Photography: “John Ball and Darcy continue the search in Chautara, Nepal (16691224554)“/ DFID - UK Department for International Development / CC BY 2.0.
Crumbled buildings like thick ashes litter the city in the earthquake’s aftermath. Or so said the front pages, read from thousands of miles away by good citizens. Monies are clearly needed, cry the good, and they transfer dollars to agencies that know the island nation best and can dispense support, comfort, and fund local first responders. Like Columbo.
So Columbo pads on, freed from her leash, keen to find those on which she has been trained: humans. Woman or man. Young or old. Warm. Alive.
She pants in heat and humidity which has, thankfully, waned, as if The Elements wished to offer some modest condolence, given that one of Their Own had chosen a foul insult to the living.
The long dead do not turn in their graves, not even after a tectonic orgasm tosses encrypted bodies asunder within their mausoleums. They will be reckoned, come Judgement Day.
The newly dead? They will have their Masses. And there will be much grieving, and many colorful funeral processions in which family and friends will mourn their loved ones and celebrate those lives.
The living: now that is where Columbo comes in. She knows that if she finds them, the living, then she has done her job.
Columbo treads and climbs and paws and whines at a crevice down inside the rubble which had been the Sanctuary of the historic Catholic church near a city square on the northern shore of the island.
Diggers dig, carefully, hand by hand, stone by stone, as Columbo’s handler praises her beyond measure. Which is when they find the Tabernacle, within which rests, securely, the Consecrated, the Transubstantiated, the Blessed Sacrament.