The whole sequence had taken about thirty seconds. In one study, in Michigan in 2000, police dogs managed to track down suspects 93 percent of the time, compared with 59 percent for teams of two to four police officers. And the dogs did it five to ten times faster. Vapor Wakes focus on explosives—in an adjacent room, Baird taught the dogs to find more than a dozen kinds of chemical by hiding them in a wall fitted with small compartments—but other dogs have been taught to find everything from bedbugs to termites, lung cancer, diabetes, and the lithium in cell phones. At Auburn, a dog that can’t cut it as a bomb detector could find work as a fungus hound, sniffing out growths that attack and kill the roots of pine trees in the Southeast.
Its esteem for dogs notwithstanding, the university hasn’t given up on mechanizing them. When I was in Waggoner’s office, later that day, he played me a video from a project called Autonomous Canine Navigation. It showed a yellow Labrador moving through a bomb site wearing an elaborate headset and a harness. The harness contained a computer, a video camera, a G.P.S., and an accelerometer, all remotely controlled. As we watched, a man on a rooftop transmitted some coordinates to the computer below, which directed the dog to the target by playing tones for “Left,” “Right,” and “Stop” over the headset. “The computer can get within three meters,” Waggoner said. “That’s more accurate than under human control.” When the dog came to a doorway, it sniffed at the threshold and lay down. By dial, a sensor had detected its rapid-fire breathing, which meant an explosive had been found. Lying down set off a switch on its belly, confirming the discovery.
The video ended with a tennis ball flying down from the roof and the dog jumping up to snatch it. Even cyborgs, it seems, can use a little positive reinforcement.
New York City is now experimenting with a simpler version of canine navigation. In October, it acquired an infrared video camera that mounts on a dog’s back and can be remotely monitored by police. “We can see what the dog is seeing,” John Pappas, the head of the transit squad, told me. “So we can use it in a building search. If there’s a suspicious box, instead of sending a human being down there, I’ll send in the dog, then call him back if things look suspicious.” The purchase was approved after the raid on Osama bin Laden, in which a Belgian Malinois named Cairo played an important role. “The real technology here is the dog,” Pappas said, “and a lot of it is centered on the nose. That’s the most useful tool we have.”
On my last day with the squad, Rothschild and Brenner took the dogs for a sweep of Grand Central Terminal. It was nine o’clock on a Friday morning and a final wave of commuters was rushing from the trains. Police in riot gear stood guard by the tunnels to the tracks, machine guns at the ready, while voices blared overhead. When two of the squad’s Vapor Wakes ambled in from the street, they stopped at the entrance and stared. The mess hall in a Georgia prison had nothing on this scene: a thousand New Yorkers late for their appointments. “It’s an extreme situation,” Rothschild said. “But we try to put the dogs in the hardest scenarios possible. We don’t know how the next explosive is going to go through.” The dogs didn’t seem to mind. They just lifted their noses and sniffed the air.
Earlier that morning, Rothschild had arranged for two decoys to make runs through the subway and the train terminal. One would be carrying seven pounds of ammonium nitrate, wrapped in black panty hose and stuffed in a backpack; the other would have twenty pounds of dynamite in a baby stroller. Vapor Wakes can track a scent in the air for up to half an hour, I was told, but the trail wouldn’t last long in Grand Central. “You have the trains pulling in air over here,” Rothschild said. “You’ve got the mass of people pulling the air down under these arches. You’ve got vents bringing it around, and the smells from all the restaurants.” He shook his head. “It’s like when a boat passes. You can see the wave right afterward, but eventually it dissipates.”
Horacio Maldonado, one of the new recruits, positioned himself under an arched entrance on the west side of the station. His black Lab, Ray, could smell most of the passersby from there—she had a range of about thirty feet—but a crowd like this was full of false leads. The chemicals found in explosives can also be found in drugs, cosmetics, fertilizer, construction supplies, and other mundanities. I’d heard of a police dog driven wild by a table patched with plastic wood filler, and a dog tearing down a wall with nail-gun cartridges hidden inside it. “I remember one time, we stopped a guy in Columbus Circle, he had two hundred nitrogen pills in his pocket,” Maldonado told me. “Turned out he was going to Europe and had just come from his doctor. So you’ve got to use your common sense. The guy’s sixty, seventy years old. He isn’t sweating. Does he look like a suicide bomber?”
False positives are the bugbears of canine detection, but the bigger problem is miscommunication. A leash can be like a faulty phone line. The handler thinks the dog is telling him something; the dog thinks it’s the handler’s idea. (“Dogs are pretty easy,” one trainer told me. “The problem is usually at the other end of the leash.”) At Auburn one afternoon, I’d watched Waggoner put a Labrador into an fMRI scanner, to see which part of its brain lit up when detecting a scent. Some day, he said, detection dogs may carry EEGs that set off an alarm when a bomb is found. For now, though, cops and dogs have no choice but to try to talk to one another.
When the explosives went by, they were about twenty feet from Maldonado. The decoy, a young man in a blue sweat shirt with a Mets cap underneath the hood, was buried so deep in the crowd that I almost missed him. The Vapor Wake didn’t. She lunged forward on her leash, Maldonado stumbling behind. The decoy walked beneath the arch and down the corridor, heading toward a set of stairs that led to the subway. Ray cut zigzags across his trail, zeroing in on the scent. Soon, she was only about ten feet away, pulling so hard on the leash that her legs were splayed like a lizard’s, claws scrabbling on the tile. She was about to catch up when a middle-aged woman sauntered by with three toy dogs on a leash beside her. Ray stopped and glanced at them—a little hungrily, I thought—then shook her head and continued. But by then the trail had drifted, and the decoy was down the stairs.
It was a rare mistake. I’d seen the Vapor Wakes catch half a dozen decoys that week, and even Ray found her man eventually, when he doubled back through the subway. But would she have caught him in real life? “Yeah, she was in odor,” Rothschild said. “She was just eliminating the possibilities. She would have gotten him.”
Afterward, when Ray was chasing her tennis ball around, some commuters stopped to watch. They were standing in one of the world’s prime targets for terrorism, surrounded by a bomb squad with a suspect in custody, but that didn’t seem to concern them. They smiled and watched the nice dog play with its ball, then hurried on their way.
Detection-dog stories almost always have happy endings. If they don’t, they aren’t about dogs anymore. When the training session was over, Rothschild went to get Danz, who was waiting in a mobile kennel, nearby. His cage was brand new and luxurious by most standards—custom-built and climate-controlled, with sensors that would sound an alarm and open the windows if the air got too hot—but Danz was glad to be free of it. He leaped to the ground when the gate opened, and shook his fur as if casting off a rope. Then he ran to Rothschild’s side and waited, as always, for a signal.
It was a cold, clear morning, with sunlight streaming through the treetops, and the last patches of green were aglow in Bryant Park. Rothschild waited a beat, just to remind the dog who was in charge, then quietly said “Empty.” Danz jumped into the ivy and lifted his leg to a lamppost, glancing back to make sure this was O.K. A police dog’s life is all about delayed gratification. You know that ball? You can’t have it. Not right now. That treat? Maybe later, if you do exactly what I say. Danz had an alpha male’s domineering drive—it wasn’t hard to imagine him howling at the head of a pack—but he’d long since learned to tamp it down. And who was to say he wasn’t happier this way: always cared for, always needed, always knowing exactly what was expecte
d of him?
Some police keep their dogs in a crate at night, when the family is around. “My husband doesn’t put his gun on the kitchen table,” Kurt Dumond’s wife, Helen, told me. “And he doesn’t let his police dog loose in the house.” But Rothschild, who had two young children, let his dog roam free at home. Danz was named for Vincent Danz, a New York cop and family friend, who died in the attacks on September 11th, and Rothschild never forgot that the dog was also looking after him. He let Danz wander through the park a while longer. “This is his time,” he said. “His time to play. When he empties, I just let him be a dog.”
| 2012 |
THE WATCHER
The dog who knew the winter felt no spleen
And sat indoors; the birds made tracks all day
Across the blue-white crust; he watched the branches sway
Like grasping fingers mirrored on the snow.
The house was warm, and long ago the grass was green;
And all day long bones rattled in his head,
While seven withered apples swung like time,
So quick, so short the pendulum. The tree,
Cursing with wind, prayed mercy on its knee.
He saw the snow toward evening flush to red,
Stepped on his bowl of milk, licked up his crime,
Rolled on his cozy self and smelled his skin,
And snuffed the nighttime out around the bed.
—RUTH STONE | 1957 |
DOG RUN MOON
Fiction
CALLAN WINK
Sid was a nude sleeper. Had been ever since he was a little kid. To him, wearing clothes to bed seemed strangely redundant, like wearing underwear inside your underwear or something. And that was why he was now running barefoot and bare-assed across the sharp sandstone rimrock far above the lights of town. It was after two in the morning, a clear, cool, early-June night, with the wobbly gibbous moon up high and bright, so that he could see the train yard below—the crisscrossing rails, a huge haphazard pile of old ties, the incinerator stack. He was sweating, but he knew that once he could run no more the cold would start to find its way in. After that, he didn’t know what would happen.
The dog was padding along tirelessly, sometimes at Sid’s side, sometimes ranging out and quartering back sharply, its nose up to the wind trying to cut bird scent. Not for the first time in his life, Sid found himself envying a dog. Its fur. Its thick foot pads. A simple, untroubled existence of sleeping, eating, running, fucking occasionally if you still had the parts, not worrying about it if you didn’t. Even in his current predicament, Sid couldn’t help admiring the dog. A magnificent bird dog for broken country such as this, no two ways about it. Sid kept going, hobbling, feeling the rimrock make raw hamburger out of the soles of his feet. When he turned he could see smears of his blood on the flat rock glistening black under the moon. And then the shafts of headlights stabbing the jutting sandstone outcroppings. He could hear the shouts of Montana Bob and Charlie Chaplin as they piloted their A.T.V. over the rough ground.
Sid hadn’t stolen the dog. He’d liberated it. He firmly believed this, and this belief was the fundamental basis of his disagreement with Montana Bob. Montana Bob thought that simple possession meant ownership. Sid thought otherwise.
He’d been in town for two months, and his path to and from work took him twice daily through the alley behind the house with the dog. The dog would follow his passing through the chain link and Sid would whistle, and the dog would raise its ears without getting up.
Sid worked at a sawmill that processed logs brought down from the mountains. The logs came in massive and rough, smelling like moss and the dark places where snow lingers into July. They entered one end of a screeching hot pole building, met the saw, and came out the other side, flat and white and bleeding pitch into the red-dirt lumberyard. The men who worked the logs and the saw were Mexicans mostly, wide, sweating men who wore dirty white tank tops, their inner arms scabbed and raw from wrestling rough barked logs. They spoke their language to each other, and Sid did not know them. He kept to himself and did his work. He was a scrap man. All day he took castoff pieces of aspen and pine and cut and stapled them into pallets that were eventually piled with boards to be shipped out. His hands were pitch-stained and splintered. All day his mind ran laps, and after work he walked home through the alley, whistled at the dog on his way, and drank three glasses of water in quick succession, standing at the kitchen sink in the trailer that he rented by the month and hadn’t bothered to furnish. Even with the windows open, the trailer smelled like a hot closet full of unwashed clothing, and Sid couldn’t stand being there unless he was asleep.
“You can’t plead cute.”
In the evenings, he drove. Sometimes over to the next town, sometimes all the way back to where he’d come from, but he never drove by his old house. She still lived there and he couldn’t bear the thought of her looking out the kitchen window to see his truck moving slowly down the street. He could imagine how his face would appear to her. Sun-dark. Gaunt. Too sharp down the middle, as if it were creased. Sometimes he got a milkshake at the diner and nursed it for the drive. No matter where he drove he took the same way back, a route that ran past the front of the house with the dog. The east-facing windows were covered with tinfoil and Sid never saw anyone outside.
At the mill one afternoon, a full pallet of eight-inch-by-twelve-foot boards broke free of the loader and crushed the legs of one of the Mexicans who had been standing by the truck, waiting to tighten the straps. Sid, eating his lunch, saw the whole thing, heard the man’s hoarse screams above the shriek of the saw until the saw was silenced and then it was just the man, pinned to the ground and writhing, his eyes bulging, with sawdust coating the sweat on his bare arms.
That evening, Sid drove the two hours to his old house, still in his work clothes. When he got there, her car was in the driveway and there was a pickup truck parked behind it. Sid pulled in sharply and got out, not bothering to shut the door behind him. He was striding fast, halfway up to her porch, before he noticed the dried smears of blood on his pant legs and boots. At the mill, he and everyone else had rushed to the man, frantically teaming up to move the heavy boards from his legs. There had been blood everywhere, making the sawdust dark, making the boards slick and red and hard to hold. Now, standing on her front lawn, he tried to clean out the rust-colored crescents under his fingernails, tried to scrub the pine pitch mixed with dried blood from the creases in his palms. He was rubbing his hands on his stained jeans when he saw movement at the curtains over the kitchen window. And then he ran, sliding into the open door of the truck, spinning gravel up onto the vehicles in front of him as he backed out at full speed.
On his way home he passed the house with the dog. As usual, there was no sign of life outside. Sid passed slowly and, after thinking about it for a minute, pulled over and let the truck idle. Then he got out and went around back to where the dog was lying on a pile of dirty straw, chained to a sagging picnic table. The dog didn’t bark, didn’t even get up, just watched Sid with its muzzle resting on its front paws. Sid unhooked the chain from the dog’s collar and when he walked away the dog followed him, jumped in his truck, and sat on the bench seat, leaning forward with its nose smudging the windshield. Sid drove up to the flat, windswept bench above town and let the dog run. In the hour before it got dark, they put up three coveys of Huns and two sharptails, the dog moving through clumps of sagebrush and cheatgrass, working against the wind like some beautifully engineered piece of machinery perfectly performing the one, the only, task to which it was suited.
Sid was afraid of Montana Bob. As he ran, he could feel the fear lodged somewhere up under his sternum, a sharp little stab of something like pain with each inhaled breath. It was a healthy thing, his fear of Montana Bob. You should be afraid, Sid, he thought. You should be afraid of Montana Bob, the way you should be afraid of a grizzly bear, a loose dog foaming at the mouth, anything nearsighted and sick and unpredictable. Sid stopped behind the
wind-twisted limbs of a piñon pine and listened. He could hear the low growl of the A.T.V. somewhere behind him, and then the different, softer sound of the engine idling, stopped, no doubt, so that Montana Bob and Charlie Chaplin could branch out on foot to look for his sign. Sid was above them and he could see the shapes of their shadows, tall and angular, moving across the headlights, cloaked in swirling motes of red dust.
“I know who you are, Sid. I know it’s you out there. We’re still out here, too.”
Montana Bob’s voice came up to him, reverberating off the rock.
“You got the dog, and I think that is a damn stupid reason to go through all this trouble. I got Charlie Chaplin here with me. He agrees that this is a lot of stupidness just for a damn dog. Also, he has a big goddam pistol. I bet your feet hurt something fierce. You’re bleeding like a stuck hog all over this lizard rock, and me and Charlie Chaplin are going to drive right up on you before long. We will. Also, you were a big damn fool to run out the back door like that. Charlie saw your naked ass. We were just coming for the dog. You can’t argue my right to it. You have that what belongs to me. You catch up that dog and bring it down to me and, hell, you know what? We’ll even give you a ride back down into town. We will.”
Sid started out again, moving up and away from the voices and lights. He found a long piece of slickrock that stretched out farther than he could see into the darkness, and he ran. He could hear the rough whisper of the dog’s pads on the rock, the click of its nails. The dog’s coat shone. What was black in sunlight became purple-blue in the moonlight; what was normally white now glowed like mother of pearl.
Would Montana Bob do as he said? Let Sid go if he came down with the dog? Sid was unsure, but he thought not. The oblong little organ of fear under his sternum pulsed each time his feet slapped the rock. He kept going. The moon overhead was a lopsided and misshapen orb that at any moment could lose its tenuous position and break upon the rocks. That might be a good thing. A landscape of blackness into which he could melt.
The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs Page 8