What the Dog Knows

by Cat Warren

  Dave Lopez’s kids were almost recovered from the flu, and he was less sleep-deprived. Lughar was back to almost perfect, although he was a bit softer on the bite than Steve ultimately wanted him to be.

  Steve sent the green handlers and their dogs away from the scene to wait to be called. I offered a hand, and Steve and I went about staging an illusion for the handlers that would teach them to trust their dogs’ noses.

  The grasses and weeds on the side of the hill next to the plant were thigh-high. The sandy hill was steep, nearly a forty-five-degree angle. As I crawled up in the dark with Steve, almost on my hands and knees, I thought about Florida’s coral snakes. I’d never seen one in the wild, but their identifying stripes—“red touches yellow, kill a fellow”—wouldn’t be visible in this darkness.

  It took us a mere forty-five minutes to set the scene, although it felt longer. We were both sweating in the mild night air. I hauled three big waste containers from the other side of the public works and tugged them up onto the hill, scattering them so they looked like they had been dropped willy-nilly by aliens out of UFOs. Steve found the old hole dug for a training two years before. He cleared it of the roots and weeds that had taken over, and we used our feet to stomp the garbage can down into the hole until its lid was even with the ground. With his penknife, Steve made a small hole in the lid. Casting about the waning beam of a flashlight, I finally found a tough golden graduation tassel on the floor of one of the buildings that would do the trick; we knotted it and ran it through the small hole, so the handler who hid in the can could hold down the lid if a dog found him and decided to dig him out. We tested it and retested it, tugging hard on the tassel, amending it with an extra knot. We pulled brush over the can and stood back and admired our handiwork. The buried garbage can was invisible even a few feet away.

  We stashed a decoy handler, helping him into his garbage-can prison. Steve handed him a latex arm. Steve had constructed it from liquid rubber, using his son’s arm as a mold. It was a work of art—ductile and creepy—a toothsome reward, just in case a dog and handler managed to work out the elaborate problem. We stood at the bottom of the hill, looking up, bemoaning age and complaining joints.

  Steve got on the radio. The first handler, Dave Lopez, arrived in his patrol car, pulling up hard just inside the gate. Steve briefed Dave on what was happening—maybe one, maybe two guys ran this way after a robbery. He warned Dave that feral cats and raccoons were everywhere. That the guys were dangerous. Just over the hill, people were having a late-night barbecue. “Be careful,” Steve warned him.

  Dave didn’t start the search where he should have, given the wind direction out of the northwest. It was a beginner’s error, one that gave him a huge advantage. Lughar dragged him around the near side of the mushroom-shaped treatment plant, where Steve and I had retraced our steps, tracking us backward along the bottom of the hill. Then Lughar flipped his whole body. He had hit the decoy’s scent coming down the side of the hill in less than a minute.

  Steve and I watched with admiration and some dismay as back-to-perfect Lughar made short work of the puzzle. He surged up into the underbrush and pounded the lid of the can with his teeth, muzzle, and feet, making the handler inside howl in misery as his fingers got pinched trying to hold the lid down. There was no time for Steve to play with Dave’s mind by telling him it was clearly a raccoon that Lughar was after. That howl was all too human.

  It was over in two or three minutes. Steve was discouraged by the fast pace but determined to get some bang for our dramatic stage-setting buck.

  Pete and his large sable shepherd, Diesel, were next. Steve was no longer sure that the scenario would slow them down as much as he wanted it to. This time Steve made certain that Pete had pulled well inside the compound, away from Lughar’s clever backtrack.

  “Hey, Diesel, boy,” Steve said. Diesel was already staring out into the dark, ignoring Steve. Steve turned to Pete, frowning. “There are a lot of cats, raccoons, people north of the complex, so just be careful. Give your warning.”

  Steve watched as the released Diesel set up a solid pattern, moving through the deserted Bobcats and stacks of palettes and concrete culverts on the flat, doing natural switchbacks. “He’s got really nice structure.” It wasn’t clear whether he was talking about Diesel’s powerful, sleek looks or his search pattern. Probably both. Diesel worked the area like an old pro, ignoring a cat as it slid away from him, clearing a half-acre with ease. Diesel and Pete were methodical; they were also raising our hopes that they might not solve the problem as quickly as Lughar and Dave had.

  “Wouldn’t you just love to be inside a dog’s head?” Steve asked quietly, arms folded across his spare frame, watching as Diesel swung his huge muzzle, and adjusted his body so it followed his big nose. The breeze had shifted slightly, carrying scent. I could hear the faint sound of Latin music and voices from over the top of the hill.

  “There are a lot of people barbecuing on the other side of the fence, so be careful,” Steve called to Pete. The admonitions were like whistling in the wind. Diesel, the Mack truck, caught the decoy’s scent. He moved uphill in first and then second gear, toward the underbrush and the hidden garbage can. Pete was right behind him, scrambling up the hill.

  Steve attempted to distract Pete, but Pete kept following Diesel, who was under the brush next to the hidden garbage can. “So you got somebody or not?” Steve called impatiently. “We need to clear this out now.”

  Diesel’s harsh bark resonated down the hill. He had somebody. He wanted to clear the decoy right out of the garbage can. We could hear his nails scrabbling on the lid.

  Steve sighed, shrugged, called to Pete to hook Diesel up, and yelled at the hidden handler to open the garbage can and wave his rubber arm in defeat.

  Diesel carried the heavy rubber arm back to the car as a reward, though his enthusiastic growling and head shaking would probably tear a hole in the precious arm, and Steve would have to make a new one. That was the price of rewarding solid aggression work.

  Perhaps it was the wind, perhaps the humidity, perhaps beginner’s luck. Whatever it was, Steve didn’t want cockiness coming out of this exercise. He looked at the three rookie handlers.

  “Remember, when you go out into the street, don’t think it’s going to be just like this. There are three of you, and the dogs have been smelling you for twelve weeks, so they know the odor. They’re very confident. You get out on the street, it’s a whole different thing. People are yelling, music playing, different odors. You all wear the same style of boots and uniforms. All of that comes into play. It’s going to be different.”

  The handlers were nodding obediently and happily. They clearly respected Steve. I wasn’t sure they believed his warning. It was a soft and lovely night. The wind was gentle, the humidity low. It was magical. Steve and I walked back to his patrol car. One final scenario remained before his green dogs and handlers graduated and hit the streets. But only after dinner and a bit of rest.

  “In the right circumstances,” Steve said with a hint of melancholy, “that’s a very difficult find.”

  The dogs and handlers did beautifully, Steve told me later, at their demonstration at graduation in front of the brass. Lughar’s recall was perfect; Diesel was fluid and impressive on the box work. More important, though, is what happens out on the streets. The twelve-week foundation course headed the handlers in the right direction. They will keep training and learning, both on the street and during training. For now, the dogs are doing their jobs. So are the handlers.

  Steve was pleased and, as usual, understated. “The dogs are successful. The handlers are the same.”

  9

  Into the Swamp

  But there is nothing like work for toning down excessive fear or joy. So I ran ahead, calling him in as gruff a voice as I could command to come on and stop his nonsense, for we had far to go and it would soon be dark.

  —Stickeen: The Story of a Dog, John Muir, 1909

  Patrol cars were park
ed helter-skelter, radios popping, laptop screens glowing through darkened windows. A few cops, scattered across the apartment project’s dismal lawn, looked up as my Camry slid in. I lowered the rear window so Solo could be ID’ed, and he provided his profile, sticking his bear-sized head and chest out the window. One officer hitched his gun belt and jerked his head. Ten-four on the canis searchus.

  It was a fine afternoon for a search. The morning wind had calmed, and the late-spring air was heavy with unseasonable heat. If scent were out there, the swamp would capture it. It would be hanging like invisible moss on the vegetation, floating above pools of water, waiting for the dog’s nose to harvest it.

  This was not the first search Solo and I had been on where some central characters were drug dealers. I suspected some were watching us from concrete stoops as I got out of the car and sorted through my minimal equipment in the trunk. The cops were talking to the missing person’s girlfriend. I heard sobbing. I leaned farther into the trunk to pull out my backpack, willing myself not to look. It wasn’t my business.

  This was our first search where climate change probably played an indirect role. It wouldn’t be the last. Drought followed by a tempest of rain had caused flash floods. Sheets of water slid off dry, hardened soil into overwhelmed storm drains. Water, silt, and trash cascaded into the already polluted remnants of Triassic Basin wetlands and woodlands.

  The suspect’s flight reportedly started with a 911 call. The caller told police that a group of men were selling drugs out of a car. Police arrived. They realized one of the men was wanted for a parole violation. When they went to arrest him, the suspect broke away and fled into the woods. Flooding and darkness made the search dangerous. After a patrol dog tried to track him and nearly drowned, the cops pulled out. By then the suspect was long gone, into the woods and swamp beyond. He called his girlfriend from the middle of the swamp that night. That was the last time she heard from him, she told police. His cell phone had gone dead. The girlfriend and his family waited a couple of days before calling the police to say he’d never made it back home.

  At the police station an hour before, investigators and I stared at a satellite map of the area. It was acres. Some of it would be muddy; some might be flooded. I tried for calm confidence, though my heart bounced around in my chest.

  There in the station, I helped make decisions about how to run the search, trying to sound as though I’d done this a hundred times, even while I confessed my novice status to the participants standing around a table, trying to lower their expectations—and mine. I’d been training with Mike Baker for nearly two years and with Nancy Hook for more than three. It felt like nothing. I slowed down my voice so I didn’t sound like an eager amateur. I’m just a volunteer, I said. Dogs aren’t perfect, I said. They’re just one tool among many. I said all those things, and I believed all those things.

  But when cops call in a volunteer, they want results. I knew that as well. A couple of dozen cops were on standby, expecting to make a line sweep of the swamp. Unless Solo and I could find him.

  Even though I’m a Yankee, North Carolina woods aren’t alien to me. So when the police asked what I needed, I asked for two people to accompany Solo and me. If they were available. Even within urban limits, a few acres of floodplain can contain sinkholes and creeks with eroded sandy banks that may crumble beneath you. Two people could get us out if we got stuck. Those were just the natural hazards. I didn’t want to be out there alone meeting the kind of guy we were searching for.

  The two investigators who cheerfully volunteered to accompany us arrived at the scene at the same time I did. They were clad for strolling down a linoleum hallway, not slogging through a swamp. The one wearing natty tasseled loafers and creased tailored pants was getting grief from his colleague, who was also wearing office clothes that were only slightly more suitable. The sharp dresser joked about water moccasins and copperheads, but he wasn’t laughing that hard. A couple of the bloodhound handlers from the Triad foothills had told me that only people with phobias ever see venomous snakes. I’m not phobic, and I knew that wasn’t true.

  I wore no loafers with tassels. I had hastily changed out of my cute linen office outfit and looked like an aging Outward Bounder. Nancy would have been proud. I was shod in hiking boots and cross-country-skiing gaiters to discourage ticks carrying rickettsia or Lyme disease; they might even deflect a reptile fang. No hat: I didn’t want to look like a complete doofus. A fine-toothed flea comb would do the trick post-search to flick ticks out of my short hair.

  As usual, Solo provided extra sound effects—mewling, crooning, sounding more like a great Serengeti cat than a German shepherd. Even his whiskers twitched. He had on his sturdy nylon harness that could double as a handle to suck him out of the swamp if needed. He hated the harness, since it signaled a bit of constraint in what he thought should be an unconstrained life: It meant he might have to work on a long line. Tough titty. It was staying on.

  I ran a final mental checklist: water, water bag, bug spray. Tug toys to reward the dog; I hadn’t forgotten those as I dashed out of the house. They were as essential as water. We had graduated from one hard rubber Kong to two rope tug toys. One could be thrown straight into his jaws and the other held in escrow. Solo was still a jackass, too possessive of the tug toy, especially after a difficult training. Using two solved the problem. I always had the fun tug in my hand: the one that could get flung far because it wasn’t stuck in a stubborn German shepherd’s jaws. We no longer had a power struggle at the moment when both he and I should be feeling fine about the work he’d done.

  With the permission of the commanding officer, I’d also planted a Mason jar with redolent training dirt a good distance away from the search area. It wasn’t a given that we would find anything on the search. Critical to Solo’s day ending in a satisfactory way was letting him find some bit of the dead. Mike Baker had given me a gentle lecture after one of Solo’s first long searches. We hadn’t found anything, and I hadn’t brought any training material so that I could give him an honest reward. Solo needed to be paid for his work, just like I did, Mike noted. This time I remembered Solo’s paycheck.

  My list-checking was simple distraction, a rosary of search equipment that slipped easily through my mind. Solo’s distractions were more concrete. Dog piss on the rusted jungle gym and dog piss on the grass, making his tail curl defensively. As we walked toward the woods, children from the apartments—having stood back at first to watch from a distance—now surged around us, chattering like mockingbirds, then leaping back and screaming in exaggerated fear as Solo swung his huge head in their direction and wrinkled his brow. They weren’t dogs, they were just little people. He relaxed his tail to wag slow and low, all stiffness gone. Around children, he dialed back both his drive and his rhetoric. “Don’t worry, he’s sweet,” I told them. He wasn’t always sweet with me, but he was with others. “He’s big, huh? He won’t hurt you. He loves kids.” He wasn’t a therapy dog, though, so we kept moving the whole time.

  Before we entered the fickle shade of the mimosas and elderberries and trees of heaven that have colonized and overwhelmed the edges of these Piedmont woods, Solo paused to inhale a last resentful snort of dog piss, baked onto a corroded steel post. Then the two investigators, the dog, and I ducked under the yellow crime tape and through a jagged hole in a chain-link fence.

  We straightened up on the other side, and I took one of the rope tug toys out of the training bag and tucked it ostentatiously into my pocket. Solo yowled and spun in delirium, kneecapping me with his big shoulder. I winced and unhooked him from my aching arm. I was tempted to clock him, but I reminded myself once again that searches were not the time for etiquette lessons. I didn’t want him to sit or heel or watch me with adoration. I wanted him to find the body.

  Unhooked and far more obedient off-lead than on, Solo stood frozen, waiting. His eyes fixed outward, then sliced back to my pocket, then down the hill littered with empty liquor bottles, toddler diapers, a shattered
Big Wheel, a rusted washing machine.

  He didn’t need to hear the command, but the words focused and centered me, reminding me that we’d researched this dance for a couple of years. The least I could do was get it started.

  “Solo? Go find your fish.”

  He did a final brief tarantella around me, striking the pocket where I’d stashed the toy with his open muzzle. Not a bite. It hurt nonetheless. Brat. Then he barked sharply and disappeared into the dense undergrowth.

  Solo was bounding, zigging and zagging downhill, the grim apartments left behind, past the distractions of police radios, dog pee, children, and the broken glass and twisted metal that slowed me but not him. We’d breached the first wave of Chinese privet and avoided most although not all of the catbrier, which has the habit of digging its claws deep through thick shepherd coats, right at chest height. We were now in understory, rife with baby buckeye and larger oaks, hairy cords of poison ivy coiling around their trunks.

  Then Solo disappeared from view. He had taken his first hot-dog leap, launching off a sandy cliff as it crumbled beneath him. He landed hard in the creek bed below. His maneuver thrilled him. The investigators, distracted from their argument about whether quicksand lay beneath the still-high water, watched with bemusement as Solo tested the two hypotheses. He ran down the stream bed, dropping his jaw to scoop up water and sand like a dredging shovel, humping his back like a porpoise, tucking his tail between his legs, spitting out the sand, then turning around and doing it all over again. It wasn’t quicksand.

  I explained to the investigators that this particular behavior did not represent Solo at his most disciplined. Purpose and fortitude and focus would arrive momentarily, I promised. I showed no amusement. We were looking for a victim, not playing games.