by Cat Warren
The farm’s owner, ninety-two, told Kathy and Lisa that the slaves hadn’t been allowed to leave the farm. Some of the children, he said, had been sold. If that were the case, it was probable that they walked in a coffle, bound together with ropes, a frequent sight in West Virginia in those decades. Nearly one in three slave children in the upper South in 1820 was gone by 1860.
It was just after nine A.M., and the sun was glaring when Kathy started Strega loping down the cow path. Strega’s rear moved sideways due to her aging hips as she went toward the pond, folding back like sable-colored origami. She moved along the outer edge of the pond, not bothering to dip herself and not slowing until she hit the end. She held her nose low to scoop scent. Nothing here. Nothing here. No reason to quarter or hesitate. Ten yards later, she slowed and flipped back on herself in that distinctive way a scent-detection dog does when it notes something relevant. She leaned over a drainage spot. I could see, tracing back up, where the water percolated off the rocky hill and down into a dimpled spot at the bottom before entering the pond. Strega paused there, sniffing, turning around several times, leaving, then going back to it. She never looked at Kathy, who was standing back about a hundred feet, silent, letting her work. Kathy is a noninterventionist handler. Strega left the drainage and slowly worked up the hill toward its crest, using her good, deep nose. This is behavior that experienced handlers and trainers have seen with dogs working toward victims, even those who are not buried. The scent can percolate down the hill or toward water from a great distance. Scent won’t always be strongest right on top of a grave.
After more than 175 years, one shouldn’t expect vegetation to be different above the buried, Kathy said. Nonetheless, at the top of the hill, a slightly concave area was filled with purple and white clover and mats of shorter, greener grasses that seemed woven more tightly than in other places on the hill. Strega stopped, turned in a tight circle several times, and whuffed audibly. Then she sat and stared at Kathy.
And so it went for the next two hours. Renzo, Lisa Lepsch’s massive black shepherd, found a spot on the other side of the small hill. It wasn’t concave, but it stretched out for fifteen feet or so in a green streak across the top of the hill. He sniffed around the edges of the space, walking slowly, then came into the middle of it and stood there looking at Lisa, who chuckled. “He’s good at defining things,” she said.
Rocco, Ann Christensen’s young shepherd, alerted where Renzo had shown interest, flinging himself down in abandon. Whump. Dusty, Charm Gentry’s Beauceron, alerted there, too, after mincing through the field and occasionally popping straight up like an antelope that had found a snake beneath her. So did Kessa, Ann’s gray sable shepherd.
On that hill of four or five acres, the five dogs walked and ran, quartered back and forth, slowed, then alerted on two general flat spots where Strega and Renzo had alerted. Dogs can alert on top of other dogs’ spots, although that’s not how they are trained. Handlers can subconsciously signal to their dogs. None of the handlers was working the problem blind. While the dogs and the oral history overlapped, using GPR in that rocky environment would be impossible. Once we left the field, all that would remain would be the stories and GPS locations marked in the dogs’ training records. No names. No headstones. A field of clover and thistle.
“I’ve never done anything that old,” said Arpad Vass. Then he continued. “But it does not surprise me that a dog will alert. Clay makes a nice vault.”
• • •
There’s little science to shed light on what is happening when dogs sweep through an old graveyard. Archaeology is already a speculative discipline. What can dogs’ noses add? What are they alerting on? Handlers’ unconscious cues? Old decomposed trees? Gravestones, when they are there? Are people simply watching the dogs work, adding historical fantasy to evocative landscapes, and creating erroneous paint-by-noses pictures?
Several teams across the country now work with old burials; a few are starting to get consistent and more verifiable results with the combination of ground-penetrating radar, dogs, and oral and written history. Scattered excavations here and there—proof positive—are corroborating those finds. The arena of cadaver dogs and historic remains is still clouded and contentious, though. It’s particularly hard to prove the worth of working dogs when dealing with old burials, because more often than not, excavation (aka confirming proof) just isn’t going to happen.
Mary Cablk has done research using historical-remains detection dogs on the Old Spanish Trail on several possible burial sites, including some blank areas. Now she would like to corroborate, with core sample testing, where the dogs alerted and where the GPR showed changes.
“The historical human-remains detection is something that I go back and forth on,” she said. “Do I think that dogs can do it? Yes. Do I think that all the teams out there across the country who claim they can do it can do it? No. That’s what I call faith-based dog work.” Are dogs trained to detect ancient remains, as Mary notes when she is at her most skeptical, simply “great anomaly detectors”? She wonders whether the anomaly might be simply a change in the surrounding soil chemistry rather than ancient remains. Are the dogs alerting on the pottery urns that human ash was placed in, in some cultures, rather than the ash itself?
Mary is not the only skeptic and not the only researcher trying to develop peer-reviewed research on the issue. The work on using dogs for archaeological work is just beginning, and it’s all over the map, literally—from Bosnia to Hawaii, from California to the Mississippi Delta. Since no one has established exactly what volatile organic compounds cause dogs to alert for more recent deaths, old graves raise even more questions.
“Dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return” has a scientific basis. At some point, most of us rejoin the earth in a way that should confound a cadaver dog as well as any instrumentation: We’re not grave dirt, we’re not dirt mixed with adipocere. We’re just dirt, plain and simple.
How far back can the dog go? It depends on how much scientific verification we want. Solo has alerted on an eight-hundred-year-old bone from the Mississippi Delta, and I’ve watched a number of dogs do the same. And, of course, it depends on what the dog is actually alerting on—it was thought until recently that it could only be VOCs. The human body simply lets volatile organic chemicals go up and up, until the body stops communicating in that fashion. No scent understood as human decomposition should still be holding forth into the air column. And yet, good dogs, trained on the whole spectrum of decomposition, appear to know. The soil seems almost permanently changed.
“Scientifically, it’s almost impossible to explain,” Arpad Vass said. “It’s long gone, so what could they possibly be picking up?”
• • •
Scarcely had she spoken, when a stiffness seized all her limbs; her bosom began to be enclosed in a tender bark; her hair became leaves; her arms became branches; her foot stuck fast in the ground, as a root; her face became a tree-top, retaining nothing of its former self but its beauty. Apollo stood amazed.
—Apollo and Daphne, Bulfinch’s Mythology, 1913
When I watch well-trained cadaver dogs work a possible clandestine burial site or define the outer perimeters of old cemeteries—throwing their heads, staring up into the trees, even putting their feet up to try to climb them, and bringing their noses deep down into tree roots growing out of depressions in the earth—I’m fascinated. I tread more lightly in those spots. As one handler in Mississippi, Gwen Hancock, whispers when she accidentally steps in the shallow depressions of the nineteenth-century cemetery she and other handlers discovered by accident in the woods behind her house: “Please forgive me. Thank you for letting us train our dogs.”
I wanted to say similar thanks when I got invited on a small expedition to a possible cemetery site in South Carolina. I had watched Kathy Holbert and Lisa Higgins and a number of other experienced handlers work their dogs on possible grave sites in West Virginia and Mississippi; Solo hadn’t been with me. Then cadaver
-dog handler and anthropology graduate student Paul Martin invited us to South Carolina.
Early-morning mist was still hanging just above the Great Pee Dee River on the border between North Carolina and South Carolina. A February mist with a bite to it. On a little bluff overlooking the river stood one lichen-covered stone, placed there by the Daughters of the American Revolution some time in the 1960s. The DAR had hoped, in planting the stone, to mark an abandoned cemetery that might include the body of Revolutionary War Captain Claudius Pegues Jr., who fought alongside the wily Francis Marion. Marion, the Swamp Fox, led a group of backwoods soldiers against the British, often escaping into the underbrush or marshes—which was how he got his nickname: “As for this damned old fox, the Devil himself could not catch him,” swore British Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton.
Claudius Jr. died in 1792, less than a decade after the war of independence was won. He was reportedly buried here. The bluff overlooks the once-huge Pegues family cotton plantation, the site of the only prisoner exchange during the Revolutionary War. But perhaps Claudius wasn’t here at all. Putting a stone marker on a spot doesn’t always make it so.
Claudius Jr.’s great-great-great-great-granddaughter, Pat Franklin, stood at the edge of the woods, her gray hair swept up in a loose Gibson-girl knot. Pat wasn’t familiar with cadaver dogs; nor was her longtime friend and fellow genealogist May MacCallum. But after May read about dogs finding graves, she did her research, and ultimately, they called Paul.
Pat was uncertain how the family records, letters, wills, and oral history coalesced. Her grandmother always told her “the old burying ground” was at the Charrows, where we were now, looking over the river, and that a coach whip snake guarded the spot. A coach whip snake is long, fast, and smart, with large dark eyes and scales that look like braided leather. It will chase you, whip you to death with its tail, and then stick the tip of its tail up your nose to make sure you’re not breathing.
Childhood fears gone, Pat wanted to know where her ancestors lay. Claudius Jr., his wife, Marcia Murphy, and perhaps four infant children might rest in front of us in the woods. Two children died the same year they were born; two were dead by the time they were two. Had they lived, they would have been heirs to a large cotton plantation. Their wealth didn’t spare them the early death that greeted so many infants. Some took their mothers with them. One record indicates that Claudius Jr.’s mother, Henriette Pegues, may have been buried here just days after she gave birth to an infant girl in 1758. The records don’t show what happened to the little girl, but Claudius Sr.’s will mentions only two sons—directly, that is. Claudius Sr. gave his servant woman Cortney and her son, Martin, to his son, William, as slaves. He also gave Cortney her own slave and directed that a house be built for her and Martin. He stipulated that the two of them were to be set free when Martin was twenty-one, and that Martin be given tools and taught a trade. Cortney and Martin then disappear from the record.
I couldn’t quite countenance, looking across the land, that both the Revolutionary War and the Civil War took place here, that people who had fought in the revolution for independence from England were the same people who kept slaves. And that their slaves kept slaves.
Solo whined loudly in the car. He was a cemetery novice and would not get to go first, which irritated him greatly. Paul Martin would start with Macy, one of his veteran cadaver dogs. Paul started working on ancient human remains more than ten years ago, and it has become both an intellectual and a training challenge for him. A bit more sun, Paul said, and the scent would start rising and moving, if scent were there. Too much sun can burn it off. There’s a sweet spot for grave work.
Arpad Vass observed the following about using dogs to find more recent, clandestine burials, and Paul was applying the principles to older remains: Humidity should be between seventy and eighty-five percent. Check. Ideal soil type: sand and humic. Check. Temperatures at fifty-three degrees and rising. It was colder than that, but otherwise, we were searching in conditions that were well-nigh perfect, according to Arpad’s calculations, although I didn’t know if the barometric pressure was falling, as it should be.
Macy looks more like a cross between Old Yeller and Gollum than a Labrador. He’s slippery and primitive, with amber eyes, a reddish-dun coat, and ribs sticking out; though he eats constantly, he runs it off. He had raw spots on his pink nose that morning from butting his wire crate door repeatedly in his eagerness to get out. Macy banged in joy as Paul approached the crate; as soon as the latch turned, Macy shot out into the woods. Paul followed more slowly, then stood amid the oak, beech, sweet gum, black cherry, and sycamore trees. Calm and quiet, he watched Macy dash around the perimeter of the area like a surveyor on methamphetamines.
“Too far,” he said in his nasal, lilting voice as Macy dropped out of sight down the bluff toward the river. It’s a term that Lisa Higgins uses, and I had started using it with Solo. It doesn’t mean “come.” It means “start to circle back.”
Macy was working hard, snorkeling scent in the leaves without finding anything. It was too cold. He ignored Paul and didn’t ask to be rewarded. After ten minutes, Paul put Macy up. We would have to wait until the sun penetrated the canopy. In the meantime, another glade beckoned, where it was warmer than it was on this crest. Down the gentle hill, where the cotton was harvested months before, lay the “black cemetery”—covered with periwinkle and abandoned but with stones that dated through 1910. A number of former slaves became tenement farmers and stayed during Reconstruction and beyond. Pat and May have worked to record this cemetery as well.
Paul turned to me. “Why don’t you go get your dog?”
Solo was ecstatic to be out of the car, whirling and barking sharply, coming back to hit my leg. I offered him water, since he had been panting in excitement. He wasn’t interested. He dashed down the hill, ignoring the rough cotton stubble, and into the woods and underbrush and tangled periwinkle at the bottom. Scent must have called to him. By the time we entered the woods, he was already working. Solo had never been exposed to gravestones, except for a hasty search of a modern graveyard; he had no reason to suspect they had any significance. Given how they were scattered, neither did I. Nonetheless, in one spot, I could hear Solo snorkeling from twenty feet away. He did his down alert, staring at me. He was surrounded by periwinkle and daffodils, and I saw several tilted headstones under the vines. “Reward him,” Paul said. I did. Solo alerted seven or eight times. Paul estimated that at least seventy-five people were buried at this larger site. Pat doesn’t know how far it goes back. The DAR has not put a stone marker here.
It was now midmorning, so we moved back to the top of the hill, where we expected fainter scent because of the age of the burials, if they were there. Paul took out Macy again; ten degrees warmer, and Macy’s behavior change was astonishing. He alerted several times. We started to notice shapes and depressions that had been covered with leaves. Paul pointed them out to Pat and May. The more oblong and rectangular, the more likely. Possibly up to six adults and five children, Paul estimated.
Paul then ran Jordan, his other Labrador. She was soft and black rather than hard and amber, like Macy. She alerted repeatedly in the deep leaves, in a couple of spots where Macy had alerted, in a couple of new places, where we could then see depressions. Both dogs worked the area in ways so similar that I marveled. Macy was fast, Jordan much slower. Nonetheless, the same depressions seemed to hold scent. The two Labradors threw their heads around the same trees, went down to the same holes, and did their final alerts in four or five places.
I could hear Solo howling. Paul turned to me, and I freed Solo from his Camry prison, letting him run into the little woods. I stood well back. It didn’t matter. His work overlapped Macy’s and Jordan’s—several alerts and head throws in the same places. I was no longer surprised.
We had finished searching for the day. We placed flags, and the work of measuring began. Pat and I went to poke the depressions shallowly to see if we hit stone; marker
s could have become buried underneath the humus of the woods. Burials of the era tended to be at least four feet deep, so it didn’t feel as though we were poking at the dead.
May was happy for her friend. “We don’t care who is who. Now we can lay it to rest.” Pat and her family were planning to put markers there.
Solo was lying off to the side, panting, his tug toy in his mouth. The leaves where he had flung himself were disturbed. Beneath them, I saw a hint of white. A tiny violet. Pat looked at it and smiled.
“It’s called ‘spring beauty.’ ”
17
A Second Wind
My little witch, who lived life every day, has traveled on, taking a huge part of my heart with her. Fair winds and following sails, Strega. Buon viaggio.
—Kathy Holbert, 2012
Sweat poured down Danny Gooch’s face. He’d just removed the suffocating decoy suit and rolled up his soaked dark blue T-shirt sleeves over the tops of his shoulders, exposing the dark-blue-inked portrait of a Dutch shepherd head on his bicep.
One of the handlers shook his head in dismay. “Paisano,” he said.
Danny’s flat white teeth flashed as he pulled back his lips in a grimace. “Hey, you know what Kimbo would have done? You know what Kimbo would have done?”
Everyone standing there knew what Kimbo would have done. Earlier, Mike Baker had decoyed, stashing himself underneath the composite tile floors in an abandoned laboratory building. Watching him thread himself into the small space, more cramped than a coffin, gave me claustrophobia.
Dogs are object-oriented. Once the less-experienced patrol dogs realized Mike’s scent was somewhere in the room, they went to look for him behind doors. One leaped repeatedly at the large refrigerator unit in the room; Mike’s scent had crawled up its side. Several other dogs figured an interior hallway window was the key. They kept levitating toward it, hoping that a person would materialize on the other side. The idea that someone could hide literally under their paws flummoxed them.