PART 2 — THE ALERT
Kyles sister pulled a hospital photo out of her purse and held it up. The little girl in the picture was the same one now standing in the yard with a yellow Lab at her side.
Two Novembers ago, she said, my daughter had a seizure in the middle of the night. We were all asleep. We would never have known in time. But there was a dog in her room, one of Amys dogs, trained to smell a seizure coming.
That dog would not stop barking until it woke us. We got to her and got help in time. The doctors said if we had found her even minutes later, we would have lost her. That dog saved my daughters life, and Amy is the one who trained it to do it.
The woman Kyle called a trainer of mutts had taught a dog to smell danger coming in the dark, and that dog saved his own nieces life.
I kept this hospital photo, Kyles sister said, from the night she was almost gone. Then the little girl walked the yellow Lab straight up to her uncle and said, this is the dog that saved me. Your Amy made him.
Kyle, the horse breeder, set down his bourbon.
Amy just cut the graduation cake and said the dogs do the real work. But her sister-in-law shook her head and said the dogs only know what Amy teaches them, and Amy taught one to save a childs life.
My daughter teaches dogs to sit, her son-in-law had joked. She also taught one to wake a family before a seizure took their little girl. Those are not mutts.