Part 2: My Pit Bull Had No Search-and-Rescue Training the Night He Led Me Off the Trail to a Missing Boy. A Year Later, a Veterinarian Explained What He Had Been Born With — and We Finally Made It Official.

Part 2

The missing boy’s name was Caleb Foss. He was eight years old. He was visiting the area with his family — they were not locals; they were from Phoenix, up for a long weekend, staying at a rental cabin near the Hermosa Creek trailhead.

Caleb had wandered off on a Saturday afternoon.

It is the oldest story in mountain search-and-rescue and it almost never has anything to do with bad parenting, and it did not here. The family had been on a short hike near the cabin. Caleb had been a little ahead on the trail, the way an eight-year-old gets a little ahead, and there was a fork, and there was a squirrel or a bird or some small ordinary thing that pulls an eight-year-old’s attention, and by the time the family reached the fork, Caleb was not on either path.

That is all it takes. A fork, a distraction, ninety seconds. The mountains do the rest.

The call came in to the Sheriff’s Office in the late afternoon. The first hours were the organized, optimistic hours — the hours when you still expect to find the child within sight of the trail, cold and scared and fine. We did not find him in those hours. The light went. The temperature, which in the Colorado high country in October falls off a cliff the moment the sun is gone, began to drop toward freezing.

By the time it was fully dark, this had become the kind of search that the people doing it do not talk about in their normal voices.

We had real search-and-rescue resources on that mountain. I want to be completely clear about that, because I am not telling you a story about a heroic amateur dog outshining the professionals, and I would be ashamed to tell that story, because it would be a lie and it would be an insult to people I respect. We had a trained, certified SAR team. We had two certified search dogs and their handlers — serious people, serious animals, the real thing. We had a grid. We had a command post. We had a helicopter on call for first light.

I was not the dog handler. I was a deputy assigned to a ground team, working a sector on the cold western slope, on foot, in the dark.

And I had Compass with me, on a long lead, because if my team was the team that found Caleb Foss, I wanted my gentle dog there for the boy.

That was the whole plan. Compass was, that night, supposed to be furniture. Comfortable furniture for a frightened child.

He was not interested in being furniture.

From the moment we started working our sector, Compass was not behaving like himself. He was not a dog out for a walk. He was up — nose working, body tight, pulling, scanning. I corrected him a few times, the way you correct a dog who is being a nuisance on a lead. I assumed he was overstimulated. New place, dark, a dozen people with flashlights, radios crackling.

About forty minutes into our sector, on the marked trail, Compass stopped.

He put his nose up. He held it there.

And then he turned ninety degrees off the trail, into the black timber, and he pulled.

Part 3

I want to tell you what I did at the moment Compass turned off the trail, because I did the wrong thing first, and I think that matters.

I corrected him. I planted my feet and I shortened the lead and I told him no, and I tried to put him back on the trail, because I was a deputy doing a job, and the job had a grid, and the grid was the trail and the sectors off it that the command post had assigned, and a sixty-pound rescue dog with no training does not get to redraw a search grid on a freezing night with a child’s life on the clock.

Compass did not accept the correction.

I want to be precise about this, because Compass is not a disobedient dog and he has never, before or since, refused me the way he refused me that night. He did not lunge or bark or fight the lead in a panicked way. He simply set his weight, and faced the black timber, and pulled — steadily, with his whole body, with total commitment — and when I held him back he turned and looked at me, and then he faced the trees again and pulled.

He pulled the way a dog pulls when he is certain and you are wrong.

I stood on that trail for what was probably only fifteen seconds and felt like much longer, and I made a decision that I have gone over many times since.

I keyed my radio. I told the command post that my dog was alerting hard off-trail to the north of my sector. I said the words “my dog,” and I heard, even through the radio, the small pause on the other end, because everyone on that mountain knew that “my dog” was not one of the certified search dogs — that “my dog” was Yates’s rescue Pit Bull that he’d brought along to be nice to the kid.

The incident commander was a woman named Sergeant Reyna Ortiz, and Reyna Ortiz has run searches in those mountains for twenty years, and Reyna Ortiz did something that night that I will be grateful for as long as I live.

She did not tell me to stay on the grid.

She said, on the radio: “Yates. Is your dog sure?”

And I looked at Compass — at sixty pounds of brindle rescue dog leaning his entire body toward something in the dark that I could not see and could not smell and had no reason to believe in — and I keyed the radio and I said:

“He’s sure.”

She said: “Then go. I’ll move a team to back you. Call your position every five minutes.”

And I let go of the correction, and I gave Compass the lead, and Compass took me into the timber.

Part 4

I want to tell you about the next ninety minutes, because the next ninety minutes are the part that taught me what I had been walking around with for four years without knowing it.

Compass did not wander. That is the thing I keep coming back to. A dog without training, following a scent, will cast around — work back and forth, lose it, find it, circle. Compass did not do that. Compass moved through that black timber on a line. Not the trail’s line. His own line. He would adjust — he would lift his nose, swing a few degrees, settle — but he was not searching the way I understood searching. He was tracking. He had a thing, and he was going to the thing, and the timber and the dark and the cold and the steep ground were simply obstacles between him and the thing.

We went off-trail and downslope for the better part of a mile. I called my position every five minutes. The certified team Reyna had moved was behind me and working to catch up, but Compass was fast and certain and I was not going to slow him down, because every instinct I had — and after fourteen years you do develop instincts — every instinct I had was now screaming that the dog was right.

The temperature was below freezing. I want you to hold that. An eight-year-old, eighteen hours out, in a Phoenix family’s idea of October clothing, somewhere on a mountain below freezing.

It was Compass who heard him first. Or smelled him — I will never know which. We had come down into a drainage, a steep little fold in the mountain choked with deadfall and brush, the kind of place a search grid does not love and a frightened child trying to get out of the wind would absolutely end up. Compass’s whole body changed. He went from certain to urgent. He pulled me down through the deadfall, and I had my flashlight sweeping ahead of us, and the light came across a pale shape wedged in under the root ball of a fallen spruce.

It was Caleb Foss.

He was alive. He was conscious. He was hypothermic and he was exhausted and he had been crying for so long that he had stopped, but he was alive, and he was eight years old, and when my flashlight found him he flinched away from it and made a small sound, and I have been a deputy for fourteen years and I have heard a lot of sounds and I am not going to forget that one.

I got to him. I got my coat around him. I got on the radio and I gave the command post the words they had been waiting eighteen hours to hear, and I heard, behind Reyna Ortiz’s professional voice, the command post erupt.

And I want to tell you what Caleb did, because Caleb did not reach for me first.

He reached for the dog.

Compass had pushed in beside him under the root ball, pressed the whole length of his body against the freezing boy, and Caleb Foss — eighteen hours alone on a mountain — wrapped both his arms around a strange brindle dog and held on, and Compass let him, and held still, and that is how the certified team found us nine minutes later: a deputy, a boy, and a Pit Bull, in a hole in the mountain, in the dark.

I thought, that night, that I had simply gotten lucky with a good dog.

I had not gotten lucky. I had been walking around for four years not knowing what I had.

Part 5

About two weeks after the search, I took Compass to our veterinarian for an unrelated thing — a torn dewclaw — and while I was there I told the vet the story. I was still, two weeks later, a little high on it, the way you are.

Our vet is a woman named Dr. Halloran, and she has been practicing in Durango for a long time, and she listened to the whole thing, and then she asked me a question I was not expecting.

She asked: “Dan, has anyone ever actually told you what Compass is?”

I said he was a Pit mix. Hound maybe. The shelter card said “hound maybe.”

Dr. Halloran got up and she felt Compass over — his head, his long heavy ears, the loose flews of his lips, the deep chest — the way a vet feels a dog when she is reading him like a document. And she told me that what she was looking at, underneath the Pit Bull, was a great deal of scenthound. Not “hound maybe.” Hound, substantially, structurally — the architecture of an animal built, by generations of breeding, around a nose.

She explained it to me carefully, the way good professionals explain things. She said that all dogs smell the world in a way we cannot imagine, but that scenthounds are a different order of the thing — that they are, functionally, a nose with a dog attached, bred for centuries specifically to find, follow, and stay committed to a scent trail across terrain, in the dark, for as long as it takes, without giving up.

And she said something else, and this is the part that has stayed with me.

She said that a frightened human being is, to a dog with a nose like that, not subtle. She said fear changes a person’s body chemistry — adrenaline, cortisol, the sweat, the breath — and that to an ordinary dog that is a faint signal and to a scenthound it can be a flare. She said an eight-year-old who has been terrified and alone on a mountain for eighteen hours would have been, to a dog built like Compass, the loudest thing on that mountainside. Not hidden. Not faint. The single most obvious thing in the entire drainage.

She said: “Dan. You keep telling me Compass found that boy. I want you to understand. From the moment you stepped into his sector, Compass almost certainly knew that boy was there. He spent forty minutes on that trail trying to tell you. The story isn’t that your dog found a missing child. The story is that your dog smelled a terrified child a mile away through a forest, and then had to spend forty minutes convincing a human being to follow him.”

I sat in that exam room and I thought about the forty minutes I had spent correcting him.

I thought about how close I had come to winning that argument.

Part 6

I want to tell you what I did with what Dr. Halloran told me, because this is the part where the story stops being about luck and starts being about a decision.

I went home, and I sat in my quiet house with my dog, and I thought about all of it.

I thought about the shelter. Compass had spent five months in that shelter. He was an adult Pit Bull mix, brindle, with a scar — which is to say, he was exactly the kind of dog that shelters cannot place, the kind of dog the world has decided, on sight, is a problem and not a gift. He had been “overlooked,” the volunteer had said. He shouldn’t have been.

He had been carrying this — this nose, this built-in, bred-in, generations-deep gift — the entire time. Through five months in a kennel. Through four years of being my quiet-house companion. Nobody had known. He had not known. I certainly had not known. The single most remarkable thing about my dog had been completely invisible because he was the wrong breed and the wrong color and the wrong age to be looked at closely.

It had taken a missing child and a freezing night and forty minutes of me telling him no for anyone to find out what Compass was.

So I made a decision.

I called the regional search-and-rescue organization that trains and certifies dogs, and I told them the whole story — Caleb Foss, the drainage, Dr. Halloran’s assessment — and I asked them what it would take to find out, properly, whether my four-year-old rescue Pit Bull could do the job he had already, untrained, done once.

It was not a fast process and it was not an easy one and I am not going to pretend it was. SAR certification is serious. It is supposed to be serious. Compass and I trained for the better part of a year — evenings, weekends, a real curriculum, real evaluators, real standards that we passed on their terms, not ours.

Compass passed.

He passed everything. The evaluators, more than one of them, used the same word Dr. Halloran had used — they kept telling me, with a kind of professional surprise, that whatever was under the brindle coat, the nose was the real thing, the rare thing, and that it was a quiet shame nobody had found it sooner.

Compass became, in the fall after the fall he found Caleb Foss, a certified search-and-rescue dog with the same organization whose professionals had backed me up on the mountain that night.

The rescue Pit Bull that a shelter could not give away for five months put on a real SAR vest.

Part 7

It has been three years since the night on the mountain.

Compass is seven now. He is a certified, working search-and-rescue dog, and he has been deployed on a number of searches across our region, and I am going to tell you a number, and I want you to understand that I am telling it to you carefully, because behind the number are real families and real worst nights of their lives, and the number is not a trophy.

In the three years since he was certified, Compass has been the dog who located eight more missing children.

Eight.

Eight children, alive, found — in timber, in drainages, in the cold, in the dark — by a dog who, four years ago, was a brindle Pit Bull mix nobody at a shelter could place.

Not every search ends the way those did. Anyone in this work will tell you that, and I will not pretend otherwise, and the searches that do not end that way are the ones that the people who do this carry with them. But eight children went home to their families because the dog in the back of my truck turned out to be carrying something nobody had bothered to look for.

There is a thing I do now, every single time, before Compass and I deploy on a search.

When we get the call, and I load him into the truck, I take his head in both my hands for a second, and I look at him, and I say the same thing out loud. The other deputies have heard me do it and nobody gives me a hard time about it, because every one of them was on that mountain or knows someone who was.

I say: “I’m sorry I argued with you. I won’t argue with you. Go.”

And then I let him do the thing he was apparently born on this earth to do, and I follow him, and I do not correct him, ever, no matter where he goes, because I learned — at altitude, in the cold, with a child’s life on the clock — exactly what it costs to tell Compass he is wrong when Compass is sure.

Part 8

Caleb Foss is eleven now.

His family drove back up from Phoenix last October — the one-year anniversary of the night — and they have done it every October since. They come and they see the deputy and they see the dog. Caleb is a tall, healthy, ordinary eleven-year-old boy, and the first thing he does, every single time, before he says a word to me, is get down on the ground and put his arms around Compass.

It is the same thing he did in a hole in the mountain when he was eight years old and had been alone in the dark for eighteen hours.

I think about the shelter a lot. I think about the five months Compass sat in that kennel being overlooked, being the wrong breed and the wrong color, being a dog the world had already decided about.

I think about how the most extraordinary thing in our county’s search-and-rescue program spent five months one wall away from being out of time.

The volunteer who walked me down that row was right.

He had been overlooked.

He shouldn’t have been.

Nobody looks past him now.

Good boy, Compass.

I’m following.

Follow this page for more stories about the overlooked ones who were carrying something extraordinary the whole time.