Dog Days (8 page)

He looked so earnest that I had to smile. “I appreciate that, Corny, but it’s not your fault.” He really had to learn to stop taking things so seriously. He reminded me a lot of Pepper in that regard. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

~*~

I left Katie in charge of the phones, and Marilee, who was, if I had to make a choice, the more responsible one, in charge of the dogs—including Pepper, Mischief, and Magic—in the playroom. I threatened to Tweet pictures of them without makeup across the universe if they were not still here when I got back, and loaded up Cisco into the SUV. I didn’t actually have pictures of either one of them, with or without makeup, and I wasn’t entirely sure I knew how to Tweet a picture even if I had, but they didn’t know that, and the uneasiness on their faces when they heard the threat made me pretty sure they weren’t going to try to sneak out early again.

I could hear Cisco’s excited panting from the backseat as we made our way up the mountain toward the ranger station. The area I intended to search was actually on the other side of the mountain, but it was protocol to check in. Besides, I owed Rick the courtesy of an explanation about how I’d lost the dog.

But when I reached the ranger station at the top of the mountain, I could tell Rick had bigger problems than a lost dog. The front parking lot was crowded with four sheriff’s department cars, including the K-9 unit, and, from the look of the back lot, half the jeeps in the Forest Service had been called in. A half dozen deputies and rangers bent over a topographical map that was spread on a table on the front porch of the rustic log cabin that served as the main office of the ranger station. I could see Jolene, notebook in hand, interviewing a rather harried-looking man in the shade of a picnic shelter a few feet away. The man kept tossing anxious looks at Nike, her gorgeous Belgian Malinois police dog, who sat in perfect attention at Jolene’s side, but I could understand his consternation. Most people are a little afraid of police dogs.

I parked on the grass on the opposite side of the road, rolled down all the windows, and told Cisco I’d be back in a minute.

Rick looked up as I crossed the road and waved me onto the porch. “Good,” he said, “they called you. I was afraid you wouldn’t have time to help.”

“Help with what?” I shoved my hands into my jeans pockets as I came up the steps, trying not to look around too anxiously for Buck. It was inevitable we’d run into each other sooner or later, but I really wasn’t ready for it yet. “Nobody called me. I’m just here looking for a dog. What happened?”

Rick nodded in the direction of Jolene and the man she was talking to at the picnic shelter. “Fellow says his wife went for a walk last night and hasn’t come back. They’re in the RV section of the Bottleneck Campground.”

I frowned a little. “Kind of hard to get lost over there.”

Bottleneck was so named because of the way the nearby creek narrowed and then exploded into a waterfall, but during tourist season its popularity gave the name a double meaning. Throughout July and August the bottleneck of campers sometimes meant a two-hour wait to sign in on the weekends, and the place was wall-to-wall with tents and RVs. The hiking trails were all flat and well marked, and they all led right back to the campground.

Tim White, a deputy I’d known a few years, explained, “We think she might’ve gotten turned around in the dark, maybe hurt somehow, or met with foul play. Her husband said she didn’t have her phone. Did you bring your dog?”

Before I could answer, Jolene said behind me, “That won’t be necessary. Nike works best alone.”

I lifted my eyebrows and turned to face her. “Two dogs are better than one,” I pointed out, as nicely as possible.

“Two dogs only confuse the scent trail,” she returned, making no visible effort to be nice.

“Nike is a great dog,” I replied, “but Cisco is wilderness certified. And he knows these woods. If you want—”

“Look,” Jolene said, sharply enough to make Rick turn and look at her. “I know you’re used to being the hot ticket around here, but amateur hour is over. The sheriff’s department has its own dog now, and we’ll be handling things from now on. Get used to it.”

“I’m not an amateur!” I objected, temper flaring. “I’m as qualified as you are, maybe more! Cisco, too!”

Her tone was cool. “Nike is a deputy with the Hanover County Sheriff’s Department. We are paid to do this. You are not even qualified to be here.”

I drew in an outraged breath, but she cut me off. “This is a police matter, Stockton,” she said. “Don’t make me cite you for interfering with an investigation. You need to take your dog and get out of our way.”

With a flick of her finger she called Nike to heel, and the beautiful dog glided to her side. As much as I wanted to give Jolene a piece of my mind, I certainly could not fault Nike’s training. And clearly Jolene considered the discussion to be over. She turned her back on me and bent over the map, addressing the assembled deputies and ranger. “The husband says he thinks she went west. That means she was likely to have taken one of these trails.” She pointed on the map. “We’ll work in teams of three: two rangers, one deputy. Nike and I will search the deep woods beginning here …”

I met Rick’s disbelieving gaze and gave a shrug that I hoped successfully disguised my pique. I was a volunteer, and when a police officer told me to go, I had to go. It was a good thing I wasn’t going far, though, because I had a feeling Jolene might be persuaded to reconsider turning down free help before the day got too much older.

“Listen,” I told Rick, speaking below Jolene’s military-like commands, “I’m going back over to Hemlock Ridge where you found the golden yesterday. I had this crazy idea she might’ve tried to get back to her family’s campsite. I’ve got my cell phone if you need me.”

He muttered, “
When
we need you.”

Again I shrugged.

He nodded toward Jolene. “Is her dog any good?”

“The best,” I assured him. For sniffing out drugs or armaments or taking down a fleeing suspect on the street. But in these woods … well, we would soon see.

I turned to go back to my car, and couldn’t resist tossing over my shoulder to Jolene, “Call me if you need me. Rick’s got the number.”

Jolene did not even look up.

~*~

By the time I got to the Hemlock Ridge Campground I was feeling irritated, foolish, and more than a little sour. In the first place, Cisco and I had made seven verified wilderness rescues over the past two years, and okay, some of them were so simple they involved little more than pointing a lost hiker back in the direction of the trail, but some of them, like the little girl lost in the woods, were life or death. How many rescues had Nike made? We knew what we were doing. I should have stood my ground with Jolene. I shouldn’t have let her just kick us out like that.

On the other hand, who was I going to complain to? Buck?

In the second place, I was clearly grasping at straws to think that Cameo would return to the place she was picked up yesterday morning. Even if she wanted to, what made me think she could find this place again, or that she might have gotten here already? It could take a lost dog days, circling around, trying to pick up her own scent trail. It was far more likely that she would return to my place, which was closer and more recent in her memory, than here.

I almost got back in the car and drove to Bottleneck to join the search for the missing human, but two things stopped me. The first was the fact that, quite simply, I refused to beg Jolene to let me do my job. The second was the eager, hopeful expression in Cisco’s eyes as I stood there holding his tracking vest, debating.

I put Cisco’s vest and tracking harness on him and let him sniff the baggie of Cameo’s hair that I’d taken from the brush I’d used to groom her before bedtime last night. I brushed my hand across the dirt of the road beside which I’d parked and told him, “Track.”

He took off enthusiastically but it was clear after a few minutes he had nothing. That might have been because campers kept interrupting us with, “Mommy, look! Can I pet the dog?” and “We have a dog just like that at home!” Some parents were astute enough to point out the vest and tell their children the dog was working, even though Cisco, with his wagging tail and grinning face, looked less like a working dog than any dog I’d ever known. And since he actually
wasn’t
working by any normal definition of the word, I told people we were on a training exercise and took advantage of their curiosity to ask everyone we met if they had seen a golden retriever running loose that morning. No one had.

About a mile down the dirt road from the campsite there is an overlook where you can park your car, pose the family in front of the rock safety wall, and take a fantastic photo of a multilayered, blue and lavender, green and yellow, forever mountain view. Curls of fog rising off a distant peak reminded me why it’s called a smoky mountain; tracks of old logging roads and animal trails lined with bright red sourwood and sorghum always made me think of the stitching on a crazy quilt. Back when I worked for the forest service and used to patrol these roads in a jeep, this was one of my favorite spots. Sometimes I’d stop for lunch at the picnic shelter to the west of the overlook, and I’ve taken many a tourist’s photo posing with that magnificent vista in the background.

There was a family of tourists posing for a photo now; a blonde-haired mom trying to control two wiggling children on the rock wall while Dad stretched out his arm for the all-inclusive selfie. I was about to volunteer to take the photo for them when suddenly Cisco, who’d been sniffing the gravel walkway for tidbits the kids might’ve dropped, suddenly stiffened and turned his nose to the air.

It was clear he had scented something, but I couldn’t tell from which direction. To the north there was nothing but a tangled gorge so steep you looked down from here onto the tops of trees. To the south was the dirt road down which we’d just come. To the east and west the gorge sloped more gently, but it was still a wilderness. Cisco turned his head, tasting the air with that magnificent nose of his, sorting out the thousands upon thousands of pieces of information he was gathering from it, and then, unexpectedly, he barked.

Cisco is trained to sit and bark to alert me when he has found his target. This is the one thing about which he is very consistent, but unless the innocent-looking tourist family was concealing a big golden retriever somewhere on their persons, he had not found anything. Still, I believed Cisco, and I actually turned to look at their car, wondering if they might have picked up the stray dog, when I heard, from not so far in the distance, an answering bark.

I swiveled my head around just in time to prevent being jerked off my feet as Cisco, following the sound of the bark, raced toward the edge of the overlook and, placing his front paws on the rock wall, peered over. The children, ten or fifteen feet away, laughed and pointed, and Dad no doubt got a great picture. I looked down over the sheer drop in dismay. Cisco barked again, and again an answering bark came from somewhere within that tangled gorge.

It never occurred to me that the bark might have come from any dog other than Cameo. Like I said, I trusted Cisco, and Cisco knew what he was searching for. But even if it wasn’t Cameo, any dog who was lost—or perhaps even injured—at the bottom of that drop needed my help. All I had to do was figure out how to get down there.

I needn’t have worried. Cisco is a tracking dog, and his nose led me to the western edge of the overlook, where the slope was less intense and, at least at the top, less overgrown. There was a sturdy timber fence which I climbed over and Cisco climbed under; I grabbed his tracking leash on the other side and we began the slipping, stumbling descent into the gorge. I called “Cameo!” and got nothing; Cisco barked, and got a bark in return. I hung onto the branches of saplings and scrub brush to keep from falling as Cisco plowed down the slope, but I knew it was pointless to try to slow him down. It was all I could do to keep the leash from tangling and doing serious harm to us both.

We had gone five or six hundred yards when Cisco suddenly gave such a lunge that he pulled the leash right out of my hands. I didn’t even have the breath to call him, so I stumbled after his leaping, scrambling path, keeping up with him mostly by following the shaking of the bushes through which he tunneled. I threw up a hand to protect my eyes from a slapping branch and in the next moment caught a glimpse of two wagging golden tails. I skidded down another ten feet of incline and wrapped my arm around the trunk of a small pine to stop my forward momentum, leaving behind a layer of skin. But I barely felt the burn as I stood there, gasping, holding on to the tree, staring at what was before me.

Cisco had found Cameo and sat proudly beside her, his tail swishing in the dead leaves. He barked, once, to let me know of his success. Beside him, Cameo worriedly nosed at something on the ground. I blinked the sweat from my eyes and refocused, and for another half second I still couldn’t believe what I saw. It very much looked like a person, lying tangled amidst the vines and debris on the ground.

I plunged forward, shrugging out of my backpack, and dropped to my knees beside the form. Automatically my hand dug Cisco’s toy out of the pack and I tossed it to him, gasping, “Good find, boy, good find!” I had to push Cameo out of the way to see what it was, exactly, he had found.

It was a woman, her pale hair now dark with dried blood, her face a mass of bruises. One leg was twisted at an odd angle, showing breaks in two places, and an arm was pinned beneath her. She was completely still and her skin was cool and dry to the touch. But when I pressed my fingers reluctantly against her carotid artery I felt a pulse, very faint, very irregular, and my own heart leapt. I whipped a space blanket out of my pack and covered her with it, then dialed 911.