What the Dog Knows

by Cat Warren

  Serious water cadaver-dog handlers carry around a “body float” chart; many of them know it by heart. It provides information on water temperature and estimated days-to-float time, along with variables like body composition.

  Water cadaver training works just like land cadaver—finding the strongest source of scent. Then it gets hard. At first it’s canine torture, like tying a dog’s feet together and then commanding him, “Go find!” The dog doesn’t get to run around and climb over obstacles to find scent. Instead, he’s trapped in the boat, which has become his legs, and he’s forced to communicate with scent illiterates to make those legs move anywhere.

  “We’re taking a lot of things away from them,” Lisa Higgins warned handlers during one lecture. “We’re taking away their ability to run the scent cone with their own four legs. Now they are dependent on us.”

  Water search was taking patience away from me. Solo and I were not the perfect pupils. Neither of us fully understood the concept of what we were doing on water. Training a couple of times a week on water wasn’t possible. We’d already been out in a boat with Nancy a number of times. It was trigonometry to me, trying to understand the currents, the wind, the scent cone, the boat chugging in a zigzag across the water. For Solo, water work was hyperbolic geometry. It takes patience and nerve strength on the dog’s part. Solo has a great deal of drive and good nerve strength, but less patience.

  Solo also needed to learn to modulate, so that if we were on an actual search, the buoys that searchers threw down each time he alerted would define a small area for dive teams, not an entire lake of dog screams. Sending a diver into murky water with snags or dangerous current, based only on an insufficiently trained dog’s alert, isn’t just a waste of time. It’s endangering living people to recover a dead one. The first three times we went out to train on water, Solo screamed incoherently, even when we were a hundred yards or farther away from the scent source, lunging in frustration for the reward toy, which I had stupidly placed in the breast pocket of my life preserver.

  Solo was in scent, just not the strongest scent. I threw up my hands, Nancy laughed and shook her head, explained the principles again, and around the lake we went once more. Nancy wanted him quieter, and she wanted him closer to the source. I agreed.

  Dogs who have worked on land have to learn a whole range of new behaviors in a boat, where a dog needs to give increasingly strong cues to the handler as the scent gets stronger. Solo needed to learn to use what little physical freedom he had to tell me and the boat driver to follow his lead, by turning this way and that, or by going from the front of the boat to the back. He needed to communicate with the captain that the boat was moving into or away from the perfume rising from a body far beneath the water’s surface. Solo, working on land, is usually able to run where the scent is strongest and lie there. He can work out problems on his own timetable, not that of a moving boat. If I know he is honing in on something, I can slow down a bit and let him work. Water is a different gig. Instead of just moving himself closer and closer to the strongest emanation of scent, he needed to tell the boat driver exactly what he wanted. His bossy attitude would come in handy—if he could learn to give clear directions.

  Andy Rebmann wrote much of the book on cadaver dogs, but Marcia Koenig wrote the chapter on water cadaver. It was only after studying the illustrations in that chapter, watching Solo on water, and watching a bunch of experienced water cadaver dogs that I started to fully understand the fundamental differences that dogs—and their handlers—face in water work. And how dangerous a “three-dimensional problem” can be for everyone when flood stages, boiling currents, and logjams are in the mix.

  Marcia researched and re-created an extraordinary search and recovery using dogs on a flooded Ohio River. Her hypothesis is that dogs alert where water breaks around an object, where scent gets strongest, and then suddenly disappears. The handlers on the Ohio River search all noted the same phenomena. Nikki, a German shepherd, had an entirely new reaction: Her bottom jaw vibrated as she worked scent. She was still nearly a mile and a half downstream from the victim. As the boat got closer and closer to the body, Nikki gulped water, spat it back out, clawed, tried to jump into the water. When the boat crossed the invisible scent line, just upstream of where the body was located, she visibly relaxed. She smelled nothing but fresh, unscented water. “Nikki went completely limp for just an instant.” Game over. Scent, scent, more scent . . . no scent.

  Her handler dropped a buoy on that line. Marcia wrote: “She remembers thinking, ‘What have I done?’ ” Nikki’s handler had never seen her react that way. Yet as one of the dog handlers said, for the dogs, “it was like stepping from one room to another.”

  That threshold was where the victim was located, trapped under logs.

  Water work, even more than land work, depends on being able to know and read your dog, and having someone along who can watch closely. The dog’s cues may be much different and run the gamut between subtle and dramatically obvious.

  On land, Solo uses his whole body, including his large tail, and I get to watch him from a distance. He has a much smaller stage to work on when he’s on a boat; he’s working in close-up. We’ll need to work with a whole series of clues, escalating signals that can help the handler and the boat operator work in tandem. Licking lips, lapping water, throwing his head: It’s a new vocabulary. Because water work is so different, Solo might also need to find a new way of alerting, so there’s no question in anyone’s mind that there’s something there. Biting at the water, yowling, who knows? I don’t fully know what Solo’s alert will be on water. We’re still working on it. I hope we get there.

  Detective Art Wolff’s gorgeous Belgian Malinois, Radimir, whose name means happiness and peace in Russian, digs at the bottom of the boat. If he could just dig through, he knows he could get to the body lying in the water beneath. He has gone all over Tennessee on water recoveries.

  On one of the most emotionally difficult cases that Canadian trainer and handler Kevin George ever worked, on a flooded river in Calgary that claims victims each year, his Belgian Malinois started barking, leaning over the side of the Zodiac, snapping at the water. In his excitement, he snapped at the side of the inflatable boat. Thankfully, he didn’t deflate it. Sadly, the river was too high and filled with unstable logs to recover the victim safely.

  Nancy liked what her big German shepherd, Indy, used to do: When he couldn’t stand it anymore, his big question mark of a body would become more and more unbalanced over the water until he would tumble in where the scent was strongest.

  Then there’s an even more direct method. As Lisa Higgins told a group of handlers, “A dog jumping out of the boat and swimming in a circle over the source? That is an indication you just can’t miss.”

  Lisa does worry about alligators where she works, so she doesn’t encourage Louisiana handlers to let their dogs jump out of the boat to alert. On one search, she counted thirty alligators. Interestingly, they hadn’t touched the victim Lisa was looking for. Nonetheless, for training, she chooses her spots carefully.

  “I go to places I know to be safe, because a ’gator may not attack me, but it will have my dog for lunch.”

  • • •

  Friends, if we retreat to the hollow ships, and yield this body to the horse-taming Trojans, who’ll drag it to their city and gain the glory, that would be small fame indeed for us: better the black earth swallow us instantly where we stand.

  —Homer, the Iliad

  Since their arrival in Iraq in September 2009, Kathy Holbert and Strega had started to adjust to the oppressive heat, the wind, the sand—and the danger.

  In November, just two months after their arrival, the military sent them into Afghanistan, fifteen hundred miles to the north. As they flew in, Kathy could see the country’s wild beauty below: its glorious tan and ocher mountains, its winding rivers, its stunning farms and orchards, which were finally starting to recover from being razed and bombed by the Soviets during th
eir nine-year occupation fighting the mujahideen. Kathy knew the beauty would be offset by what she and Strega would face on landing: a harsher and even more dangerous environment than Iraq.

  “Afghanistan was different,” she said flatly. “They try to kill the dogs.”

  Military K9s and handlers get targeted there much more purposefully than in Iraq. Afghan fighters know how demoralizing it is when the U.S. military loses a handler or K9. Those are the teams that go out first. The dog sweeps a hundred feet or more in front of his handler, searching for the scent of IEDs. Both dog and handler are ahead of the troops. Some of the IEDs have wires running into nearby ditches where someone waits to detonate them. First out. First to die. Kathy keeps an increasingly long list of dogs and handlers killed.

  It’s not only the Taliban and their sympathizers who pose a danger. In Afghanistan, Strega was just another occupier. Children, mostly girls, followed them after they landed. They were beautiful, Kathy said. She turned to greet them and hand them candy. They countered by throwing rocks at Strega. “They tagged her pretty good.”

  Soon, Kathy and Strega were in a convoy, heading farther north to a search in the Murghab River, near the border of Turkmenistan—a six-hundred-mile-long river that flows north and disappears in the sands of the Karakum Desert. Two paratroopers had drowned. It was a classic tragedy—a crate of supplies dropped out of an aircraft by parachute that ended up in the river instead of onshore. The first paratrooper was in full battle dress. He waded out on the shelf of the river, where the water was calm and shallow, and grabbed the supply crate as it floated by. He must have been pulled hard off the shelf’s rim by the palette’s weight just as it careened into the fast, deep water. It would have been like grabbing a floating boat that suddenly revved up its engine and took off. Seeing his fellow paratrooper in trouble, another trooper went after him. And like that, he was gone, too.

  The Taliban, downriver from the site, claimed they had both men’s bodies. Thus began a massive recovery operation for the two deceased men. A team of British divers flew in and started searching. After a week, they found the paratrooper who had gone in after his friend. His body was around the bend in the river, well downstream. The recovery operation came at great cost. Downstream was filled with Taliban fighters. The Associated Press reported that eight Afghans were killed—four soldiers, three policemen, and an interpreter. Seventeen other Afghan soldiers and five American soldiers were wounded.

  And no second body surfaced. That was when Greg Sanson, then the personnel recovery advisor for the U.S. forces in Iraq, got the call asking for a human-remains dog team. He sent Kathy and Strega.

  Water was a familiar search area for Kathy. That was where she got her start with her previous dog, Mangus. Kathy was a sheriff volunteer with a narcotics patrol dog when she was called to the scene of a drowning one summer. She sat with the family whose young son had drowned. They couldn’t find the body. The family knew, at some level, that he was dead. Then again, they didn’t.

  “This went on for five days,” Kathy said. “I don’t think that people understand what families go through when they don’t know. One of the things I learned is you don’t ever, ever say the word ‘closure’ to that family. There’s no such thing.”

  Those wretched days started her thinking. Could a dog have helped? A state trooper told her about Charm Gentry, a cadaver-dog handler in another part of the state. “I contacted her, and it just so happened they were getting ready to do an Andy Rebmann seminar.”

  Kathy certified Mangus by the end of the seminar. The week after that, he helped pinpoint a drowning victim. Mangus ultimately helped recover twenty-seven people. He made it look easy. He went to the front of the boat, lay down, and put his head over the bow, close to the water. Just like that. A natural.

  Strega, though, had her own ideas about how she wanted to run a water search. She kept wanting to leap into the water. “She was a very stubborn dog,” Kathy said with pride. The two of them finally worked out a system that made them both reasonably happy.

  And then there they were. In Afghanistan, to work on water.

  The terrain was steep, with willows along the edge of the river. The river looked placid on its east side, where it was shallow and calm enough to reflect a hint of blue sky and a slightly muddy color, with the sandy shelf just visible underneath. Farther out, the water turned white with froth, a churning, greenish gray. Kathy suggested she and Strega start searching at the place where the men fell in. They said they were sure the body had moved on, beyond the bend of the river. I can picture experienced, low-key Kathy quietly saying, “No, you need to go back to the point of entry.”

  Kathy started Strega at the point of entry at ten A.M., on the east bank of the river, where it was warmer in midmorning, with current to move the scent around. It wasn’t just the river they had to deal with. A sheep-and-goat guard dog—powerful and leggy—headed straight for them. He stopped at the last moment, retreating to a ridge just above the river. He looked to weigh at least 125 pounds. “He watched the whole time we worked.”

  Strega worked to the bend that the military suspected the paratrooper’s body had gone around. Then she tried to get into the river. She wasn’t interested in going around the bend. She moved back upriver and worked the rapids. She alerted on the shore, across from a churning area yards below where the men were last seen. It was her simple alert. A sit. It told Kathy everything she needed to know, although she suspected the divers, who had never worked with a dog, were probably hoping for more “yippie-yi-yo-ki-yay.” Strega was not a dog who did backflips. Her sit, nonetheless, started to recalibrate everyone’s thinking about where the paratrooper’s body might be.

  The next day was a Sunday. Not a day of rest for anyone. The humidity and wind were better, and Strega told everyone once again that she was pretty darned sure the paratrooper had never made it past the bend in the river. She kept working upriver, closer and closer to the boil.

  The divers rigged a more complex system, a high line over the river, and put Kathy and Strega on a rubber raft. Back and forth. Strega alerted right over the rapids, midway across the river. Kathy and the divers looked down to see a deep undercut and a hydraulic boil.

  Imagine a washing machine in its highest spin mode with lots of water. It keeps tossing clothes around but never lets them escape. That’s a hydraulic boil, more familiarly known as “a drowning machine.” The British divers tried to search it, but the currents were too strong. They did manage to snag the parachute and cargo box. Both had been trapped in the boil.

  They had to trust Strega. A number of people had already died. And while the military talked about a couple of different options—including putting some blasts into the river—they decided to let nature take its course.

  “K9 assistance was ended,” the report read. Strega had been utterly consistent over three days on the same area of the river. You shouldn’t ask a dog to tell you the same thing over and over, seeking reassurance, like you do with people.

  The military notified the villagers that there would be a reward if they watched the river. Kathy, who knew her float chart by heart, provided the military with her estimates of when villagers might see something, given the days since the paratrooper disappeared, what he was wearing, and the temperature of the water. The hydraulic boil made it hard to know what might happen.

  Nearly two weeks after the search was suspended, villagers contacted the military. It was late November. The paratrooper’s body had surfaced right in the area where Strega had alerted. Strega, a dog trained to find human remains, had probably helped save lives. The Taliban didn’t get the body. No one else died on that mission. No one triumphed, either.

  15

  The Perfect Tool

  In this business it takes time to be really good, and by that time you’re obsolete.

  —Cher

  Just as I got a handle on dogs’ noses, appreciating them for their precision, practicality, and adaptability, science leaped ahead of me. S
omething superior to the primitive dog snout was around the bend. I was a scent Luddite, hunkered down and defensive of the working-dog class at the moment the biotechnology revolution was launching something slick and superior.

  Time magazine ran a piece about the demise of working dogs one week before Joan Andreasen-Webb told me that Vita was pregnant with Solo. Before Solo was more than a clump of rapidly reproducing canine cells, he and his nose were passé.

  “Memo to man’s best friend,” Time told magazine-reading dogs in January 2004. “In a few years, you may be relieved of your police drug-sniffing duties, thanks to a pair of Georgia Tech scientists.” Scientists “have developed a handheld electronic nose that detects the presence of cocaine and other narcotics better than your cold, wet snout ever could.” The magazine overestimated dogs’ print literacy while not giving them nearly enough credit for nose literacy.

  This biotech moment wasn’t the first time I’d felt like an apprentice on the cusp of entering into a brilliant new career just as pink slips were getting handed out. My career timing had always been lousy. In 1982, the same year I started my first newspaper job in the foggy San Joaquin Valley, Gannett launched USA Today in full color, with its nuggets of fun-to-consume news. Publisher Allen H. Neuharth called the style of reporting and writing the “journalism of hope.” Headlines emphasized the positive. When a charter plane crashed in Málaga, Spain, the headline read: MIRACLE: 327 SURVIVE, 55 DIE. But newspapers were already ailing, victims of executive bean counters, their own stockholders, and, soon, the burgeoning Internet.

  Thinking quickly, I transitioned from newspapers about a decade before massive layoffs began. This time I trained in an industry I knew would last. Higher education had been around since medieval times. Knowledge would never go out of fashion. I became a tenured university professor about a decade before tenure started dying and the sun started setting on affordable public universities.