1. Courtesy of Joanne Varley (dog); Matt Slaby/LUCEO (Sammie and Ali)
Narrative Nonfiction
Two 10-year-old girls Will this dog find them before A Race
Against 4 s t o r y w o r k s

2. are lost in the woods.
Maddee is a search-and-rescue dog.
She’s trained to work in some of
the most dangerous conditions on
Earth. Above: Ali Ferry and Sammie
Wartchow in 2012, in the woods
where they were lost.
it’s too late?
Race
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article with
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Against Time
By Lauren Tarshis
with reporting by Allison Friedman
s t o r y w o r k s . s c h o l a s t i c . c o m • N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 4 5

3. UP
CLOSE
It’s every kid’s nightmare—getting
lost in the woods at night.
But for fourth-graders Sammie
Wartchow and Ali Ferry, the
nightmare would soon become real.
It was 3:00 p.m. on a sunny
Saturday in Issaquah, Washington. This small
city is surrounded by forests. Ali and her mom
had picked up Sammie for a sleepover. Ali
wanted to show Sammie a stream she had
found earlier that day. The stream was a short
walk down a trail leading into a vast forest.
Like most kids in the town, the girls had
grown up exploring the woods. Ali’s mom felt
safe letting them spend time there alone. She
dropped them off and said she’d be back in 30
minutes.
But when she came back, the girls were
6 s t o r y w o r k s
Dogs on the Job
From left: During World War I, wearing a gas mask; in
Iraq, with U.S. soldiers looking for explosives; in Haiti,
searching through earthquake rubble; after
an earthquake in Turkey in 2010
nowhere to be found.
She waited a few minutes. Then she
walked down the trail, calling their names.
“Ali! Sammie!”
Her words were swallowed by the woods.
Ali’s mom shouted again and again. Time
ticked by. The sun was setting. Rain was
starting to fall.
The girls had vanished.
Ali’s parents called 911. They tried not
to think of the bears and cougars that live in
the woods, or even scarier things. “Everything
was running through my head, and nothing
was positive,” says Sammie’s mom, Vicky.
Soon, nearly 100 police officers and
volunteers were searching the woods.
Flashlights beamed like huge fireflies. A
helicopter thwacked the air overhead. Police
walkie-talkies crackled.
But the most expert searcher in the woods
that night had no flashlight or helicopter.
All she had was her nose. She was a 3-year-old
golden retriever named Maddee. Maddee
is a search-and-rescue (SAR) dog. These
dogs are called in when a person is lost or
trapped and must be found quickly. SAR
dogs search in the wilderness. They also
search areas struck by natural disasters:
buildings crumbled by earthquakes,
towns flattened by tornadoes
or hurricanes, mountainsides
shattered by avalanches. A
SAR dog can be more effective
than 20 human searchers.
But could she find Sammie and
Ali?
Extraordinary Powers
What makes dogs such great
searchers? It’s their amazing noses.
Nancy Castaldo wrote the book
Author’s Craft As you read, look for how
the author both tells a story and provides
information about rescue dogs.
Look for Word Nerd’s 6 words IN BOLD
iStockphoto.com (trees); UNDERWOOD AND UNDERWOOD/
National Geographic Creative (WWI Soldier)

4. Sniffer Dogs. She explains that a dog’s sense
of smell is thousands of times stronger than
ours. “A dog’s nose doesn’t just pick up the
strongest scent in a room,” she writes. “Dogs
smell every scent.”
Castaldo compares a dog’s sense of smell
with a human’s sense of hearing. When you
walked into school this morning, you heard
many sounds: doors slamming, footsteps
pounding, a friend screaming your name, your
teacher saying, “Quiet, please!”
But you likely smelled only the strongest
scent, like the aroma of French toast sticks
from the lunchroom. If a dog had been with
you, it would have smelled many smells that
you could not.
And that’s not all. The dog would have
picked out the smell of each person there.
How? Even if we’ve just scrubbed ourselves
clean in the shower, we each emit a unique
scent that a dog can detect. The scent comes
from tiny bits of dried skin called rafts. We
can’t see or smell them. But we shed millions
of them each day. They scatter around us
when we take a step. They cling to our
clothes when we take them off. They drift
in the water around us when we swim. They
create a scent trail that a search dog can
follow.
Before Maddee searched the woods that
night, her trainer, Joanne Varney, brought
her to Ali’s house. The family gave Varney
one of Ali’s shirts and a blanket that
Sammie had packed for the night.
Maddee sniffed both. That way, she’d
know what scents to search for. You can
find your best friend’s face in a picture
of hundreds of people. In the same
s t o r y w o r k s . s c h o l a s t i c . c o m • N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 4 7
Gandee Vasan/Getty Images (Dog); Adam Ferguson/National
Geographic Creative (Soldiers in iraq); Liz Breault
(Search Dog); Shutterstock (Earthquake in turkey)

5. 8 s t o r y w o r k s
iStockphoto.com (Trees); Q13 FOX News, Seattle (MaddEe, Dog socks)
way, Maddee would be able to sift through the
thousands of smells in the woods and find the
scents of Ali and Sammie.
Passing the Test
All dogs have a great sense of smell.
But they can’t all become good SAR dogs.
Trainers look for dogs that are smart, bold,
and very energetic. Many are found in animal
shelters. Often, a dog whose bouncing-off-the-
walls personality drove its first owners
crazy can become a great SAR dog.
The key is training.
Varney says that training a SAR dog is
not complicated. Search dogs are taught to
follow a scent and let their owner know when
they find it. When they succeed, they are
rewarded, just like a pet owner would reward a
dog after it obeys a command to sit or fetch.
But the process takes time. Experts say it
takes about 600 hours to train a SAR dog.
Varney began training Maddee when she was
a puppy. They started with simple obedience
tricks. Then they tried harder tasks. At 18
months, Maddee was ready to go on missions.
SAR dogs are a small and elite group in
Left: Maddee with Joanne Varney,
resting during a mission. Above: Before
searching through earthquake rubble in
Haiti, a SAR dog’s paws were wrapped
in protective tape.
the U.S. The best can work under very tough
conditions. They climb ladders, scale towers
of rubble, and dig through snow. Some can
even search in water. In the past decade, U.S.
SAR dogs have saved hundreds of lives. After
Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast in 2012,
SAR dogs helped find many elderly people
who were trapped in their homes with no
water or power. In 2010, after an earthquake
in Haiti, U.S. SAR dogs found people caught
in the rubble. One was a 3-year-old girl who
had been trapped for five days.
Nose to the Ground
Ali and Sammie had been missing for
five hours when Maddee arrived. “It was
so overwhelming,” says Sammie’s mother.
“Because there’s these two little girls that are
lost in the woods, and one of them was mine.”
Volunteers were shouting. The helicopter
made it impossible to hear. People were
slipping and falling on muddy trails. But
Maddee was unfazed. “Right away she was
ready to run,” Varney says.
Off she went, nose to the ground. She
zigzagged through the mud in search of the

6. right scents. She ran up and down hills,
jumped over roots, and crossed two streams.
Varney’s husband, Greg, was with her. At first
they tried to keep Maddee on her leash.
“But finally I let her go free on the trail,”
write to win
Write a story retelling what happens in the article from Maddee’s
point of view. In your story, make sure that Maddee describes
her special traits and training. Send it to “Dog Contest” by
January 15, 2015. Ten winners will each receive a copy of
Sniffer Dogs by Nancy Castaldo. See page 2 for details.
Matt Slaby/LUCEO (Sammie & Ali)
find an
activity
online!
s t o r y w o r k s . s c h o l a s t i c . c o m • N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 4 9
says Varney.
They were heading up a hill. Two hours
had passed, “and suddenly Maddee wanted to
leave the trail and head downhill.”
The brush was thick. The only light
Varney had was from the
headlamps she and Greg wore.
But she believed that they
were close.
“Ali! Sammie!” she called.
Voices came from the dark.
“Over here! Over here!”
Maddee barked. She had
found them.
The girls were cold, wet,
and scared. But they were
not hurt.
Sammie is now 15. She’ll
never forget that night.
“We had lost the trail and
had been walking in circles,”
she says. “Finally we just
stopped and lay down under
some trees.”
At one point they felt sure
that a big animal was nearby.
“We felt it looking at us,”
Sammie says.
The hours crept by. The
girls hoped someone would find
them. Little did they know who
it would be: Maddee.
Soon the girls were back with their
families.
“When I saw my mom, I just burst out
crying,” Sammie says.
The girls were grateful to all the searchers.
They wanted to put the nightmare behind
them.
And Maddee was soon snug in her bed,
awaiting her next mission.
Sammie (left) and
Ali in the woods
where they were
lost. “I’ll never
forget that day,”
says Sammie.