What the Dog Knows

by Cat Warren

  “We’re really just testing a hypothesis. We don’t know what we’re going to find,” Peterson said. “We’re keeping the categories very, very broad. This may be a dead end. We may stumble across something. This is just another piece of the puzzle.”

  • • •

  Dogs get sick, get old, die. Certain dogs you miss more than others. You try not to, but inevitably, that’s what happens.

  Kathy Holbert’s cadaver dog, Strega, was eleven when she was diagnosed with bile duct cancer. She had been over in Iraq and Afghanistan for nearly a year. She became ill and died within a couple of months in the mountains of West Virginia, where she’d spent most of her life. Kathy did everything, including an experimental procedure that injects a dye to help the immune system respond. She knew it was a long shot.

  Danny Gooch’s Kimbo died in March 2012, a year or so after his retirement. Danny’s daughter had the vet keep one of Kimbo’s canine teeth. For Father’s Day, she had it mounted on a small gold clasp. Danny wears it on a chain he tucks down his T-shirt. His daughter got a small heart tattoo: KIMBO, BFF. Kimbo was dark and fierce; his tooth is small and white.

  Sean Kelly had four patrol dogs during his police K9 handling career. Nero was his most recent, one of the happiest working dogs I’d ever met. He loved people, finding drugs and guns, and biting. He had a deep, forceful bark and one of the smoothest on-and-off switches I’d witnessed. He’d come off the bite sleeve and immediately sidle up to anyone watching, stump tail wagging. Nero visited homes for developmentally disabled children where the only coherent word Sean could understand, joyfully shouted over and over, was “Nero! Nero!”

  Nero’s ashes sit on Sean Kelly’s mantel in North Carolina, in an eight-sided canister marked with his paw print. The Malinois’s print is also tattooed on Sean’s big calf. Nero’s ashes aren’t the only ones sitting on the Kelly family’s mantel; Sean has the ashes of two of his other patrol dogs there as well.

  Losing Nero hit Sean the hardest. Nero had been a military working dog with the special forces. He’d survived an IED that had killed his handler. The same bomb blew out Nero’s incisors and put a gaping hole in his chest. His tail was amputated because his hindquarters were so damaged. He was a mess, but he was alive. Veterinarians patched his body together and gave him titanium teeth. But Nero, who had been one of the top apprehension dogs in his unit, who had helped save his handler before, as well as other unit members, could no longer do his work. Post-traumatic stress disorder is too clinical a term: Nero and his world had been blown apart.

  “You can’t get into the dog’s head and say, ‘It’s okay, it’s not going to happen again,’ ” Sean said. Besides, that wouldn’t have been the truth. So Nero returned to a military base in the U.S. to help train green K9 handlers. However, he had a lot more working parts than nonworking parts. Turning him into the equivalent of a practice dog was wasting a great dog. So in 2008, in a quietly arranged deal, Nero went to a police department in North Carolina. Sean, a former K9 officer from New York City, fell in love with him. Nero was six years old. He had drive, smarts, and a great nose. Although his tail and teeth were mangled, his head and chest mostly white, he still had his perfect, pointy Malinois ears. Inevitably, Nero’s work in a small city in North Carolina, although not as dangerous as being with special forces in Iraq, had its challenges. Nero ran into a yellow jackets’ nest tracking a suspect.

  “I don’t want that ear to flop over,” Sean told the vet when he brought Nero in. Nero’s head was swollen with stings. “That’s the only thing he’s got going for him.” His pleas were in vain.

  Despite his now comically flopped ear, Nero kept working. He got a second wind. He worked with Sean for three more years on the street. And while Nero had loved work, retirement at the age of nine felt fine, too.

  “He adjusted too well to home life,” Sean said. “I’d come home, and he’d be on the bed.” Grinning, titanium canines gleaming.

  The lymphoma was fast and aggressive. Despite chemotherapy, it was over in a matter of weeks. Nero was one day shy of his tenth birthday when he started gasping for air. Sean rushed him to the vet and into an exam room.

  “I was sitting on the floor, and he came over and looked at me. I knew.”

  • • •

  Solo and I faced man-made mountains in downtown Durham off a gravel road where the city keeps street repair supplies. Mike turned his SUV around and put on its high beams, and I did the same with my Camry’s headlights, so they cast pale light on the hills of yellow sand, crusher run, and rubble at the end of the road. The piles created cantilevered half-pipes of sand and granite rather than snow. The valleys between were cratered by tire ruts filled with muddy, alkaline water.

  The limestone crusher run looked one-dimensional, like piles of gray-and-black fragmented leaves or frozen dirty ice that went straight up fifteen or twenty feet, an Escher without open space or grace. The sand across from it was piled even higher, a huge dune stretching out into the dark. It had been unused for so long that animals had burrowed into it, making cave villages on the sides. Across from that lay a heap of granite curbstones; the city of Durham had cut and pulled the stones like long narrow teeth from the mouth of downtown. That granite had lined the streets for decades, five inches wide and three feet down, curbs that shredded the tires of those who are bad at parallel parking, and testified to a city of an estimable age. Immovable. Strong. Here, piled and canted in every direction, the pinkish granite looked unstable, with black gaps: seesaws or dominoes if Solo stepped wrong. The skunky smell of asphalt permeated the air here, though we were surrounded by pine trees and fragrant wax myrtle.

  Mike had planted some training material for Solo, somewhere on the mountains of crusher run, or down the half-pipe of sand, or in the rubble pile.

  Solo barked sharply at me, impatient to be released, and then disappeared briefly into the woods and darkness to give the trees his canine greeting. He came out of the dark, back around the edge, running smoothly. I didn’t need to tell him to start work. He motored up the sand dune, ran across the top, disappeared along the far edge, came back into the beams of the headlights, sampled the air before hesitating, and flipped himself around at the top, head raised. He dropped in like a teenage skateboarder on a ramp, straight down the hill, gathering steam before switching back up and around and doing it again. He did that twice more, swooping gracefully, before he dropped down into the flat and ran toward the pile of granite. The scent from the rubble pile had drifted over to the sand dune and crawled up it—Solo was so experienced that he knew what had happened. He’d used those easy swoops to reject the dune as the source of the scent.

  Solo only occasionally trained in rubble, and his hot-dog antics on the sand dune worried me. I watched as he stepped up, then up again, on the pieces of granite. I stood well back so he couldn’t hear any unconscious gasps on my part as he gingerly climbed the uneven terrain. Mike, standing behind me, said in a low voice, “I tested it.”

  Solo tested it, too, moving deliberately, sticking his head into the black holes where the scent swirled, moving up, over, back. Then he froze at one hole, turned his head back to stare at me, his eyes glowing amber in the headlights. He slowly backed down off the rubble so he could give his final alert.

  “Sweet,” Mike said. “Sweet.”

  18

  Wag

  I had a dog once. Wag. One of the seven great dogs. At any one time, you know, there are only seven. Did you know that?

  —Peter O’Toole as Fisk Senior, Dean Spanley, 2008

  Solo wasn’t the only aging beast in our house. The rest of us were getting sore and creaky; silver crept across the tops of our heads, though Solo’s head remained rich red and black. Only his muzzle had grizzled. Megan’s entire head was a mixture of white and faded mahogany, her eyes increasingly bleary, as though a fog had descended and was slowly encasing her. She was thirteen, ancient in setter years. Although she was no longer as strikingly beautiful as in her youth, we still u
sed her nickname, Scarlett O’Setter, since she remained as self-centered and spoiled as ever. She continued to demand royalties and obeisance from us. If Solo lay sacked out on a soft dog bed, she would totter over and collapse on top of him, looking reproachful if he startled awake and leaped away from their colliding bones. Her days of tearing my rotator cuff by running out the end of her Flexi lead were gone. Seeing a squirrel would send her into an off-kilter wobble, like a toddler whose attention is diverted. Sometimes she just fell over.

  My orthodoxies about dogs and old age softened and shifted with Megan’s increasing weakness. We popped mild opiates into her mouth to keep her, and us, happy. We helped her up and down the stairs each night and morning with an elaborate harness that had a rubber handle on top—something I had sworn we wouldn’t resort to. We bought her a Martha Stewart quilted dog jacket to keep her warm. She occasionally deigned to gaze on me with approval when I tucked a blanket over her at night. We had Dad’s cherry rocker, his good binoculars—and Megan.

  Nancy was right: I needed to start another cadaver dog. David and I also wanted to time the puppy’s entrance with Megan’s departure. We have a small house. Adding another dog in the bedroom at night would assure that it smelled like a bunkhouse. It already sounded like one: Three of us snored. Not Megan, of course. Except for her slovenly drinking habits, she remained a lady, even in decline.

  “Why don’t you just shoot her?” asked a practically minded K9 officer one night as I explained the Megan dilemma. I stared at him blankly. Dispatching her that way might betray my father’s memory, I explained gently. Also, I didn’t own a gun. Another K9 officer, Moses Irving, nodded in approval at my answer and glared at his (probably) joking friend. Moses was the minister of a basement congregation in his spare time. “Your father is looking down right now,” he said. “You’re doing the right thing.”

  Megan got extra food that night, although she always got extra food if she wanted it. She retained a wasp waist no matter what she ate. David promised me that as long as the three-dog days and nights didn’t stretch out for years, he could put up with the unknown chaos of three generations of dogs.

  That promise gave me permission to indulge in what I called puppy porn, scanning dozens of websites and hundreds of photos, raising my endorphins and hopes with two-dimensional images of baby-faced German shepherd puppies. When they are four to six weeks old, shepherd puppies have a flop-eared cuteness that makes everyone go soft and gooey inside. By nine weeks old, they start looking and acting like clumsy tiger sharks. To each her own.

  We couldn’t get another Solo. I might have been tempted, but Joan Andreasen-Webb was no longer breeding dogs. If I wanted to continue doing cadaver-dog work, my best chances lay with an entirely working-line shepherd. And I wanted to keep going. This time, I wanted to add disaster training to the mix. My former fantasies of a large, calm, red-and-black prince had been replaced with an entirely new fantasy: a sable or black shepherd with a flat back, “environmental hardness,” nerve, and drive. I knew exactly what I wanted: one of Kathy Holbert’s German shepherd puppies from the mountains of West Virginia, raised with Kathy’s mellow laughter and low-key working-dog knowledge, with the gentle hands of her husband, Danny, and with rollicking adventure: crawling through culverts, swimming in creeks, running through the woods, balancing on gently sloped ladders, diving into swimming pools, walking across balance beams. Working-dog heaven.

  “You’d better have something for this pup to do once it gets to your house,” Lisa Mayhew warned me. She was right. This was not a pup who was going to lie there as Solo now did, snoozing while we watched the new Sherlock Holmes on PBS and ate dinner on rickety TV trays. Our morning ritual of coffee in bed with the New York Times would be history. Solo slept in and arose, with a luxurious stretch and yawn, only when we decided to.

  This would be the kind of pup handlers name Havoc, Harm, or Hecate. We’d kept another name in reserve for years. It had aged nicely and still rolled off our tongues with pleasurable, bisyllabic ease: Coda. Now, though, my goal wasn’t a pup who would reflect a quiet, thoughtful ending. I wanted less sonata summation and more Beethoven’s coda for his 8th Symphony: fast and furious at points, occasionally disharmonious, “anything but orthodox.” This time I would be sobbing in David’s arms late at night if the puppy didn’t immediately leap on us, scrabbling to pepper our arms and legs and noses and toes with puppy bites and claw marks, making us look like heroin addicts. Solo taught me that such behavior wasn’t personal, and it wasn’t aggression, but rather a gnawing, biting appetite for life. My standards had changed. I knew I could build in obedience, but it was harder to build drive if the basic material wasn’t there. I could teach a pup not to leap over the couch and all over us and not to chew on hands. At least, given a few months. Or years.

  For all our preparations and research and joy about the choice, I also felt mournful and scared. We were moving into medium-risk territory after several years of relative comfort. A puppy would take lots of time, time away from Solo. That was if Solo even accepted a pup in the house. Also, I would be abbreviating his training in favor of the hot new pup on the block. Getting a new dog up and running could take up to two years—if the pup continued to show promise, if the K9 teams in Durham allowed me to train with them, if no terrible accidents occurred. I had a discussion with another volunteer handler about what might happen if the new dog and I washed out: She condoned finding the dog a new home and moving on quickly to another. I wasn’t sure I could do that. I did know our house was too small for three German shepherds. And I was fully aware of the problem of “second-dog syndrome.” If the pup didn’t work, it would be partly my fault.

  I had encouragement in my forebodings. Two experienced law enforcement trainers told me that I would never again have a dog as naturally good as Solo. When I told Nancy that, she scoffed and told me not to be maudlin. “It’s the handler, stupid,” she said. Within the hour, I overheard Nancy telling a friend that she had just lied to me. I might never again have a dog as good as Solo. I knew that this wasn’t the first time she’d lied to me. Her first major lie came when I entered her yard in Zebulon, my belly pack filled with liver treats strapped across my salmon-colored linen pants, hoping to find something for my young canis horribilis to do, and she cheerily told me she thought I would love cadaver work. She hadn’t thought that. She had seen potential in Solo, but she hadn’t thought that I—“little hippie yuppie” that I was—would follow through. Ha. I showed her. Now I was going to have to show her all over again.

  “It’s very common to see a dog handler be a ‘one dog wonder’ and to either give it up once that dog is done or to suffer miserably with the next dogs,” wrote one cadaver-dog trainer. I exhibited all the clinical symptoms of being a one-dog wonder, and I didn’t even have the pup yet.

  I was now the working-dog researcher who knew too much. Between genetics and temperament, accidents and poor health, and the limits of my ability as a still-new handler, getting another dog to succeed was a crapshoot. We could stack the odds in our favor, but we ultimately didn’t control every contingency.

  Maybe I’d been hanging out with law enforcement too much, watching good handlers struggle mightily to understand and respect their new dogs—and failing. Dogs failed, too. I watched almost-adult dogs get shipped in from Europe, get evaluated, and wash out. Not hitting the bite sleeve hard enough. Hesitating before leaping up a metal stairway. Not levitating onto a slippery desk in a warehouse. Mike Baker, who had evaluated many hundreds of dogs, was more patient and knowledgeable than the sometimes judgmental handlers. He knew how long the dog had been in the country, whether it had the equivalent of jet lag, what its early experience might or might not have been. Many dogs faced entirely new environments. Breeding kennels, even top-notch European ones, don’t always provide dogs the exposure they need.

  And here I would be bringing in a ten-week-old puppy who wouldn’t be big enough to climb warehouse stairs. It was bad enough that the pup would
be a German shepherd and not a Malinois, but I wasn’t bringing in a dozen dogs to evaluate. Only one. So much could go wrong. Solo’s gifts were serendipitous and helped shape what he became. There would be no beginner’s luck this time around.

  On the other hand, I had resources at my disposal. Nancy Hook, for example. Kathy Holbert. Joan. Mike Baker promised me that, though he would be retired from the Durham K9 unit when the pup arrived, he would still be in the K9 training business and would help me put a foundation on the young dog.

  During training one night, I tried to assure Mike—and myself—that I wouldn’t be as clueless. “I’ll know more with the next one. I won’t make the same mistakes.”

  Mike shook his head. He knew better. “If I had every dog in front of me that I’d ever worked with, I’d apologize to each of them.”

  • • •

  Steve Sprouse came to a decision soon after he retired DJ. One last patrol dog.

  “My knees say, ‘You stupid idiot,’ but I just can’t picture doing anything else,” he told me. Steve wouldn’t be getting a nine-week-old pup. “We try to get a dog that’s eighteen months, and even at twelve months, we get a dog and there are problems. That six months is really critical.” Steve is always looking for two things: genetics and potential.

  “I don’t want to see what man has put into the dog,” he said. “I want to see what God has put into the dog.” Steve got lots of eighteen-month-old dogs to evaluate: He would have his pick of a large and mostly unrelated litter from all over Europe. He knew what he wanted—a strong, confident, balanced dog with an internal motor that wouldn’t quit. One vendor offered to fly him over to Germany to assess dogs, but soon after that, a vendor he knew well called to say he thought he had a pretty special dog for Steve. The dog had been flown in recently from Slovakia to Florida. Steve didn’t take that call for granted; the vendor knew Steve was looking for what would probably be his last patrol dog.