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"These people's little boy, he was about four, said something to the grandmother about 'Daddy put mommy underwater, and they whisked him away and nobody was able to be alone with him after that."

In another picture from Tegucigalpa, a long slab of concrete lies on its side in the middle of a riverbed.

"That was a bridge," Michelle says.

In all the pictures are scattered little packages of rancid lard, left everywhere by the water.

"The most profound search that I'll still get choked up about was this autistic child," she says. "The little guy was four years old, and they'd locked him in, but he'd found a way to unlock the door while his mom was ironing upstairs. He'd take all his clothes off, too, as soon as he got out the door. So all these people had volunteered to go look. And that's not optimal, because every time one more person walks across the trail, they can track the scent somewhere else."

In these older photographs, Michelle is working with Rusty, another golden retriever. The photos show a heavy woods around a slow, dark slough of stagnant water.

"Within an hour of getting there, we got down to the slough. This is the primary spot because the little boy, he liked throwing a toy in repeatedly, and pulling it out. It was just a little bank above the slough with roots and trees around it."

She says, "By then Rust was real distraught and really sad. That was the first place where the kid went in, so there was a certain kind of scent there that wasn't as strong as when we followed the real slight current in the slough down to where it was getting stronger and stronger. That's when we called the divers in. There was a culvert between two parts of the slough."

Looking at the photos, she says, "What happened was the body had gotten wedged in this culvert, and it was under mud."

Petting Yogi, she says, "This is quite a large water area, and I'm going around, getting death alerts all around this huge marsh area. And I'm marking everywhere we get the hits. All that water that had touched the body had the smell of the death on it. Sometimes you can triangulate and determine where the body is by where the alerts are coming from.

"Putting a tag, and where the wind was coming from," she says. "What the temperature was. Who I was. What time it was. We put it all on a map. To figure out where the body had drifted to.

"Air scenting… In a case where you don't know exactly where the person started, there's still the scent in the air. There's a scent cone that goes like this"-she waves hands in the air-"and you can get the dog to work a Z pattern. They might do it naturally. You want them to go toward the source of the scent."

Still petting Yogi, Michelle blinks, her eyes bright with tears. She says, "I look up, and they're pulling him out of the culvert. That's the only victim I've ever seen, because most of the time, like in Honduras, they come in and dig the victims out after we've left. But I went into deep shock the moment I saw him, and I had this profound urge to just hold him, this little guy."

She says, "We got up to the house and did different interviews and then went into the house to cheer up the family-because the dogs are supposed to cheer up the family-and it was like walking through this aura, this energy-like an environmental condition… like being in a fog.

"We didn't process this like we should have," Michelle says. "I came back home and put Rusty with the other two dogs, to play, and I went off to work. I've always felt like that stuck with him too long because I didn't debrief him, and I don't think I knew how to process it. I don't think I understood what happened-as far as the deep shock-until I went to Honduras.

"You're supposed to let them go find a live person-and I did do that. You make sure, too, that you wash everything. Their jacket. My clothes. Everything that they have on. Wash everything in the car, everything that could've come in contact with the death scent. Just a little bit of that scent and they're depressed again."

She says, "Going back home, the scent pretty much permeated the car, so it would've been good to clean that out as well."

Rusty and Murphy, Michelle's border collie/shepherd mix-like all the victims they found-are dead now. Murphy was put down when he was fourteen and a half years old, after suffering with back problem for three years. Rusty was put down after his kidneys failed.

Looking at photos of children, children hugging Yogi in picture after picture, Michelle talks about meeting a little girl in Tegucigalpa. Her legs running with staph infections, the girl was dipping water out of a puddle of sewage. Michelle put disinfecting tablets in the girl's water. A journalist rubbed antibiotic cream on the girl's legs.

"We had to walk most places because there was the mud, and everyone who saw Yogi would smile," she says. "And if we stopped somewhere, they'd just swarm around to touch him and say, 'Dame lo! Dame lo! Give him to me! And he was just thrilled with it. He loved the attention. I know he understood how important the work was, and I'd tried to explain to him along the way, 'This is very important. You're doing good things for people.»

In a picture of the collapsed soccer field, Michelle points out a crowd that stands at the far edge. "People would stand up here on the edge of the field and just watch us, and this one little boy said, 'Thank you, in English."

She says, "Stuff like that would just destroy me. It was just too heartbreaking to have human contact like that."

She smiles over one picture, saying, "We went to an orphanage to cheer up the dogs. A kid would run and hide, and then the dogs would find him."

Over the next picture, she says, "This is an island. We drove two hours over washboard roads and hairpin turns in the back of a dump truck to get there. This is the back of the dump truck, it's real dusty. We found three bodies."

She pets Yogi, saying, "I think it aged him. He's seen and smelled things most two-year-old pups won't have to go through."

In another photo album, Yogi sits with very thin, smiling men.

"I believe in Bodhisattvas," Michelle says. "In Buddhism, there are beings that are enlightened, and they come back to help others. I think Yogi's purpose in being with me is to help me be a better person and do things. For me, walking into Our House would've been difficult without him, but with him it was like home."

Talking about the AIDS hospice where she now takes Yogi, Michelle says, "I wanted something that was compelling and meaningful, and I kept hearing about Our House from people. At first I asked if they wanted someone to do Reiki, and they said no. Then I said I had this really neat dog, and they said come on over. And that was it. We just started going there every week.

"A lot of them have just lost a pet," she says. "Sometimes that's the mitigating factor: Well, if I have a pet I can't move into Our House. And then the pet dies, and there is a lot of grief associated with that. And anyone who lives there is a little like a refugee. They've lost at least a lover. And, materially, they've lost their household."

Scratching Yogi's ears, Michelle says, "That's just part of his job. The comforting. That's what I mean by the Bodhisattva, that he's more concerned with comforting and helping, almost even more than his own well-being."

She says, "The trip to Honduras was a real seminal moment for me. One of those watershed moments. It was a high in a certain way. You never wondered what your purpose was while you were there because it was so clear. You could just be totally immersed in it."