Judy: The Unforgettable Story of the Dog Who Went to War and Became a True Hero by Damien Lewis Page B

waste—invariably well decomposed and stinking to high heaven—down the great river to where it could be dumped away from the major towns and cities. More often than not it was used to fertilize the verdant green rice paddies that lay to either side of the river. The Gnat wasapproaching the riverside city of Zhanjiang, and no doubt the vessel full of rotting human ordure had emanated from there.
    Thanks to Judy’s barking, by the time the sickening stench was upon them most crew members were sealed inside the vessel—including one ship’s dog who’d just demonstrated her unexpected usefulness. The cess ships were a constant hazard on the lower reaches of the Yangtze. If the stench got inside the vessel, it would linger in hair, clothes, and furnishings for days. Judy had just proved herself to be the Gnat ’s onboard early-warning system.
    She’d done so using her extraordinary sense of smell. A dog’s world, unlike a human’s, is almost entirely defined by odor. Their scent-detecting powers are so superior to our own, it’s almost as if they experience an entirely different dimension—a world defined by innumerable layers of scent.
    Whereas humans possess 5 million scent detectors, a gundog like Judy has something approaching 300 million. Such a dog can differentiate between over a million different aromas, as opposed to our mere thousand, and can do so at far tinier concentrations. With her wet muzzle—caused by tear ducts that ran all the way to the tip of the nose—Judy could feel the way the wind was blowing, so isolating the direction from which the smell was coming. Moisture on the nose would then dissolve the tiny scent molecules so that receptor cells could identify them.
    But Judy’s powers of scent detection were even more advanced than that. Because humans navigate largely by sight, we have a large element of the brain for processing visual information. In dogs, the olfactory (smell) center in the brain is forty times more developed than in humans. Scents are even picked up by a dog’s whiskers, which channel them to the brain. Plus, dogs have a scent-detecting organ—the vomeronasal, situated in the roof of the mouth—that is completely lacking in humans and one that we as yet little understand.
    To Judy, smell was her universe, the first sense by which she interpreted the world around her. Out here on the Yangtze, her nose was the filter through which she would sift all the scent-relatedinformation coming to her to better understand and deal with this new and exotic—and sometimes life-threatening—environment. Detecting a cess ship on the Yangtze at a mile’s distance was no trouble to a dog equipped with such acute powers of smell.
    This time, Judy’s canine senses had saved the ship’s crew from nothing more than a few hours of sickening and suffocating stench.
    But the time was fast approaching when Judy would need to use her incredible canine powers to save the lives of all aboard the Gnat .

Chapter Four
    Continuing upriver, the Gnat steamed past four Japanese warships, each trailing the distinctive bright-red rising-sun flag in her wake. It was ominous, the way in which Imperial Japan, China’s age-old adversary, was making her presence increasingly felt this far inland. It was clear that trouble was brewing. The crew of the Gnat could feel it in their bones.
    On November 20 the British gunboat reached Nanking, then China’s sprawling capital, pausing only to pick up a sailor who was able to rejoin the ship, having been treated for an ailment in hospital in Shanghai. That done, the Gnat pressed onward until she reached the smaller settlement of Wuhu, where she rendezvoused with her sister ship, the Ladybird .
    The Gnat pulled in to moor alongside her—the two gunboats with their tall twin funnels and long canvas awnings running from stem to stern resembling a mirror image of each other. They were also remarkably similar in another key respect: both the Ladybird and now the Gnat