by Susannah
"Empty," he said. "No need to search that one."
"How do you know?" Fleta asked.
He said, "Because it's mine."
I look at the dogs that have deployed with us on this search, lying quietly in their crates. Some of them are storm phobic at home on their own time. But now in the environment of search, when they can smell and feel as well as hear the storm, it's curious to me how they seem to let their fear go. Several of these dogs are Oklahoma and Texas tornado veterans: they've spent plenty of long days circling the rubble on command, expressions thoughtful as they made their way to the center of this tumbled house or the ragged edge of that one, finding dime-size fragments of the deceased in the remaining eggshell curve of a bathtub.
These are the searches that test the whole handler, the whole dog—equanimity and stamina in good measure. After the search for human casualties had been made in Moore, the same dog units went out to assist dazed residents returning to what was left of their homes. Some families needed help locating emergency items—medication, insurance documentation, and the like. Others just needed hands to help remove mementoes left intact. Still others wanted nothing more than the solace of the dogs. Many residents turned to them, having lost their own. After disaster, the Moore handlers say, a search team's job description expands. We come to search, but we do whatever, Max says. You have to get a little bigger, give up your fatigue and your ego and your own fears to meet the need.
We sit all night.
"Damn lucky," says the officer who stands us down, eight hours after we deployed. He's referring to the towns that lay along the spent storm's path and were, apart from downed trees, hail damage, and lost power, spared disaster. The worst of the weather had skipped across open fields, he says, and there were already storm stories, reports of strange sights—a tractor overturned beside a truck left untouched, a windmill that had fallen and somehow trapped a cow in the mangle of it, the cow apparently uninjured but really pissed off.
No persons missing, no civilian casualties known. Damn lucky, he repeats. Damn close. The officer thanks us for being willing to sit the night on standby. He says, "Glad you were here, but really glad we didn't need you." We thank him, and we all exhale.
Here is equanimity. The dogs are always ready for whatever. They shrug off the night of standby and are running now, racing like puppies across the muddy field. We're also a little goofy with relief, and we play too, tugging toys, throwing balls. We set up practice searches. Dog by dog, they find those of us who've disappeared for them, leaving paw prints on the windows, the wet of their noses streaking the cars where we hide.
11. RUNNING WITH THE BIG DOGS
WHATEVER OUR TROUBLES at home, a different dog hits the ground in the early days of our search lessons. Puzzle has learned all the signals that suggest she's about to leave the house and head out to work. It does not take her long to assimilate the clunk of ice in the mini-cooler, the zip of my steel-toed boots, and the jingle and snap of her treat bag on my belt to know what they mean. She rushes out the back door and into the yard ahead of me, wearing the special harness that is another signal we're about to get down to business. Puzzle is all retriever. She has the lifted head and switchy prance of a dog born to carry things for their partners, and she swaggers around the yard with her own lead in her soft mouth. She is small but extremely prideful, dragging much of the webbing behind her as she trots beside me toward the car, crooning wrrooo-ooo-wroooo-oo-oo, universal Golden for dig me. This is just the kind of reaction we want from a search dog—self-confidence, awareness, and joy in the work to come.
But at the door of the garage she pauses, and there I see her first hesitance. Puzzle is quick to make connections, and just as she knows that certain clothes and objects mean search training, she has also associated car trips with nausea. At the door of the garage, I see her pause, drop her lead, and back up a little. She is torn. When I encourage her toward the Jeep (Hey Puz! Oh boy! Let's go to work!), she is all mixed signals. She wags and simultaneously scoots backward, plopping her bottom down and whimpering, miserable with the conflict of wanting to go but really, really, really not wanting to throw up all over the back seat again, a condition I understand and share.
Car sickness is fairly common in dogs. I had a Sheltie that invariably vomited in the first five minutes of motion and then loved every minute of any car trip, even those to the vet. He would wholeheartedly retch up whatever he had in him, then flash a hey!-beg-pardon-for-the-puke grin, and wiggle and wag the rest of the way. Puzzle has thrown up only once in the car, but she's drooled a little and hung her head several other times, and it didn't take much to sense that she felt awful. At three months old, she doesn't seem to be particularly afraid of the vehicle itself or its smell, or its shape, or the rumbling of the engine, but within a few minutes of any drive, she is trembling, and in a couple of minutes more, I can see her head droop and her nauseated salivation begin. She is a long way from grinning about it.
Remembering the puppy that flew home belly-up and snored through moderate turbulence, I believe the car sickness is a problem we can outwit. Unsure if she feels sick because she's afraid or if she's afraid because she once felt sick, I first try modeling fearless canine car travel. While she sits in the doorway, I bring Sprits'l out to the garage, where he bounds into the car and puts his paws up on the back window, grinning and yapping an ecstatic neener-neener through the glass at her. Puzzle is unimpressed with the effort and oddly seems to feel no urge to one-up the Pom behind the window. They take a short car trip together. Sprits is joyful; within a couple of blocks, Puzzle's head and ears are down. Love the car, Sprits'l Morse-taps across the window with his paws. Puzzle's sullen expression suggests: Hate the car. Hate the drive. Think I hate you too.
Other tactics are marginally successful. I begin feeding her at least an hour and a half before a car trip, giving her food a chance to settle. We try puppy ginger snaps. A little Rescue Remedy on her tongue or paws. I bring out all the tricks that flight instructors use to help nauseated student pilots: I raise the seats so that Puzzle can get her bearings and see out, redirect vents so that she stays cool, fresh air blowing over her as she travels. Airbags are dangerous for dogs, so I cannot put her in the front seat, but in the back seat I move her closer to the center of the vehicle, securing her to the seatbelt with a special canine harness for a sense of security, hoping also to eliminate any swing or yaw she might feel farther back.
We make a party out of it with friends and much praising, we vary short trips with longer ones, and sometimes we just go hang out in the back of the Jeep without going anywhere. Once she jumps into the back seat of her own accord—a huge jump for a small pup—and I am very proud, but this is no new standard. Puzzle does not quickly learn to love a car. She tolerates the drive and, I believe, understands it's the necessary evil that gets her to search training. Some days, she heads into the garage with only slight reluctance. Other days, she sits on the sidewalk and sighs into the darkness, following only when I take up the lead and walk her into the garage. Once in the Jeep, she gazes stoically out the window while we back out and begin to roll, gulping a little as nausea seems to threaten, rise, and abate.
Where car travel may be a misery, search training itself is a quick and early joy for Puzzle. By the time we pull into the parking lot, her nausea is forgotten, her paws are up to the glass and her nose to the crack of the window. I hear her breathing change as she huff-huffs the delicious scent of human teammates and the dogs schooling among them at knee-level. She wiggles as I unfasten her seatbelt harness and secure her lead, and she scrambles across the asphalt to greet all comers, wagging so hard that she pops herself in the face with her own tail, and no matter how many times she's done it, still looks surprised and affronted by the smack. She whips her head in a startled who did that?—but it's an insult that quickly evaporates in the presence of greater joys: dog friends! people friends! and Oh! Oh! the men of the team.
Puzzle is something of a hussy, as one
teammate calls her, a man's dog, and though she's fond of the team's women and shows a particular affinity for Fleta, our lead canine instructor, it is the men of the team who make her go weak in the knees. Puzzle is all about the boys: petitioning them shamelessly for attention and petting. Most of these guys love her too. They are longtime dog owners, well-versed in the perfect scratch and ear rub. A few of them pick her up and strum her belly like a banjo. Others cradle her and rub her ears until she completely relaxes and her head dangles upside down. Sometimes she shoots me a look from this exalted position, and the message is pretty clear: They're big, and they're strong, and they are so much cooler than you.
Now one of them has gone missing. Puzzle would really like to find the former Marine voluntarily buried in the woodpile. We stand fifty yards away, watching as Johnny and Buster work the mound of charred debris. Our head trainer watches us, I watch my dog, and Puzzle watches Johnny and Buster. She is quiet and intent at the end of her lead. When Buster makes the find, she strains a little toward the scene, as though she wants to see the moment of connection. Buster likes to fetch a ball as reward for his searching, and off he scrambles after it while we watch. Puzzle's ears briefly perk at the sight of the ball, but she turns back to the debris pile with a fixed expression.
I have seen hundreds of training searches, but now I look down at Puzzle and try to imagine how she frames all of this. In intermediate dogs, we sometimes get the sense of wry exasperation: Look, I found this guy twice today already, not two hundred feet from his own car. I'm telling you, he is freakin' hopeless. Advanced dogs often seem to grin in conspiracy: Okay, I know you're going to hide her in the trickiest place you possibly can, and I'm still gonna show you it ain't no thing. But for Puzzle this is all still new. I wonder if Matt's predicament bemuses her— hey buddy, whatcha doing in there? —and if she can already clearly distinguish between the scent of normal human energy and genuine fear. Perhaps she saw Buster search the pile, make the find, and get to chase a ball afterward, and in all of that she sees the search as the greater game. There's no way to know.
We turn our backs and Matt, the Marine, is reburied in the woodpile, covered again where Buster had made short work of finding him. Maneuvering downwind of the pile, I give Puzzle the "Find!" command and off she races to the debris, circling it without question and giving a little happy hop of excitement when she picks up Matt's scent. She takes a moment to negotiate the loose debris, but when she gets to Matt and he weaves out a hand to touch her nose, she's all happy grins and wiggles. "Good girl!" we praise, and from beneath the debris we can hear the mutter of Matt laughing, praising her too. I offer her a bit of beef jerky with the good girl. She takes the treat daintily, and then drops it absently, unchewed, preferring to caper while we lay on the petting and praise.
As we carefully extract Matt, Puzzle steals a piece of burned wood from the debris pile. Matt carries her to the team to show off her success, and she has her head up, her trophy in her mouth. "Good girl!" they all praise. Rooo-wooo-wrroooo, Puzzle rumbles, wagging around the circle, showing off her burned stick. Wooor-oo-woo. I know the sound, but it's the first time the team has heard it from her. It's the sound of a dog who thinks she's hot stuff.
A harder lesson is learning to take her turn. Dogs that are not actively searching are waiting to search or are in "rehab," resting quietly with a bowl of water in the shade, recovering from a previous search and physically preparing for the next one. Puzzle will come off a search quietly, but her eyes follow the other dogs, and she springs to her feet when she hears the distant shout of handlers giving their dogs the "Find!" command. She watches and quivers, and occasionally when she can get the scent of a victim from where she waits, she whips her head around to look at me with great urgency and moans. Put me in, Coach, we call the yearning expressed by a line of search dogs, watching a distant dog and handler work a new scenario, waiting their turn. They all would be happiest if they had every search. Though their frustration is apparent, I believe that all that watching instructs the dogs too.
Puzzle enjoys her early days of search work. Our trainers say the dogs often catch on far more quickly than the handlers do, and Puzzle is quick to demonstrate that she knows what "Find!" means and that she doesn't care who she's finding. She likes the challenge; she likes the hunt and the strategy to get to the victim; she loves the praise. What I cannot tell in these early months is how best to reward her. The Labs and Collies and some of the German Shepherds of our team love to fetch a ball, and I try this with Puzzle, who cheerfully fetches in the backyard. After one training search, I take out a beloved tennis ball from home and throw it for Puzzle, who looks at me skeptically and ignores it. She watches the arc of the ball and the bounce and roll that follow, then looks at me as if to say, "You want it, you go get it." Search training does not seem to be the time or place for fetch in her view. Treats are possibly the better reward.
What Puzzle responds to most is the celebration that follows a successful find. Praise goes straight to her head, and she trots from a search expansive—chin up, high-stepping with her tail waving a happy flag. She croons her signature rumble until she's acknowledged by bystanders. In these early months, the work itself is Puzzle's best fun, and I get the sense that if I really wanted to reward her for a good search, I would give her another one.
Puzzle in the wilderness can move much faster than I can. Chalk it up to youth. Chalk it up to four paws on the ground and a lower center of gravity. Chalk it up to motivation too. Puzzle is from a line of dogs who love fieldwork, and she immediately shows me that crashing through brush and fording creeks to find a victim is most excellent fun. While I consider myself somewhat outdoorsy, wilderness search in Texas is never just a tidy hike through friendly wood. A wilderness search invariably means deep brush laced with mesquite thorns, poison ivy, and rugosa rose branches. Puzzle presses through such brush with equanimity, disregarding the pops and scratches and thorns in her paws. I have more trouble, bundling through the brush like a wounded bug, tripping over vines, thorns tangling the straps of my pack, snagging my clothing and sometimes shredding it as I pass.
An early morning cold front has passed on our first long day of wilderness training. We are all a little stunned by the shift from an 85-degree afternoon yesterday to a 36-degree morning today. The humans have swapped T-shirts for parkas, and we stand in a knot together, our shoulders hunched against the climate we're not yet acclimated to. The dogs, however, are bristly and alive with the cool, electric air, and as every one of them has some form of field impulse in their makeup, they look toward the wood with anticipation. This, their waving tails seem to say, is gonna be great.
Today's training will rotate between three sectors. Some feature wide plains of tall, stiff grass. Other sectors are mostly brush and huddled stands of trees, so thick that inside the huddle it is difficult to see open field beyond. The air is dense and heavy, but it's moving a little too. This morning's twelve-knot wind will shift scent in interesting ways, and when the ground warms after a few hours of sun, the same terrain will offer all-new scent patterns.
The dogs go into this with few preconceptions. It's the handlers who must be on their toes, and the risk for all of us, and particularly for me, the new handler, is that we'll search the dogs too rigidly according to our expectations, rather than trusting them to tell us where the scent actually is. Puzzle's urban work at the fire academy has shown me that when she's clearly got the victim, she is not a subtle dog. Her huge, happy alerts are visible sometimes to bystanders in the parking lot from a hundred yards away. But wilderness work demands that I be able to decipher when she has begun to pick up scent (interest), when she has narrowed it to a general location (indication), and when she has found the source itself (alert). And the heavy brush may prevent her from alerting the way she typically would. I watch the big dogs and their handlers head out into sectors, and I remind myself that when it comes to decoding my dog, I am a kindergartner at best. We have two objectives: Puzzle needs to
find the victim, and I need to know when she's on her way to finding him.
I also need to learn how to watch my dog and stay upright. Our first wilderness sector, though not large, is uneven—full of gullies and sinkholes and unsteady stones, all of which are hidden beneath tall grass. The wind is from the north, and we begin sweeping east and west from the southern, most downwind point of our sector. The idea is that a dog may catch first scent at the farthest downwind point of a search area and, if so, will indicate and head for the victim quickly and efficiently. Puzzle quivers when I ask her if she's ready to work, and on command she barrels away from me. She moves quickly, but not as quickly as she will after losing that puppy weight. She's tough to follow, even so. Puzzle's nose and tail are up, and watching her, I fail to see a dip in the ground ahead of me. I fall flat for the first time, a right smack. I pick myself up, take two steps, and fall again, this time tangling my compass in the small branches of a young tree. Puzzle pauses briefly at the sound of my oomph and oomph again, but when it's time to move deeper into the sector and sweep the other way, she races ahead without concern.
On the second sweep, I see the sharp, characteristic pop of her head and a little push in her gait, as though an elf has kicked her in the backside. She has something, I think. We continue the sweep, but on the reverse pass, when she pops her head again parallel to the first, I'm sure she's got the scent. I let her have her head. Puzzle takes off northward at full speed, and I stump along behind her, tripping once but staying upright as I watch the flick of her tail through the brush, then falling flat again in a clump of brambles just as she bounds into a stand of trees. As I pull myself up a fourth time, the two field assistants running with me exchange looks.