[yorkieusa]

As soon as we round the corner, animal control officer Craig Vestal spots a skinny brown dog with no collar at the far end of the street. He lifts his index finger from the steering wheel of the truck and says simply, “There’s a dog.”

Vestal’s partner, officer Justin Swartz, says, “You still got it. You can spot ’em a mile away.”

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The dog, a young-looking chocolate Labrador retriever, spies us just as quickly. Dogs in this neighborhood know the boxy Animal Control trucks with the ventilated cages in back. They also know every crawl space, missing fence board and dense thicket. And, man, can they climb. Vestal and Swartz once saw a Chihuahua scale an 8-foot chain-link fence.

The Lab’s body tenses — ears up, tail down — with the hyper-alertness that comes from living on the streets.

Vestal slows the truck, then pulls over in front of the yard the dog is standing in. The officers step out into a biting wind, and the dog darts into the street toward two men standing next to a nearby parked car.

“Is this your dog?” Swartz asks the men.

They shake their heads and say they don’t know where the dog lives.

The dog sees Vestal approaching in his dark blue uniform and black baseball cap, holding a metal catch stick with a nylon loop at the end, and bounds back out of the street and halfway up a sloping front yard of brown grass dotted with patches of melting snow.

Swartz, who is more than 6 feet tall and sports a strawberry blond crew cut and black sunglasses, drops to a squatting position and calls softly to the dog, “Hey, buddy.”

The dog takes a tentative step toward Swartz, relaxing its tucked-under tail ever so slightly in response to the officer’s soothing voice and mild gaze.

But then the dog halts, its bright amber eyes opening wider — perhaps registering Swartz’s heavy black gloves and coiled orange leash. It turns and runs between two houses toward an alley.

The chase is on.

The officers split up. Swartz jogs back to the alley as Vestal closes in from the side yard. The dog runs from the backyard toward the side of the house but finds its path to the front cut off by a chain-link fence.

The dog stops next to a 2-foot-high deck attached to the back of the house. Swartz stops, too.

“This one, he’s a little scared, but he’s not going to bite anyone,” he says, dropping to one knee. “Hey, buddy.”

The dog stops and looks at Swartz, then scrambles under the deck — and lies down.

Swartz crawls under the deck and loops one end of the leash around the dog’s neck. The dog follows without protest. Its tail is down, but trailing loosely, not tucked underneath.

Back at the truck, Swartz leans over the dog and pats its belly.

“Come here, baby, let me see if you’re a boy or a girl,” he says. “It’s a little girl. Come on, baby, good job.”

The dog scans the faces of our party of four — two officers, a photographer, a reporter — inquisitively but without apprehension and rewards each hand that reaches out to pet her with a lick.

We’re in this neighborhood, in the vicinity of 15th Street and Grandview Boulevard in Kansas City, Kan., because a report came in of several dogs running loose and chasing children at bus stops.

This young chocolate Lab is probably not one of them. She has no collar, but her coat is shiny and her eyes are clear and bright.

“This dog probably lived on this street, probably with those two men, which is why the dog ran down there,” Swartz says.

Vestal opens one of the cages in the back of the truck, and Swartz hoists the dog up. She settles in and doesn’t complain as the door to the cage closes shut.

“With this little dog, there’s a 100 percent chance she’ll be adopted,” Swartz says, as he climbs back into the warmth of the extended cab truck.

Not much more than a year ago, a very different fate would have awaited her.

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