Sam jumped to her feet, turned and sniffed Law’s prone body, stopping at his hip, his left shoulder, and sniffing both wrists. Whatever she read coming off him was enough to convince her to act. She licked his face twice then turned and jumped past Jori to get out.
Jori crawled out of the tiny cramped cabin after Sam into a swirl of ice and tiny flakes.
She stood up and watched Sam orient herself.
The dog stood for a moment, nose up, ears lifted. Jori wasn’t at all certain of what Sam was listening for and sniffing out. But she trusted that training and instinct were working together.
Sam barked a couple of times and started off in the direction they had come. But then something—a sound perhaps?—made her stop. She lifted her nose again, ears pricked forward, and turned slowly in a circle until again something caused her to pause. After alerting with rising tail, she ran off in the opposite direction, down the slope.
Jori watched the rusty-red dog, a bright moving blot against the creep of white over the gray landscape until she disappeared below the slope.
“It’s a hell of a day to send her out into.” Jori had shimmied back through the cab’s window.
“We didn’t have a choice.” Law’s tone was grim.
Jori nodded and bit her lip, wondering if she had just sent a wonderful dog on a suicide mission. The weather was brutal. The ice would damage her paws. If she didn’t find someone quickly she might not have the stamina to lead them back when she did find help.
“Now you will help me.” Becker was pointing his hand with a gun in it at Jori.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Find Help.
Sam knew those were very important words. It was a game she had played most of the two and a half years of her life with her trainers. Find Help was the toughest game. It meant Alpha was down. Alpha was sick. Alpha was in trouble.
It meant locate and bring back a human, sometimes a stranger, to where Alpha was.
“Find help. Sam.”
Sam looked back. The trainer woman was watching her. She would give good treats for the completion of her job.
But treats weren’t the only motive in Sam’s eagerness. There was a stronger force pushing her. The innate instinct to defend the pack.
Alpha was down.
She could smell anger and fear on Alpha even before she’d found him in the truck. Only it wasn’t just from him. A flurry of odors created by injuries blanketed the truck as she’d neared it. Some were from the man with Alpha who had tried to take Alpha away.
Alpha did not like the man. Sam did not like the man.
Sam lowered her head, approaching the driver’s side of the truck. She ignored the woman’s calls and stuck her head in through the broken window to sniff the man.
Yes, bad man.
He had attacked Alpha.
An attack on Alpha was an attack on the pack.
Alpha down.
Sam would act to defend the pack.
Find Help.
Sam circled the truck several times and then ran back the way she had come. But the odors died that way.
She paused and pushed her nose into the cold air. Surprise. The cold wet wind was now spitting ice.
She did not know what it was. But it worried her. Like a horsefly that once stung her nose and eyes and ears.
She stopped to snap at the white stings before she again put her nose into that cold wind.
She turned back from the woods. There were so many new smells on that stinging airstream. Cows and goats and chickens were known. A feral cat family burrowed in an outcropping of rock nearby. Rabbits, beavers, raccoons, squirrels, and deer. All known. But there were spoor of things she’d never even seen.
The cold seem to be crystallizing them before her. She licked at the air. The cold stings landed on her tongue. She tasted plowed fields and wheat chaff and a scrap of corn husk. Things not known.
This new frigid wind bathed her nose in the giant perfume bottle of the earth.
She danced in a circle, breathing in delight. But she soon pulled out of the overwhelming need to catalog every new and old scent.
Find Help. That meant human scents.
Humans had odors different from cows and chickens. So many chicken scents in the wind today.
Sam paused and sneezed twice to clear her scent palate. Then she licked her nose and pricked her ears. Humans made sounds, too. It took several seconds to catch the sound’s orientation. Yes. There it was. That faint wail of a police siren, followed by several short whoops. It sounded like Alpha’s cruiser. He’d turned it on only once. But it was enough.
Sam wheeled and headed out in the opposite direction from the one she and the woman trainer had come.
Find Help was this way.
The white air pelted her, becoming more and more annoying. That and the ground. It was cold, getting harder to sink her claws in for traction. She could not run long.
The white air stung her insides, too. Made white stuff come out of her mouth.