Horn and Craig refused.

Within 20 minutes, Shannon's German shepherd, Cody, put her nose up in the air and immediately turned right.  Shannon knew the dog had smelled something

"Cody probably took me a quarter of a mile in the woods, made an immediate right turn once again and gave me a bark," said Shannon, who also is a paramedic.  "I rounded the corner, went up a little hill and there was Cody."

She was licking the face of the badly scratched but very much alive 21-month-old youngster.  Shannon, a daughter of Cardinals broadcaster Mike Shannon and his late wife, Judy, was with the University City Fire Department at the time.  When she became a firefighter with the Creve Coeur Fire Protection District, one of the things she brought along was the photo snapped that day in Wright City.  Still hanging on her office wall, it shows Cody sitting on the front of a fire truck.  The little boy is on one side of her and Shannon on the other.  The toddler's hand rests on Cody's back.

"God love this little kid," Shannon said.  "And thank God for that god.  She did all the work for me."

When Horn and his duck-, goose- and quail-hunting buddy, Bill Sterne, formed the Missouri Region "C" Technical Rescue Team K-9 Division in 1996, Shannon and Craig were among their first recruits.  Horn is a firefighter with the Spanish Lake Fire Protection District.

Sterne, a paramedic-firefighter with the Monarch Fire Protection District and a former coroner, had earlier taken his golden retriever, Price, to the FBI Academy in Quantico, VA.  Together, they trained with dog expert Andy Rebmann, a retired Connecticut state trooper.

Before dogs are accepted for search-and-rescue training, they typically are tested on nearly two dozen behaviors, from curiosity to forgiveness and ability to withstand pain.  if a human pinches a dog's toes, for example, doe the dog yelp and move on?  Or does it bite the human?  Biting is not tolerated in search and rescue.

So that older, possibly spoiled pets will not have to unlearn habits, many search-and-rescue trainers prefer to work with puppies, starting when the animals are about 7 weeks old.  The dogs learn basic commands and receive directions only from their handlers.  They receive no "people food" as meals or treats.  Rewards are officially limited to praise from their handler and playtime with a rubbery, beehive-shaped chewy toy, the same kind that with a rope attached, becomes a tug-of-war drill on retrieving difficult-to-access objects.

For these dogs to finely tune a repertoire including such behaviors as tracking human scents, whether airborne or underwater, the time required usually is two years.  In a matter of months, in contract, many police dogs master chasing felons and locating narcotics. 

About 12 years ago, while firefighters Sterne and Horn were hunting for geese, Sterne casually asked his friend:" If I got you a dog, would you be my partner?"

"Oh yea, sure, whatever," Horn said he remembers answering.

A year later, Sterne informed Horn that his new dog, Jetta, an East German shepherd, was ready.

"I thought he was kidding, " Horn said

The two men and their dogs subsequently investigated drownings and homicides.  Relying on their dogs' naturally acute senses of smell, heightened by FBI training, Sterne and Horn gathered accident- and crime-related evidence.

Then they realized they were onto something with even bigger consequences. Using dog expert Rebmann's methods, they could train area firefighters, law enforcement officials and paramedics as handlers, showing them how to teach hunting and herding dogs to find and, whenever possible, rescue and thus help save missing or injured people.

In the search-and-rescue world, success also would be measured in more sobering terms.  To check out and thereby eliminate an area, to find remains rather than a living, breathing human being, would help bring closure to families of victims.

Grief may be deepened and prolonged whenever someone's official fate is unknown, when the conclusion to their story cannot be written.

"Being out there with the dogs is well worth it, even if it's just giving comfort that everything is being done to find a loved one," Horn said.

Horn said he cherishes being a part of the evolution of the non-profit Missouri Region "C" rescue team, which was founded in 1996 and now is one of the area's longest established teams staffed exclusively by professionals and not civilians.

"I'm living a dream," Horn said.

The team currently has seven trained dogs, three puppies-in-training and more than a dozen human members from fire protection districts ranging from Chesterfield and Eureka to the City of St. Louis and Florissant.

The team averages three to four service calls a month.  Team members search for humans in the aftermath of fires, kidnappings, murders, suicides, tornados, drownings and other calamities, and also in the wake of missing-person reports generated when Alzheimer's patients and others wander away.

In addition to the regular 56-hour-work-weeks required of most firefighters, Horn on his own time teaches human team members to train dogs to dig with their paws and bark if they detect a live person.  Should dogs discover evidence or someone deceased, they learn to tap a paw on the ground and look up at their handlers.

Every day, handlers work one-on-one with their dogs.  Approximately every nine days, all handlers and dogs meet for four to six hours of group training.

Beyod team members' normal workmen's compensation and health insurance, they generally receive no pay for time spent with their animals.  When donations and grants do not stretch far enough, and they rarely do, Horn said team members pay for all dog-related expenses.

"The dogs are like a part-time job,:  Horn said. "But it's all enjoyment, so you don't think of it that way.

Simulating the situations encountered on actual search-and-rescue missions, during training dogs experience flying in a helicopter, being lowered by pulleys into a well and conveyance by zip line from one height to another.

They also practice with scent tubes filled with a chemical manufactured to smell like a deceased human.  The tubes can be hidden anywhere from inside pipes to out in the woods, and dogs practice retrieving them.

On actual missions, distinguishing between live humans and those who already have perished in critical.

"If we get a building collapse and you have 100 people in there, we want to get to the live ones and get them out," Horn said. "That's what fire departments are about: saving the live ones."

Team members continually marvel at the potency of their dogs' noses.

"Humans haven't even invented any machines that come close to their smelling power," Horn said.

Unlike human partners, whose judgment may be questioned, handlers learn never to doubt their dogs.

"There's an old saying in the police business: 'In dogs we trust,'" said team member Brian Towsley, a firefighter with the Monarch Fire Protection District.

If there is a drawback to working with the dogs, he said, it may be that "they're so intense and so meticulous that they'll pick up smells from stuff that's not even there anymore."

Towsley also said it is not unusual for dogs to pick up on a scent where no tangible evidence can be found.  But months, maybe even years later, evidence may be uncovered, at which point someone acknowledges, "Oh yea, the dog was right."

Or, depending on the crime, a body may have been dumped somewhere , then moved by the perpetrator several years later.  The perpetrator also cleans the original site.

"But for years and years and years, the dirt and debris there still hold the scent of the human," Towsley said.

When calls from dispatchers are relayed through search-and-rescue team members' pagers, as any handlers as are available reach for their dogs and assemble.  Dogs are kenneled at the fire stations where team members are employed and otherwise are kept at home.

"The team has worked probably everywhere in this state and every state that touches Missouri except Nebraska, and even into Indiana," said Bill "Crunchy"

Albright, a firefighter with the Affton Fire Protection District.

Another early recruit on the search-and-rescue team, Albright acquired his nickname because he "wrecked 20-someodd cars before he was 21.  He liked demolition derbies,"  Horn said.

Firefighter Jill Cody, of the Black Jack ie Protection District, considers herself a newbie.  A first-time mom, she both returned to work and began spending regular time with the search-and-rescue team when her son, Jacob, was about 6 months old.  He celebrates his first birthday next month.

Albright recruited Cody.

"I went with 'Crunchy' (Albright) to a training session.  That just kind of did it," Cody said.

Cody serves as an extra set of eyes for a handler, a backup to help "read" a dog's responses.

Though dogs here are taught how to react, team members learn to interpret individualized responses.  When firefighter Craig's dog Sabra, a Czech shepherd, detects a human scent, he can tell it in her face and by how she holds her body.  Pus, er activity level goes from what he calls "just a normal work-type thing" to more focused.

"On a general search, she's covering the whole area," Craig said.  "When she catches a scent, she goes to micromanaging and gets really detailed."

When Sabra gives what is called an alive alert, indicating the presence of a breathing human being, she remains on all fours and pokes and scratches i=to isolate the source of the scent.  If she finds a cadaver, she sits, barks and stares at the area.

Craig has been married for three years.  He got Sabra last April.

"I can read my dog better than I can read my wife," Craig said.

Human team members seem to share the easy, solid camaraderie that comes from spending countless hours together, whether cheering when file footage of their dogs appears on TV's "American Justice" or working with the dogs to sift through the plane crash in 2000 that claimed the lives of Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan, one of his sons and his senior campaign advisor.

Not long after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania, tea members and their dogs here were put on standby.  Within 12 hours of deployment to New York, they were informed of a change in plans.  Even knowing that many of the firefighters and other volunteers who assisted now suffer from ongoing illnesses and that" every dog that went to help is dead, due to all the dust and debris," Albright said, he adds:  "We would have loved to have gone.  We would have done it in a heartbeat."

That, apparently, is the nature of firefighters, the glue for the search-and-rescue team here and the sentiment that keeps some memories fresh, if not raw.

"When I die, I know I'm going to hell," team co-founder Horn said.  "When I get done there, I'm going straight up to heaven to find that little girl, Gina Dawn Brooks, who was snatched off her bicycle, and also my first dog, Jetta."

Brooks was last seen on Aug. 5, 1989, riding her 10-speed in her hometown of Fredericktown, MO.  She was 12 at the time and wearing a blue-striped top, white shorts and tennis shoes.  Members of the Missouri Region "C" team have searched for her and met with her family on numerous occasions, as recently as the summer of 2006.

Jetta, after rigorous training, was unable to get up and walk the next day.  She had slipped a vertebra in her back.

"We had to put her down because there was nothing they could do for her," Horn said.  She was 10 at the time, the age at which many dogs are retired from the team.

The day after Jett's death, Horn wrote a tribute in the present tense that now appears, while "Amazing Grace" is piped in the background, on the team's We site, www.mrck9.com.

"To those of you I have helped, I bring closure, comfort and relief," the tribute says.  "I'm proud of the job I've done and live for it.  I have done my duty and others like me will carry on the tradition."