Bones Omnibus (55 page)

Long thought extinct in the area, a pack of timber wolves was active in the woods as well, but Bones knew to avoid them. If a confrontation became unavoidable, he could probably use his superior size and strength to fight off two or three of them, but the four or five of a hunting party would easily overwhelm him.

Thus far, there had really only been one incident, and it was easily resolved. Bones had been snoozing under a rocky outcropping during a light snowfall. He hadn’t eaten for a day or so and was starting to get hungry when a year-old buck walked by, all alone. Its horns more resembled thin sticks than a rack of antlers, which seemed to indicate that it had only lost its fawn spots a few months before. Still, it stood three and a half feet at the shoulder, which gave it more than enough meat to satisfy a ravenous German shepherd.

Bones waited until the deer crept past his impromptu blind, the snow playing havoc with the deer’s sense of smell, which typically would be effective against predators that close. The young buck moved with caution, as if realizing that another large animal had been in the area not so long ago. Still, it seemed to be banking on the fact that whatever-it-was had since moved on.

Wishful thinking.

Bones crouched low, his eyes focused on the buck’s ears, eyes, and tail to see if anything was setting off its internal alarm bells, but everything proceeded as normal. The buck’s reactions indicated little trepidation.

Once it had moved a few feet downwind from the outcropping and was investigating a small patch of grass in a neighboring clearing, Bones made his move. Moving swiftly and low to the ground, the one-time police dog launched himself off the rocks and directly onto the buck’s back. At the last moment, the larger animal seemed to realize what was happening and whirled around to bolt, but not in time. Bones wasn’t as fast as he’d been as a younger dog, but he made up for it with the viciousness of his attack. Knowing that the buck would fight back for only as long as it thought it had a chance at survival, the shepherd knew to come on strong and in a dominating manner. An older buck, arrogant in its size and standing in the woods, would fight back even with catastrophic wounds bleeding it out onto the forest floor. A younger one feeling mortal fear for the first time would sooner submit.

In this case “sooner” equaled less than a minute.

It was still barely alive when Bones tore open its soft belly and began stripping out the hot organs on which he feasted first. That’s when the shepherd’s well-tuned ears picked up a new presence in the area. Like the deer, Bones’s nose had been adversely affected by the weather, but his sense of hearing was as good as ever, and even in the soft snow he heard the footfalls of several hunters.

Bones turned around, instinctively blocking his kill with a tough defensive stance, and saw that the hunters were wolves, six in all, that seemed to have been tracking the buck when Bones interrupted and brought it down on his own.

Bones growled, the blood on his maw sluicing onto the snow as he bared his teeth. He’d had his first taste of blood for the day, was hungry for more, and wasn’t interested in being interrupted.

The wolves, which could have easily torn him apart as a group, stood their ground but refrained from coming closer. This infuriated Bones. He growled louder and then began to bark, loud, threatening noises filled with violence directed mainly at the closest two wolves. One of the others in back began to whine, and Bones turned his savage barking on that one in particular, as if indicating that that wolf would be the first to die by his jaws.

After a couple of seconds passed with no movement, Bones simply turned and went back to eating, showing the wolves his tail. His back was still rigid as if ready to fight, but he allowed it to gradually relax. When Bones then heard the wolves resuming their approach, he tensed and stopped chewing, but the footfalls weren’t stealthy this time. In fact, they were as tentative as the buck’s.

In response, Bones whipped his head around and barked sharply at the three approaching wolves, startling each and making them recoil in their tracks. But just as quickly as he had turned, Bones angled his head back to the food and continued eating/ignoring them.

After another moment had passed, a single timber wolf stepped up beside Bones, sniffed the buck and inched its nose closer and closer to the food. Bones turned and growled at the wolf, but this only made it hesitate. It moved a little closer to the fallen deer, saw that Bones wasn’t going to kill it for doing so, and then opened its jaws to sink its teeth into the newly dead flesh.

As the other wolves slowly gathered around the kill, Bones kept his peace, and soon the buck was torn to pieces. Each wolf took a chunk for itself, but also kept some back to deliver to the rest of the pack, doubtless nearby.

Bones ate his fill, gorging on the choicest pieces of meat without a care for the rest of the wolves. When one moved too close to a piece Bones wanted, the shepherd didn’t make a sound but simply reached over and tore it away from the other animal. The wolf responded with a growl of its own, but Bones didn’t engage, and soon the wolf had wisely moved on to a different piece.

A few minutes later, Bones was finished. Continuing to regard the wolves as if they were little more than crows begging at the trough, he spryly hopped away from the kill as the wolves watched and then disappeared into the woods without looking back. Once he was out of sight, he lifted his leg and peed on a tree. Then he moved on.

“It says we’re right on top of him, but I don’t see shit.”

It was three months after the incident with the timber wolves when Bones had detected the first humans of the season. He’d been asleep, but their harsh scent filled his nose when they were still half a mile away. There were a number of them and they made a lot of noise as they walked, making it easy for Bones to get moving and keep a few hundred yards ahead.

After only ten minutes of the humans staying tight on his trail, Bones realized he was being pursued.

“Bones! Here, boy! Bones!!” cried a voice.

Bones started in the direction of the voice, some deeply embedded bit of training unexpectedly rising to the surface. This quickly faded and he bounded away, heading higher into the hills around Sugarloaf Mountain.

As he went, he continued to hear the men behind him. Though he was upwind, the men were dauntless in their ability to track him, never missing a turn, as if they had his scent and good. Bones wasn’t tired, however, and just kept running. He was enjoying the pursuit, his mouth open as he galloped away, as if playing a game. He never imagined he’d be caught.

Thupp…thupp…thupp…thupp…thupp…

Bones heard the sound of the helicopter only seconds before it crested a nearby hilltop, a man hanging out of it, holding a pair of binoculars. The wash of the rotors kicked dust and needles off the aspens, creating clouds of debris that affected the shepherd’s sense of smell. Momentarily unable to tell which direction the men were coming from, Bones made like an arrow for a small crevasse only a few hundred yards away.

“Bones!”

This time, Bones stopped in his tracks at the sound of a very familiar voice. He turned and looked in every direction, but saw no sign of the speaker. He woofed a little as if to invite the person to announce his presence, and on cue the voice came again, though blended with feedback.

“Bones. Stay right there, buddy. We’re coming in after you.”

Bones suddenly felt a sharp pain in his neck and yelped. He whipped around, barely able to glimpse the little red feather fletchings of the dart already pumping a sedative into his bloodstream. He could feel his shoulder numbing when he turned to escape, and this caused him to stumble awkwardly and plow his snout into the dirt. He attempted to pull himself up on all fours, but both of his front legs were weakening.

Snuffling, Bones slid to the ground, eyes darting all around in panic at his sudden vulnerability. This did not last for long, however, as his panic was soon replaced by a dull numbing of his senses that resolved itself with sleep.

Bones awoke as he was being hauled through the woods on an Indian-style travois, two posts crossed at the head with a plastic tarp tied up between. Bones’s mouth felt as if it was full of cotton, so swollen was his tongue. He was groggy and glanced up at the people hauling him in. They were in typical cold-weather gear, like the hunters he occasionally saw from a distance.

That’s when he noticed one pair of eyes looking down at him in particular, a grim smile under them.

“Hey, Bonesy,” said former police sergeant Lionel Oudin. “You’ve put on weight. You’re looking real good. Guess outdoor life agrees with you.”

Bones looked up at his old trainer, a man he’d known since he was a puppy but who had also become his partner when he became a police dog, first for the Doña Ana Sheriff’s Department in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and then the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police. When Lionel retired, Bones had been assigned a new trainer, but that man had been killed in the incident leading up to Bones’s eventual escape into the wild.

Lionel leaned over and poured some water from a bottle into his hand, allowing Bones to lap up the liquid as the travois bounced along.

“Hate to tear you away from the woods,” the old man continued. “And I wouldn’t have, either, ’cept there’s a national emergency, so much of one that they didn’t blink when I suggested using that whirlybird to track you down. Bet you were wondering how we did that, huh? Well, that’s a Pennsylvania state-thing, embedding you with a tracking device like they use on soldiers nowadays. I’d forgotten you even had it when I got the call looking for you.”

Lionel reached down and touched a raised spot under Bones’s left leg.

“They put that in right after we got here from New Mexico, but you were knocked out,” Lionel explained. “Guess they figured you’re too expensive a piece of police property to let get away. Still can’t believe it worked after all this time.”

Bones listened awhile longer, drank water when Lionel offered it, but then looked out over the disappearing treetops. The farther they went, the less he smelled the wilderness and the more he smelled what the men had brought with them: oil, beer, tobacco, plastic, guns, deodorant, sweat.

Bones glanced back towards the woods one last time and saw a single curious timber wolf just within the trees. He stared back at it for a moment, wishing he had the strength to clamber off the tarp and go after it, but he didn’t. Resigned, he sank back onto the tarp and stared up into the sky.

The next few hours were a blizzard of activity. Bones was brought first to his old haunt, the K-9 school attached to the police training academy on Washington in Pittsburgh, where a police veterinarian gave him a clean bill of health.

“I’m surprised,” the vet admitted to Oudin. “He’s in tip-top shape. I don’t know what he’s been eating out there or how much exercise he’s gotten, but I’d say he’s fit for service.”

Bones could detect a hint of disappointment in Lionel’s face, but then the former police sergeant turned to the dog and smiled, scratching him between the ears as he led Bones off the examination table.

Two hours later, Bones found himself on a platform alongside four other enforcement/detection dogs, two German shepherds like himself and two Belgian Malinois, all younger. They were lined up at Pittsburgh police headquarters behind the chief of police as he prepared to give a speech to an assemblage of local press. Lionel was in attendance, too, standing just behind Bones with the other dog handlers, though he was the only one out of uniform, favoring a simple polo shirt with a Pittsburgh Bureau of Police badge embroidered on the chest.

“Because of the recent tragedy in Los Angeles, Pittsburgh is sending five of its best search-and-rescue dogs to aid in the city’s recovery efforts,” the Chief announcements. “These animals have a combined thirty-two years of service to our community and are of the very best trained in the country. Along with the number of Pennsylvania National Guardsmen and women already en route to the devastated city, we hope that our contributions will continue to help lead that city back from the brink.”

A reporter raised his hand, and the chief nodded his direction.

“Are these dogs going to be used on a short-term basis to look for survivors, or are they going to be part of a longer process to look for the remains of the estimated four to five million dead?”

The Chief hesitated a moment.

“As I understand it, these animals will be asked to participate in a three-pronged process utilizing their skills at search and rescue, but also as enforcement animals used to control looting and criminal activity and, yes, also as cadaver dogs to help recover the deceased.”

Bones noticed Lionel bristling at this list of tasks, his hand tightening on the leash as if momentarily regretting sending his friend into this maelstrom.

“Good-bye, Bones,” Lionel was saying, leaning down and stroking the head of his old partner when they reached Pittsburgh International Airport with the rest of the team. “I’m sorry to say that I’m not going with you on this one. They asked me to, but, well, all those years of no smoking, no drinking, and healthy eating have caught up with me, and I’ve managed to pick up a nasty case of cancer. But you know what they say, you live long enough, you’re going to get it. I just didn’t think that meant sixty-one.”

Bones stared up at his old friend, knowing something was worrying him but having no idea what it was. He nuzzled his snout into Lionel’s hand, and the former police sergeant pulled close to him.

“You be careful out there,” Lionel admonished the shepherd. “It’s full of crazies and that was even
before
the quake.”

Lionel chuckled, coughed, then chuckled again.

“Anyway, keep your head down. You never know when there’ll be another aftershock.”

Bones and the other dogs, as well as their handlers, were loaded onto a C-130 military transport plane, along with a large cache of supplies gathered from local merchants and bound for the devastated city. Bones was knocked out for the flight and slept in a large carrier alongside the other animals. He woke up an hour before the plane was to touch down and stayed awake, his snout resting on his paws as he looked around the inside of the massive plane. He smelled gunpowder and gun oil in the air, but also a different scent, one he recognized from the same incident of the previous year that had claimed his handler. It was a harsh chemical smell of almost a thousand biodegradable polyvinyl body bags that were stacked in the back and had the distinct odor of an old children’s swimming pool that had gotten musty in the garage.