Part 2

I’m Ambrose. Everybody calls me Brose.

I was a machinist at a tool and die shop out on Fort Harrison Road for thirty-eight years. My wife Lurline died in 2011. I’ve got a daughter in Indianapolis who calls on Sundays and a son I don’t speak to, which is my fault and not his.

The dog’s name is Junie.

She’s a Belgian Malinois. Nine years old at the time — eleven now. Fifty-eight pounds, though she was down around forty-four when all this happened.

Tan with a black mask across her face and black tips on her ears. One ear stands and the other one has a fold in it at the top from an old injury.

She’s got gray coming in all over that black mask.

And she has a bald patch on her left side, about the size of my palm, where the hair never grew back.

Two things I wrote on that note pad by my window and did not understand for one second at the time.

The first: she sat down before she dug.

Every single morning. She’d come into that yard, go to the corner, and she’d SIT. Square. For maybe three or four seconds. Facing the spot.

Then she’d start digging.

I wrote, sits first — why? on a piece of paper on March seventeenth, and then I drew a box around it, because it bothered me.

The second: she never came within thirty feet of Dorsey’s back door.

Not once in fourteen days. She could have gone for the trash cans. She could have gone up on the step where a man might leave something.

She went to one corner of a yard and she never deviated.

It took a man from the gas company forty minutes to explain both of those things to me, and when he did I had to sit down on Dorsey Pruitt’s porch steps.

Part 3

I called the city on Tuesday the twenty-fifth of March.

I want to be clear that I did not call about a gas leak. I had no idea about any gas leak. That thought was not in my head.

I called animal control.

That’s the truth and it doesn’t make me look good. I called because I’d watched a man hit a dog with a broom for two weeks and I’d finally worked up to doing something, and the something I picked was the one that would take her away.

The girl on the phone took the information. Stray, tan, digging in a neighbor’s yard, repeatedly.

Then she asked me a question that I have thought about probably five hundred times since.

She said, “Is it always the same spot?”

I said yes. I said fourteen days, same three feet.

And she was quiet for a second, and then she said, “Sir, hold on.”

She came back and said she was going to transfer me, and I said to who, and she said, “Just — hold on.”

I got a man at the city utilities desk.

He asked me the same question twice. Same spot? Same spot every time? Does she dig anywhere else in the yard?

I said no. I said she had a compost pile eight feet away she wouldn’t touch.

He said, “Okay. Don’t let anybody light anything back there. Somebody’s coming.”

I said, I’m sorry, what?

And he said it again. He said, “Sir, nobody lights a cigarette in that yard today.”

I stood in my kitchen with the phone in my hand and my heart going and I went out on my back step and I yelled across that fence for Dorsey Pruitt for the first time in about six years.

Now I have to tell you about Dorsey.

Dorsey Pruitt and I have lived across a fence for forty-nine years. Our wives were close. Lurline and Corinne played euchre on Thursdays for two decades.

After Corinne died in 2019, Dorsey went somewhere I recognized, because I’d been there in 2011, and neither of us has ever been much good at talking about it.

So we stopped talking about anything.

That’s how two old men on the same fence line end up not speaking. There’s no fight. It’s just easier every day not to.

He came out on his step in his undershirt at ten in the morning and I told him the gas company was coming and he said, “For what?”

I said, “For the hole.”

He said, “It’s a damn stray dog, Brose.”

And then a white pickup with an orange light bar came around the corner, and then another one, and Dorsey Pruitt put his hand on his porch rail.

The first tech’s name was Marquel Esterbrook. Twenty-eight, maybe thirty.

He came through the gate with a handheld instrument about the size of a lunch box, with a wand on a cord.

He asked which corner.

We pointed.

He walked over and he held that wand down by the dirt near the hole.

I watched his face.

He didn’t say anything to us. He reached for the radio on his shoulder and he said a number, and then he said, “You’re going to want to send Cliff.”

Then he turned around and he said, in a very normal, very flat voice:

“Gentlemen, I need you both to walk out to the street with me right now.”

Part 4

There was a two-inch plastic main running under the alley side of Dorsey’s property.

It had a crack in it. Not a pinhole. A circumferential crack, from ground movement — Marquel explained it later as freeze and thaw and a bad bedding job from whenever it was put in.

Gas had been coming out of that crack and migrating under the soil.

It doesn’t go straight up. That’s the thing I didn’t know. It travels sideways under the frost layer looking for somewhere to surface, and in March, with the ground half frozen, it can run a long way.

It had been migrating toward Dorsey’s foundation.

They had a reading in the soil along his footing wall. They had a reading in his crawl space.

They evacuated three houses at 11:40 that morning. Dorsey’s, the Vandermolens’, and the little rental on the corner with the young couple and the baby.

I wasn’t evacuated. I’m across the alley on the other side and the plume hadn’t gone that way.

I stood on my own front lawn for six hours and watched them tear up that corner with a mini excavator.

They were done by seven that night. The main was replaced and re-pressurized.

Marquel came and found me on my lawn at about half past seven, still in his coveralls.

I asked him how bad it was.

He didn’t give me a number and I don’t blame him. He said their reading in the crawl space was in the range where you don’t let anybody back in the house.

Dorsey has a gas water heater in that crawl space. With a pilot light.

He’d been living on top of it since the beginning of March.

Then Marquel asked me where the dog was.

And I realized I had no idea. Animal control never came. In all of it, nobody had picked her up, and she hadn’t been back since morning.

Marquel said, “Sir, I need to ask you something. When she came into the yard, did she do anything before she started digging?”

I said, “She sat down.”

He got very still.

He said, “She sat down. You’re sure.”

I said I wrote it on a piece of paper.

He asked me to go get the paper.

Part 5

I brought that legal pad out and handed it to a twenty-eight-year-old in a gas company uniform standing on my front lawn in the dark.

He read it. Eleven dates. Eleven times. And sits first — why? with a box drawn around it.

He handed it back and he said, “That’s an alert.”

I said, what.

He said, “That’s a trained indication. A sit is a trained indication. She was alerting on it.”

And then he told me she looked familiar to him.

I said she’s a stray.

He said, “Mr. Kerrigan, I don’t think she is.”

He made a phone call on my lawn to a man named Cliff Bowersox, who has been with that utility for thirty-four years, and I heard one side of it, and what I heard was Marquel saying a description.

Tan. Black mask. Malinois. Bald patch on the left side.

Then he stopped talking and listened for a long time.

When he hung up he looked at me and he said, “She used to work for us.”

Part 6

Here’s what came out over the next two weeks, and most of it came from Cliff Bowersox, who drove over on a Saturday to tell us himself because he said it wasn’t a thing to say on a telephone.

From 2018 to 2019, that utility ran a pilot leak-detection dog program. It’s a real thing — it’s used more in Europe than here, but it’s real. A trained dog can find a buried leak faster and more precisely than a truck-mounted instrument, especially small ones under pavement and under frost.

They contracted three dogs and two handlers through a private outfit.

Junie was one of the three.

Her trained indication was a passive alert. A sit. That’s standard — you don’t want an animal digging at a live gas main, so you train them to sit and stay sat.

She worked eleven months.

The pilot ended in 2019 when the contractor lost their funding and folded. The dogs were supposed to be placed. Two of them were.

Cliff said the paperwork on the third one went sideways and by the time anybody at the utility thought to follow up, the contractor’s phone was disconnected.

He said that out loud on Dorsey Pruitt’s porch and then he stopped and looked at the floor for a second.

Six years.

Nobody knows where she was for six years. That part nobody was ever able to fill in.

And then every single thing from those fourteen days came apart in my hands.

She sat down before she dug.

That was the job. That was what she was trained to do and what she was paid in kibble to do for eleven months of her life.

She sat. Three or four seconds. Facing the source.

And she waited for a person to come and read her.

Nobody came. For fourteen mornings, nobody came.

So she went to the thing she wasn’t supposed to do, which is dig, because sitting had stopped working.

The compost pile. Eight feet away. Twenty years of kitchen scraps in that dirt and she never put a foot on it.

She wasn’t hungry-digging. She was on task. She had a target and everything else in that yard was nothing to her.

The fence. Over it, clean, first try. Malinois. Of course.

The times. 6:58. 7:04. 6:51. 7:10.

That’s a shift. That’s a dog that worked mornings with a handler for eleven months and never got told it was over.

And the broom.

Fourteen days.

She got hit and she went fifteen feet and looked back at the hole.

Marquel said something on my lawn that night that I have not been able to put down since. He said the hardest dogs to place out of detection work are the ones that are good at it, because the job is the only thing they know how to do for a person, and when you take the person away they don’t stop doing the job.

They just do it at nobody.

Dorsey Pruitt did not say one word for the entire time Cliff was talking.

When Cliff finished, Dorsey got up and went in his house, and he didn’t come back out, and I sat on that porch with a man I’d just met for about ten more minutes and then I went home.

The next morning Dorsey knocked on my door at ten after seven with two cups of coffee, which he has done almost every morning since.

He said one sentence to me on my step that day and then we talked about the Pacers.

He said, “Brose, she was trying to save my life and I hit her with a broom.”

Part 7

They found her nine days later behind a body shop on Thirteenth, living under a boat trailer.

The utility hired her back.

I want to be precise because people think I’m making this part up. There was a corporate process. There was a contract with a handler out of Indianapolis, a trainer named Simone Lachapelle who re-certified her in six weeks and said in writing that she had never seen a dog retain a skill set like that after that long out.

She worked four more years. She was ten when she started back and fourteen when she stopped.

Twenty-three confirmed leaks.

Three of them were in places the truck instruments had already been over.

There’s a photograph in the lobby of their operations building. She’s in a yellow work vest sitting in a gravel alley.

She’s sitting, obviously. It’s all she does.

Dorsey Pruitt did something I didn’t expect.

He wrote a letter to the newspaper here. He’s a seventy-two-year-old lineman who hasn’t written anything longer than a check since 1971 and he sat down and wrote four hundred words about hitting a dog with a broom for fourteen days.

He did not make himself look good in it. He could have. He didn’t.

The last line was: She dug in my yard for two weeks and I hit her every time, and the whole time she was standing between me and a hole in the ground I couldn’t see.

Then he became her guy.

He’d drive out to wherever she was working. He’d bring her to his yard on Sundays. Simone let him, and then encouraged it, and then said it was good for the dog.

And here’s the thing he does.

She retired in 2024. She lives with him now, in that house, on this street, twenty feet from the corner where she dug.

Every morning between about six-fifty and seven-ten, she gets up and she goes out the back door and she goes to that corner.

And she sits down.

Square. Facing the spot. For three or four seconds.

There’s nothing under there anymore. It’s new pipe, and it’s been tight for six years.

Dorsey goes out and stands next to her every single morning while she does it.

He puts his hand flat on the top of her head. And he says, “Good girl. I got it.”

Then she gets up and goes back inside and eats her breakfast.

He told me he tried once not going out.

He said she sat there for nineteen minutes.

Part 8

I’m eighty-three now.

Dorsey still brings the coffee at ten after seven. Forty-nine years across a fence and we lost about six of them and I’d like those back.

Junie’s slow now. Her back end gives her trouble and the gray has taken most of that black mask.

She comes through the gate to my yard in the afternoons and lies on my patio in the sun.

Last week I was out there with her and I got down on the concrete next to her, which took some doing, and I put my hand on that bald patch on her left side.

I said out loud what I have never said to Dorsey and probably never will.

I said, “I watched. I watched for fourteen days and I didn’t come.”

She didn’t move.

She’s a dog. She has no idea.

But I needed to say it to somebody who was there.

Follow this page for more stories about the ones who kept doing the job — long after everybody stopped showing up to read them.