Mountain Dog Read Online Free PDF Page A

never-lonely.

 
    11
    TONY THE BOY
    THE RESCUE BEAST
    Tío notices my mood.
    He invites me to talk, but I don’t feel
    ready, so he takes me with him
    out to the woods, where I help him
    by hiding for his search-and-rescue team
    of volunteer handlers and their dogs.
    Hiding offers me a strange escape
    from feeling cheated by life,
    even though the dog handlers call me
    a volunteer victim.
    The way they say it, victim sounds so useful,
    because it means that when I hide
    in the forest, all the dogs have a chance
    to practice finding a real victim.
    There are all sorts of complicated
    training exercises, but the simplest
    is the first one every SAR dog learns:
    a runaway.
    All I have to do is race away
    from a dog as it watches me.
    The handler holds on to its collar
    so it can’t follow until I’ve vanished
    behind a tree or a boulder.
    Once I’m out of sight, the dog
    is turned loose, and the handler
    shouts, Find!
    The eager dog rushes
    to do his playful
    hide-and-seek work,
    running to my hiding place
    so that he can receive
    two rewards—his handler’s praise
    and a treat, or a toy.
    Even the most experienced dogs
    love to do runaways
    just for fun,
    but they also need
    more difficult problems.
    It’s like they’re doing math,
    and they already know fractions,
    percentages, and word problems,
    so now they have to move on
    and try to master
    prealgebra.
    Dogs don’t separate reality
    from fantasy. It’s all the same,
    all work, all play. Imagine a world
    where homework is fun. That’s
    a dog’s world. Just thinking about it
    encourages me. Maybe there’s hope
    for a kid who hates numbers.
    Research for an online article
    about SAR dogs
    calms me too.
    It helps me feel safe to know
    that search-and-rescue volunteers
    practice all year, just in case
    someone gets lost.
    Even a stranger.
    Especially a stranger.
    Tío risks his life each time he goes out
    in wild weather, at night, in rough terrain,
    to search for a child or a thru-hiker.
    My uncle claims
    he’s not brave.
    He says there’s a fierceness
    that takes over his mind, giving him
    endurance and strength. He insists
    that anyone who has ever
    searched for the lost
    knows how it feels
    to be transformed
    into a Rescue Beast
    thinking of others
    instead of himself.
    Rescue Beasts are the opposite
    of werewolves. They’re people
    who turn into wilderness heroes
    instead of villains.
    There’s so much to know.
    Where do I start? Tío advises me
    to study the dogs, not the Beast.
    He shows me how there are two kinds
    of searches, area and trailing.
    Gabe is one of the few dogs trained
    to do both. When he zigzagged
    all over the apple grove, his nose
    was up in the air, searching for any
    human scent, any human at all.
    That’s called area work.
    Trailing work is different.
    It can only be done when there’s
    a PLS—a place last seen—a spot
    where someone saw the lost person
    right before she vanished.
    A trailing dog sniffs any object
    that carries the victim’s scent—a pillow,
    a jacket, a hat. Whenever there’s a PLS,
    Gabe searches on a long leash,
    like a bloodhound in a manhunt movie,
    nose to the ground, following only one
    set of footprints as he sniffs to match
    the smell of those tracks
    to the scent of the pillow.
    It’s eerie, thinking how easily we
    can get lost and how little of ourselves
    we leave behind. Sunglasses. A backpack.
    Winter gloves. After a week or two,
    even the unique smell of a person
    is gone. The place last seen is only
    fragrant and useful for a few days,
    or at most, a few weeks.…
    Thinking of lost people
    reminds me of Mom, but instead
    of letting me focus on loss,
    Tío goes into Rescue Beast mode,
    showing me how to concentrate
    on helping others. On SAR training days,
    a bunch of us gather in the forest, and I
    have my chance to help the dogs
    by hiding.
    First, I’m escorted to a hiding place
    by Tío, who gives