmth when it came. The snow turned soft and wet, and then for several days Samantha and I mostly played inside. Rain came down, ceaseless and loud, and I only dashed out into the slush for a quick squat.
When Ben came to pick me up, water filled the streets and we splashed through it to Captain Bee’s house.
“Still raining,” Ben announced in disgust to Willets and Nance when we arrived.
“Minnesota is the land of ten thousand lakes, and half of them are in our front yard,” Willets replied.
We sat the room where the men and Roxie liked to drink coffee and occasionally eat sweet things that they would slip me under the table. Today was one of those occasions.
Captain Bee strolled out of his little room and gazed broodingly through the wet windows, out at the flooded lawn, before turning to us. “Guys, I have to be honest. All the years I’ve lived here, I’ve only seen this happen a couple of times, record snowfall all winter followed by some unseasonably warm days in April. The snow’s melting pretty fast and the rivers are already at flood stage. The Mississippi at Red Wing is eighteen feet, and now this.” He hooked his thumb toward where the rain was battering the window. “Not supposed to let up soon, either. I want you all to review water rescue tactics. Hutch, let’s practice ropes and harnesses. You know the drill.” He smiled and shook his head. “People are foolish. They’re going to be driving into water without knowing how deep it is and it’ll be up to us to go save them.” He sighed. “Heck of a way to spend my last couple of months in the department.”
“In other words,” Alvis drawled into the silence, “it’s gonna be a long day.”
We had an odd morning in that everyone mostly wanted to play with ropes. Ben had me pull the rope to him many times, giving me a treat and a click each time but not explaining why we were playing this game over and over. It wasn’t as fun as Search.
The roof roared with falling rain. The truck didn’t venture out into the storm, and I noticed water seeping in under the big doors. I sniffed at the gathering pool curiously, and Alvis saw me and came over with a mop and a bucket. Pretty soon he and Willets were mopping up the water, which danced merrily every time they swept their mops across the floor.
“What a mess,” Alvis complained.
“I imagine it’s pretty hard for you,” Willets observed, “seeing all this water on the floor—your precious floor.”
“I get that you’re too far up there to see the dirt, but for people of normal height, a clean floor is a happy floor,” Alvis countered.
“Alvis Anderson, the man who believes floors can talk,” Willets said cheerfully.
I lifted my ears then, because I heard a familiar chime playing through Captain Bee’s house, and sure enough, the men started running around yelling the way they always did, making me uneasy. The big doors rattled up and I saw that the streets and the driveway were covered with water.
“All right,” Bee yelled from the doorway to the dinner room. “Stay safe. Rope yourselves. Do not go into deep water!”
The huge truck trundled out into the rain, and we followed in Roxie’s car.