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spaces where people and other search dogs cannot go.
For 10 days starting Sept. 19, Ricky and his trainer, Janet Linker, a Seattle firefighter and dispatcher, worked the night shift at the site of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, searching for survivors and, toward the end, bodies.
They were sent as a part of Puget Sound Urban Search and Rescue -- 62 firefighters, police, doctors, engineers, public-safety personnel and three other search dogs. They were one of 28 elite teams coordinated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Dog Game: Linker and Ricky worked with trainer Kent Olson and his canine search partner Thunder, a golden retriever, to locate several victims in the rubble, among them a firefighter and a policeman.
Olson, a forensic therapist at Western State Hospital, and Linker work for Northwest Disaster Search Dogs.
Ricky, who lives with Linker and her family in Auburn, Wash., is not a shy dog.
He jumps around and chews things up and fetches until the sun goes down. He will not give up the ball. He can bark continuously. But when people are trapped and dying, these are the traits that make Ricky in demand.
The training takes nearly two years.
In drills, Ricky can search through piles at concrete recycling plants the size of half a baseball field and find three victims in eight to 10 minutes. Bulldozers and jackhammers will not distract him. He will not quit until told.
During FEMA tests, the dogs are sent to find victims in rubble where distractions such as cats in cages and dirty laundry have been planted. When the dogs find a victim, they use body language to signal to their trainer. After each find, they get a toy as their reward.
"The dogs think it's a game," Olson said. "You make it fun for them, and that's what keeps up their drive."
At ground zero, however, there were few survivors emerging from the debris.
"When we first got there, we were overwhelmed with how big it was," Linker said.
Long Days: The team quickly got into a rhythm of work.
Up at 3 in the afternoon, water and feed the dogs, eat dinner, take the bus to ground zero for the night shift, 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., after some of the heavy equipment had cleared out.
Ricky and Thunder searched the buckled subway tunnels and stairwells, locating victims and marking their resting places so workers could remove them later. Ricky's small size worked well.
"There were a few situations where we had to climb underneath metal beams, and the space just kept getting smaller and smaller," Linker said.
When Ricky found a body, his signal to Linker was to stand very still and look at her intently, all the fur on his body standing up.
"It's really hard to know exactly how many people Ricky helped find," Linker said. "There were lots of people in there. They were gone, not alive."
The search teams did find some personal items scattered throughout the debris, which were kept for victims' families.
"People would find necklaces, or someone's pager or cell phone," said Linker. "You'd find clothing with nobody in it."
After their rotation was up, trainer and dog returned home.
"Sometimes I wonder if the dogs feed off our emotions," Linker said. "If I'm nervous, my dog is nervous. If I'm upset, my dog is upset. Toward the end, he was just tired of working, tired of the noise, the commotion, the power and construction equipment always running. I've never seen Ricky as mellow as he was when he got home."
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