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"A forty-foot wall of water had gone through and then receded, leaving just this deep, deep mud," Keating says. "Everywhere the water and mud had touched a dead body, there was the smell. That's what was confusing the Mexican dogs. They were hitting everywhere."

Looking at photos of the swollen, muddy Choluteca River, she says, "There was dengue fever. There was the germs. Everywhere you went, you could smell dead bodies there. And Yogi couldn't get away from it, and he wasn't wagging anymore at all. They had a water shortage, but we'd wash everything down as much as we could."

In the pictures, people shovel the mud out of the streets in exchange for government food. The smell of the dead was "pungent," she says. "You could taste it."

She says, "Ten thousand were killed throughout the whole country, and a good percentage of them were right there in Tegucigalpa, because they had the landslides, too. So there were the people drowned by the forty-foot wall of water coming through town. Then the soccer field caved in."

She shows photos of dim rooms, half-filled with dirt and broken furniture. She says, "The first day, we went to a Chinese restaurant where this family had died. The fire department would have to excavate, and what we were able to do is save a lot of time for them, and grief, because we'd pinpoint exactly where. In the Chinese restaurant we put Mentholatum under our noses and wore masks and a helmet with a light because it was dark. All the food, like crab, was spoiling and the sewers had overflowed, and it was knee-deep in mud. And there were all these dirty diapers. So Yogi and I go back into the kitchen, and I thought, 'Oh my gosh, what am I going to find?»

In the photos, she's wearing a miner's hat with a light mounted on front, and a surgical mask of gauze.

"There was all their clothes and personal effects embedded in the mud," she says. "People's entire lives."

They found the dead, crushed and twisted. "It turned out they were under a platform. There was a low platform that tables and chairs were on, and the water had forced them under there."

Michelle's sitting on the sofa in her living room, the photo albums on a table in front of her. Yogi sits on the floor at her side. Another golden retriever, Maggie, sits in a club chair across the room. Both dogs are five and a half years old. Maggie came from an animal shelter after they found her, sick and starving, apparently abandoned by a breeder after she'd produced so many litters she couldn't have more.

Yogi she bought from a breeder when he was six months old and couldn't walk.

"It turned out that he has elbow dysplasia," she says, "and a couple years ago I took him to a vet in Eugene who did surgery to allow him to walk. It reseated the joint. What had been happening was, this small joint-it was supposed to be a strut, but it was taking the weight, so it was fragmenting, and it was very painful for him."

Looking at the dog in the club chair, she says, "Maggie's more the red, smaller kind. She's probably about seventy-five pounds. Yogi's the larger, blond, long-haired fellow. In the winter he's over ninety pounds. He's got the typical golden big butt."

Looking at older pictures, she says, "About eight years ago I had a dog named Murphy. He was border collie/Australian shepherd mix, an incredible dog, and I thought, 'Here's a good way to work obedience with him and maybe meet some people. I was working at Hewlett-Packard, in an office situation, so I needed a balance."

She says, "The more I did it, the more intrigued I was by the cases. It started out as this dog-focused obedience thing and evolved into something that I really had more of a passion for."

In the photos of Honduras, Michelle and Yogi work with fellow volunteer Harry Oakes, Jr., and his dog, Valorie, a mix of border collie, schipperke, and kelpie. Oakes and Valorie helped search the ruins of the Federal Courthouse after the Oklahoma City bombing.

"Valorie, when she smells a dead body-or what she's looking for-she'll start barking," says Michelle. "She's very vocal. Yogi, he'll wag and get very excited, but he barely says a word. If it's a deceased victim, he'll whine. His tail will go down and do the stress reaction."

She says, "Valorie will get hysterical and start crying. And she'll dig, if it's mud with someone underneath. Or if it's water, she'll jump in the water."

Looking at the photos of collapsed houses, she says, "When someone is either stressed or angry or anything, they let off epinephrine. And when violence or death happens, it's just a more intense release of those smells. Plus whatever gases and fluids belonged to the body when it died. You can imagine in the wild why that would be so important to a pack. To an animal that means, 'Something has been killed here. One of my pack members has been killed here. They get particularly upset over a human, because we're part of their pack."

She says, "About ninety percent of the training to do search and rescue is the human recognizing what the dog's doing naturally. Being able to read Yogi when he's stressed.

"Obedience sets the tone that you're in charge," she says. "Then you hide toys from them; I still do that. And they love it. They have a race to see who can find it first. The next thing you do is have someone hold the dog while you run away and hide. You just keep doing more and more complex situations. They're looking on a track. If they haven't seen where you're going, they can smell."

Looking at a photo of a group of men, she says, "This is the Venezuelan fire brigade. We said we were the Pan-American rescue team."

About another photo, she says, "This is the one area we called the 'car graveyard.»

About a vast, sliding hillside of mud, she says, "This is the soccer field that collapsed."

In another photo, inside a house filled with mud, she says, "Walking through this house that had been looted, there were handprints on the wall. All these mud prints where the looters had kept their balance."

In a wide band along all the walls are countless perfect handprints in brown mud.

In other photos are the rooms where Yogi found bodies buried under fallen walls, under mattresses.

One photo shows a neighborhood of houses tumbling down a steep cliff of mud.

"This is up on the hill where all these houses had collapsed," she says. "They had hundreds of stories why people wouldn't leave: they didn't want looters to get their stuff, a woman with kids said her husband had gone to a bar and told her to stay here. Just awful, tragic stories."

Another photo shows Valorie sleeping in the back of a pickup truck, dwarfed by a thick roll of dark plastic bags.

Michelle says, "That's Valorie with the body bags, exhausted."

She talks about her first search, saying, "It was up in Kelso, and it was a fellow whose wife had disappeared. There was word that she was fooling around with all types of different people who were coming up to the house. So we drive up to this immaculately manicured farm. There's horses and a pasture with a bull in it. The dogs did a huge death alert in the barn. Their tail goes down and they pee. They swallow a lot. The natural part is the defecating, that and the peeing and the whining and the crying. It's making them nauseated, I think. Yogi pulls away. He doesn't want to go near it. Valorie goes toward it and she digs and barks more and more, and she gets frantic because she's trying to communicate something. 'It's right here!