Scent of the Missing

by Susannah

  If Puzzle is going to have a problem with storms, it isn't this morning. The wind rises, and the cross-draft in my old house makes the glass in the windows rattle with each change of pressure and thunderclap. Jack and Sophie have raised their heads and grumbled a little before settling back down. Storms hassle their dream cycles. I roll to my side and let Sprits tuck himself in the V at the back of my knees. He settles there, and I lean toward Puzzle's warm, sleepy presence. I have always loved cuddling a dog during bad weather, and she's a good size now for a full-body hug. I press my cheek to her forehead and drape my arm across her middle. Every crash and bang of thunder makes Sprits squeak a little, but Puzzle refuses to rouse. What a steady girl, I think. She rolls belly-up and sighs, and the storm's bright crashes have resolved to the occasional flicker and boom.

  A free-floating statistic you hear in canine SAR states that 80 percent of would-be search dogs wash out. They can't do the work or won't do the work or too many things stress them to overload and they shut down. Aptitude testing for puppies gives an initial idea of a puppy's overall assurance, but there are no guarantees which way the maturing dog will go. I heard the statistic long before I got Puzzle, and I went into our partnership knowing there was more than just can-she-smell-it-and-tell-me involved: a search dog's drive and confidence are as important as good gifts of scent and smarts.

  I watched her go into and out of the first puppy "fear stage," when she suddenly was averse to wheeled things and to toddlers, a condition that faded with desensitization as weeks passed. Now Puzzle's due for another one. A second fear stage is common between six and fourteen months. So far she hasn't reacted strongly to anything, but knowing the speed of her changes, I try to calmly show her the whole range of bizarre stimuli that for a search dog is common ground. I hope this can be a bonding opportunity: a here is this thing we respect but don't need to fear—trust me.

  This morning, young firefighters are learning how to drive the big trucks. Two fire engines round a corner and flash past us at the fire academy. Sitting with me in the grass five feet from the curb, Puzzle could be nervous. That's a lot of truck and very close. There's much for a dog to be afraid of as the engines tilt and blaze through their paces—turning corners, braking suddenly, navigating through tight lanes, backing up. But Puzzle doesn't seem to be afraid at all, regarding the fire engine maneuvers with calm, unmoving benevolence. When the trucks stop and the firefighters jump out, she occasionally wags her tail as she scents one who is an old friend.

  Puzzle has grown up with big noise, living in a house that sits next to ongoing construction. If houses aren't being torn down to the left or the right of us, the city is tearing up the streets, repairing aged infrastructure. The daily noise and dust have made me cranky, but—credit where it's due—the cement mixers, dump trucks, and backhoes may have accustomed Puzzle to big vehicles and the noise they're capable of making. I have seen her belly-up sleeping in the backyard grass while jackhammers pound asphalt twenty feet away.

  For all she accepts storms and fire trucks with equanimity, this is not to say Puzzle is fearless. She is of two minds about the firefighters themselves. From puppyhood, she has schmoozed the men and women of local fire departments for petting when they are in civilian clothes. (We joke that she simpers, "They're big and strong and lightly smoked!") But a recent experience with a firefighter in turnout gear has dampened her enthusiasm a little.

  The firefighter is Max, a team colleague and a thirty-one-year firefighter, the subject of Puzzle's deep devotion. On a bright, windless training day, out of sight from the dogs of the team, he puts on full turnout gear and oxygen system. It's an important part of their training. The youngest dogs of the team have never seen (or heard) a firefighter in full gear up close, and today is the day we hope they will make the association that the lumbering yellow creature with the shiny visor, indecipherable expression, and raucous breathing is a human underneath. Many dogs dislike their first experiences. Puzzle has seen quite a few firefighters in full gear from a distance, and in the engine bay she has sniffed curiously at long rows of pants and boots dropped in a neat, vertical, waist-open stack for quick gear-on—but this will be her first up-close experience with a firefighter in full gear.

  Max rounds a corner and approaches the group of young dogs, all of whom shy, most of whom bark. His own search dog, Mercy, backs and barks in alarm for a few seconds until she connects the changed form with the scent of her handler. Two others are pointedly wary until Max gets on one knee and speaks to them. Whether his scent or posture tell them this guy's okay, they come forward with hesitance, then greater confidence.

  Puzzle, however, is having nothing of him. She went skittish the moment she saw Max, and as he stands near her, speaking to her in a voice distorted by the mask and rasp of the SCBA, calling her by name, she cowers and pulls away, trembling. When he extends a hand down to offer a treat to her, she huddles behind me and submissively pees—something I have never seen her do before or since. In time, she takes a tentative sniff of his gloved hand and offers a tentative wag, but there seems to be nothing about this experience that comforts her.

  Max wisely moves away—no sense in making the first experience a permanent problem. Puzzle watches him go, calming as he turns his masked face away from her and heads back the direction that he came from. I cannot make out if she failed to recognize the scent or sound of Max in the gear, or if she knew it was him and was terrified by his great change. I don't have to wonder long. When Max returns in his civilian clothes, Puzzle shies from him for the first time in her life. She presses to me for protection and looks briefly up at him with a betrayed expression on her face. She clearly knows what's what: the funky, stomping guy with the shiny face and distorted voice was Max. Her Max! It is not difficult to see the friction of her cognitive dissonance: Max is a friend. Why would he scare me like that?

  It is a grudge she holds for months. Though every interaction with Max warms slightly, we all notice her subsequent hesitance in approaching him, as though she thinks in a flash he might change into the monster that first offered a treat, then scared and shamed her into peeing herself.

  "Puzzle," Max says six weeks later, "are you ever going to forgive me?"

  One thing's certain, Puzzle needs more turnout gear experience. I take her through the engine bays every training session, allowing her to walk the room's periphery where all the gear hangs, and after a moment of wariness, she thoughtfully sniffs the trousers, boots, coats, and gloves as we pass. "Own this," I say to her. "And this ... and this." "Own," in our language, means check this out, get comfortable with it.

  We acquire an old turnout coat and pair of trousers, and I bring them home, first throwing them haphazardly on the porch for all the dogs to sniff. Sprits'l to the rescue: from the first, he stomps over the gear fearlessly, his small, curious nose working it over, punctuating the inspection with an occasional snitz. The other Pomeranians follow, and a friend remarks that this process looks a little like a science-fiction movie, where fuzzy, fox-faced space parasites somehow swallow a firefighter whole without making a mark on the gear left behind.

  Days later, I move both coat and trousers to an outdoor chaise longue, draping them over the frame as though it were a human lying there. Again the outfit looks like the person inside has been sucked right out of it by tidy aliens. Nevertheless, I hide treats in the thick yellow folds. Puzzle is somewhat curious about the change of position, only mildly interested until Sprits'l jumps on the chair and bounces across the coat and pants to find the hidden treats; then suddenly competitive Puzzle wants in on the action.

  For the next week, I putter around the yard wearing that turnout gear and yellow ladybug galoshes. This firefighter rig once belonged to a large man—the pants are seven inches too long and the jacket could hold three of me—and I wonder what that long-retired fellow might make of me toddling around the rose garden in his bright yellow pants and coat while holding a pair of clippers and a watering can. The ensemble has a make
shift crazy-lady air. Once, when I carry a bag of clippings to the compost heap at the side of the house, two neighbors laugh aloud before shifting to the other side of the street to avoid me. The next time I cross their path, they stare. They seem disappointed I don't have my little outfit on.

  In time, my gardening, lounging, and taking tea in the turnout gear have the desired effect. Puzzle comes to accept it calmly during training exercises, particularly when firefighters go about their business uninterested in her. I watch her watch the rookies suit up. She tilts her head and brings her ears to bear now and again when a person she recognizes slides into the heavy coat and trousers, looking speculative when their heads disappear beneath a helmet with a shield and mask. When it's someone she's fond of, I see the characteristic Golden furrow of the brow, an almost maternal look of concern, like Oh, I wish you wouldn't do that. On several training sessions, we hide volunteers in a turnout coat and pants, face-down in a tumble of wood, and—good news—Puzzle shows no qualms about finding them in it.

  But her memory of Max in the suit remains fresh. Long months after he approached her for the first time fully suited in firefighter gear, he hides for her one day in the engine bay, wedging himself in the space behind a rack of the heavy yellow coats and trousers, helmets, masks, and boots. Puzzle has happily found other victims similarly hidden, but this time she runs into the room, clearly orients the scent in one corner of the bay, and screeches to a stop about six feet away from where Max is hidden. From that comfortable distance, she alerts to me, she alerts to the head trainer, and just to make sure we get it, she alerts to us both again. I encourage her to move closer to Max, but there is no way this time she's going to breach the space between them. Fool me once ..., she seems to say, staring hard at the spot where Max crouches behind a row of turnout coats. She is sure and she is stubborn. She knows it's Max hiding back there, and—nothing doing—she knows what he gets up to when he gets a little access to that gear.

  I make a note to myself: hide Max in turnout clothes more often. And I add a second note: maybe invite him to suit up and come over to pull a few weeds.

  Thunderstorms, fire engines, jackhammers—not a problem. Toddlers and turnout gear, getting there. Puzzle moves forward, but I too have issues that I need to get past. Puzzle's a year into her training and doing well. She has more than two hundred successful scenario searches behind her. Urban streets and buildings, wrecked cars and mangled aircraft, debris fields, dense wilderness. Now, because half or more of the team's searches take place at night, we train accordingly.

  I'm not at all afraid of the dark, but some night spaces make me a little uneasy even by flashlight. This is particularly true of building searches. It's my own clumsiness at issue: I don't want to fall over things I can barely see. I've had a few missteps with and without my dog, falling once face-first onto an oxygen tank. Puzzle, however, is comfortable in dim light, padding through dim warehouse and furniture-tumbled apartment spaces, climbing stairs with easy confidence.

  Wilderness night work is her particular favorite. The Golden grows more joyful as the light fades, as though the diminished view intensifies all the things available to her other senses. Not that her night vision is necessarily bad: though information on canine sight is sometimes contradictory, contemporary research suggests that dogs have much better night vision than we do—more rods than cones, an assist to night hunting, while our cone-rich eyes give us better color vision. Puzzle and the other dogs seem to bear this out, bounding forward at the "Find!" command with the same ease they demonstrate by day.

  While the dogs take darkness in stride, volunteer victims are relieved when the search canines work quickly at night. It can be an interesting hour, hidden somewhere in deep brush without a flashlight, waiting for a series of dogs to suss you out in the brambles, even as the nocturnal wildlife comes forward to make sense of you in the stillness. Our volunteers have come back a few times with their eyes wide and neck hair prickling. They've brought back stories of creeping sounds and snapping sounds and unblinking eyes that flicked once or twice in the moonlight.

  It isn't hard to feel lost out there, and it's not difficult to be joyful when the dogs make the find. I've hidden in the brush for every dog on the team except my own, peeking through vines to watch them sweep their sectors, imagining how a stranger would see them—the light dogs ghosting along in the moonlight, the dark dogs unreadable, their easy trot almost wolflike in the dimness. The volunteers know what's coming—from the dogs, anyway—but I think of those who are genuinely lost and realize again the importance of people-friendly dogs out doing this work. I'm glad of my light-coated girl with the whole body wag and the smiling puppy-soft face.

  But she scares me sometimes, does Miss Puzzle Boldly-Go, who seems to trot from light into darkness without pause. What I've learned across this year with her is that I can face my own fears at this work, light or dark, and push through them, but I am much more anxious about Puzzle. It's the parent's conundrum that I have sidestepped in my childlessness: that conflict between love, protection, and a young one's developing independence. It lands on me in full force now.

  In familiar territory, we work primarily off-lead, and though Puzzle is well past her flight impulse, and her willingness to check in with me doesn't vary from day to night, I find myself stiffening before I take off her lead and give her the "Find!" command. This is particularly true in wilderness or debris fields where I have little ability to be a second set of eyes for her, to see what might be a threat from yards away. Coyotes. Stray dogs. Vagrants with a grudge. Anything could be out there, and sometimes is. Puzzle wears a set of blinking lights on her collar that helps me plot her movements when I cannot hear them. That helps. But in the dark, I seem to quiver with protective antennae. It's hard not to hold her back.

  A trainer I know says that some of those 80 percent dogs wash out because of their handlers, and now, in the latter stages of our training together, I'm first aware that I could be the weak link between us. This is not a job for the merely well-intentioned. I have the training, the head skills, and the physical and emotional stamina for this, but Puzzle provokes my vulnerabilities.

  One night at the fire academy, our trainer hides a victim on a high A-frame built to simulate a roof for training firefighters. The victim clings by his hands to the roof's peak, his body dangling out of sight down the other side. Puzzle and I are working a sector that includes mangled cars and railway tankers, and on this clear, cool night, the victim's scent is sweet and strong for her. After a couple of sweeps through the area, my dog rejects the tankers and the cars and dashes for the A-frame, lifting her head once at the bottom of it and then racing up the incline to the top, wagging and alerting on the victim draped down the other side, licking his hands. "Woop!" she says, the joy of the find making a little pop like a consonant at the end of her croon.

  At the base of the A-frame, I'm about to climb to meet her when she dashes down the incline to get me and lead me back. "Good girl," I praise, and she bolts up the roofline again, alerts again, then scrambles down the roof to meet trundle-bug me only halfway up. She's made a good find and a great alert, and though I'm pleased at her insistence, she's terribly excited, scrambling from the victim back to me several times as I climb. Every dash down the roof seems closer to the edge of it in the dark—a ten-foot drop at its greatest height, a drop onto cement and training equipment she seems oblivious to. Or perhaps she can see that edge clearly, has it all under control.

  "Puzzle," I call to her at the top of the roofline. I hear my voice quavering. "Good girl. Good girl. But 'Stay.'"

  She does—oh, beautiful stay—balancing there with the victim at the top of the peak, wiggling her great joy of the find, tongue lolling. In the darkness, she is all light coat and dark eyes and ha-ha-ha exhalation.

  "Hi," I huff to the volunteer victim at the top.

  "Hi," he says back.

  "Ten bucks says she makes it down from the roof before we do."

  "Not gonn
a take that bet," he replies. I see him grin. With one hand hanging on and the other free, he gives her a scritch on the cheek before we begin our careful slide down the incline to the ground. On the release word, Puzzle, with her lower center of gravity, skitters easily down the slope. She stands on the asphalt and smiles up at my slower progress, her tail waving idly.

  As I make my way down, I decide to teach Puzzle a "Creep" command, a word for "go slow beside me" in cases like these. I can imagine other scenarios where such a command might be useful—crawling under barbed-wire fences, making our way through damaged houses—anywhere slow progress might be the safest course. Woo, she says to me cheerfully when I arrive, a little encouragement for the human from the dog.

  Night work is good for both of us. I have lessons of confidence to learn in this uneasy space between Puzzle's puppy foolishness and adulthood. Across the coming months, we train on, and I begin to understand how she makes sense of her surroundings at night. She's not heedless. With her nose in motion, her paws out-stretched, her gaze extended, and her ears brought forward to bear, Puzzle is capable of making good choices. But I watch her light form flash over debris in the darkness, and because I love her as well as respect her gifts, I hold my breath when she slips out of sight. It's a hard-won peace, this letting the dog do her job outside the scope of my protection.

  17. SNAKE-PROOFING

  I AM UPSTAIRS, tapping away at my journal with the stereo on, and Puzzle has been whining at the puppy gate for several minutes. She's come in from outside, and now she wants to come up.

  "Wait, Puz," I call, using our words. Trainer Susan would be proud. "Let me finish this, and I'll come down and let you in."