“I’m not going to miss you,” I told our resident wunderkind. She responded to the warmth in my voice as I jostled her from one side to the other. When I signaled to allow it, she jumped up, putting her paws on my thighs. I buried my hands in her downy fur and scratched under her collar. “I’m not going to miss you at all, you awful dog.”

Pad tilted her head to the side. Her ears went up.

She hears something, I thought. Unlike most dogs, Pad was unlikely to be distracted by small animals. A squirrel could have danced across the path, and she wouldn’t have batted an eye.

The only thing that Pad was trained to pay attention to was humans.

A muscle in my jaw ticced. The boundaries of Cady’s property were clearly marked. So was the fact that trespassers were not welcome. Our territory. Not yours. I kept a check on the part of my brain that whispered those words, but I didn’t take Pad and head back to the house. Instead, the two of us went for a little walk. Being the human half of a SAR team required more than just training the dog and giving the appropriate commands. You had to be able to traverse all kinds of terrain. You had to know advanced first aid. You had to be able to navigate. You had to be able to strategize.

You had to have at least rudimentary tracking skills yourself.

It took me five or six minutes to find a sign that Pad hadn’t been hearing things. A broken twig, a quarter of a footprint, if that. The size and shape indicated the owner was male and walked lightly. Whoever our visitor was, he knew how to hide his tracks.

“You ready for some fun?” I asked the golden.

In answer, Pad got a good whiff of the intruder’s scent. The human body shed roughly forty thousand skin cells per minute. With a trail this fresh, those cells would be a beacon for the dog’s nose, leading us straight to the trespasser.

Pad looked up at me, waiting for the command. “Find him.”

Pad took off running. I gave her plenty of slack on the lead—thirty or forty feet—and jogged to keep up with her. She led me up and over rocks, twisting and turning deeper and deeper into the forest. I wasn’t sure how long we’d been on the trail when Pad stopped. She stood perfectly still for a moment, then took off running with joyful abandon.

Find. Play. Find. Play.

I could feel the energy thrumming through her as she took us down a hill and into a clearing. To my surprise, our quarry was sitting on a rock, waiting for us. The intruder was older than I’d expected, and his suntanned, weatherworn face registered exactly zero surprise when we came tearing through the clearing.