by Susannah
She whines again. Nothing doing on the wait. I hear her somehow pop the latch and press through the puppy gate, bounding up the steps to find me. She pushes her way between the hassock and my chair to sit nearby. Without looking away from the computer, I reach my hand to her face and feel her snuffling there.
Okay, I shouldn't be pleased. She didn't wait. (Trainer Susan would not be proud.) But this is a cozy, friendly connection, and for the division of a minute, I am first bemused by a dog who has figured out how to open the puppy gate and grateful also for the adolescent Golden who has finally begun to seek me out for companionship. We've had a number of little breakthroughs recently. Partners at last.
Stroking her idly while I reread today's journal entry, I'm only half paying attention to my dog. It takes a moment to realize that her face feels misshapen, and I recognize that the snuffling I heard against my hand didn't stop when she pulled away from it. I look down to Puzzle, and a Puzzle in trouble looks up at me, the left side of her head swollen twice its size, her eyes terrified. She is struggling to breathe. Saliva she cannot seem to swallow runs from the sides of her mouth, soaking the fur of her chest.
I drop down beside her, turning her face in my hands. This looks like anaphylaxis, an allergic reaction to something she'd eaten, gotten into, or the result of a bite or a wound. Her head seems to be swelling more even as I touch it, and when I find two small puncture marks just below the edge of her mouth in the soft flesh that joins face to throat, I know this is an emergency issue. Somehow I lift her up, get her down the stairs, and into the car. A neighbor agrees to drive while I hold Puzzle upright. She is gasping now, the inside of her mouth tinged blue.
The emergency vet is just a few miles away, but this Friday night the direct route is choked with restaurant and club traffic. Puzzle is propped in my arms, trembling as I lift her chin with my fingertips and hold up her head, the only position that seems to relieve her labored breathing. My friend drives carefully. We try not to further distress the dog, so we speak in low voices about whether we tough out the traffic or try longer, alternate routes. I wonder if Puzzle feels my racing heart against her shoulder. It takes only minutes but seems forever to get to the vet.
The receptionist at the emergency clinic takes one look at her and triages us into an examining room quickly, where the on-duty vet examines Puzzle at once, noting the double puncture wound. Rodent, possibly, but snake far more likely by the look of the injury, and this is the season for them. I think of my house's proximity to water and of the undisturbed woodpile in the backyard, both attractive resources for a snake even in a residential area. Still, it's hard to believe. We're out working in all kinds of wilderness, and she gets a snakebite at home?
"These bites are very painful," the vet says. He disinfects the area, gives Puzzle a shot of Benadryl and another of antibiotic, and starts an IV. She doesn't growl or resist, tilting her chin up to rest on my shoulder as I lean down to her. And then I hold her and we all watch, waiting for the swelling to come down and her breathing to ease. Long minutes of no change at all. She struggles to get comfortable. The random scrabble of her feet against the table is so helpless a sound I fight tears.
After a time, she stops drooling, and a little while after that she swallows. When Puzzle opens her mouth to pant, I no longer hear a labored rasp, and I can see the flush of pink tongue. "Things are looking up," the vet says, and he leaves us to attend the other emergencies that have crashed through the door. Across the next hour, we hear the click of nails on the lobby tile, bright thank-yous in the corridor, and later, a young man weeping. I stand in the examining room with my head bowed to Puzzle. I too have lost loved animals at this clinic, even in this room. But not this time.
We drive home more slowly than we'd left it. Whether sedated from the Benadryl or relieved that she can breathe easily, Puzzle no longer trembles in my arms, but lies awake and occasionally gulping. I can feel her pulse beneath my fingers, the motion of her swallow against my arm.
She is strong enough to walk, but we carry her gently into the house and put her across my bed, where she lies without protest. The little dogs yap and chitter, and lifted to the bed, they give her the obligatory vet trip sniff-over. And then they settle, all of them, the way she had once settled near Scuppy. Jack, shy and wiggly, gives Puzzle's face an experimental lick. She seems unaware of all of them, her eyes following me as I draw the curtains and change into my pajamas. When I leave for a glass of water, she immediately tries to jump to the floor.
Puzzle is needy—a condition I have never seen in her. I prop us both up on pillows and curl beside her on the bed, feeling the press of her spine against my chest. In time, she sighs, a relaxed heave and an exhale that suggests all is better, if not well. She sleeps easily, but I do not, realizing how serious this could have been had she not come to me. And I wonder what went through her dog mind as she bumped free the puppy gate separating us and bounded up the stairs to put her face into my palm.
I can easily imagine Puzzle putting her nose to something rustling in the woodpile. Was the snake a resident or a transitional character? How long after she'd been bitten did she come to me? I think of the Poms, equally curious and one-fifth of Puzzle's body weight. Tonight's situation, already bad enough, could have been much worse.
The next day, wearing boots and leather gloves, friends and I disassemble the woodpile with much noise and crashing, and we move it behind a gated fence inaccessible to the dogs. And I make a plan to disturb that woodpile daily. Come winter, we will burn it all up.
Puzzle is eighteen months old and has not yet been "snake-proofed," in the traditional sense. Snake-proofing is a common procedure for field and search dogs, involving a shock collar and thoughtful, controlled access to a living snake, which is not harmed. From a considered distance, the dog is allowed to get the scent of the snake and see the nature of its motion, and at the point the dog exhibits any interest, a mild shock is applied via the collar—ideally teaching that the snake has a painful potential and is to be avoided at all costs. Some dogs get the point with little provocation from the collar. Even the tiniest shock elicits a start and a yike, and a second view of a snake causes a backpedaling motion worthy of Wile E. Coyote. One of our handlers laughs that his dog, generally calm and relatively fearless in the search environment, leaps straight up at the sight of a snake in the brush, landing in his arms with Scooby-Doo's "ruh-roh!" expression on her face. Other dogs require greater deterrence. Belle, a yellow Lab with a high pain threshold who has grown up around snakes, would not be put off no matter how high the setting on the collar, a shock she did not even seem to feel.
I wonder how Puzzle will respond at her own snake-proofing session. She's a dog of great curiosity, but also a dog of deep grudges against things that have frightened her. This could go either way.
Puzzle's regular vet examines her face the next day. He is an upbeat, confident man with an easy laugh that fills the room, and no matter how many times Puzzle goes to the vet for one injection or another, she adores him, tolerating any number of pokes and prods and sharp sticks to be with him. Now she stands quietly as he examines her, trembling a little with the intensity of our joint scrutiny. Dr. Yzaguirre confirms the snakebite—probably copperhead, probably juvenile. The swelling has diminished this morning, and the neat double-slash of the bite is clearly visible. He shakes his head a little, then gives Puzzle a stroke and a playful tug of her ear. A lot of venom in these young snakes; a little lower on the jaw, and this could have been very bad. I mention Puzzle's future snake-proofing session, and the vet laughs a little. He would be surprised, he says, if she needs it.
Puzzle seems to agree. Across the following weeks, she watches our regular disturbance of the woodpile, raising up on her hind legs to peer over the fence at what we are doing, and though she has always loved stealing kindling, she has little interest in joining us.
We go to formal snake-proofing as soon as possible. I'm not sure what to expect as Fleta fits the shock coll
ar around Puzzle's neck in the parking lot of a wildlife rehabilitation facility near one of our local parks. A wildlife handler brings out a large, lidded plastic tub carrying a de-venomed diamondback rattlesnake. The lid has holes in the top of it, and we begin the training procedure by simply allowing Puzzle to approach the tub in the way of any curious dog. As she approaches and her nose begins to work the scent of it, Puzzle has already stiffened and become wary. Her path forward has altered to a cautious half-circle. I watch her nostrils work, and though she is receiving small, increasing shocks, she doesn't seem to notice them. At the most downwind point to the tub, Puzzle veers abruptly away.
Fleta and I deliberate. Initially, Puzzle was a little too curious about the tub, but the moment of strongest scent and strongest shock seemed quite clear to her. She had no interest in approaching the tub again. The snake handler suggests that we move to the next stage, allowing Puzzle to both see and scent the snake in order to gauge her true response. This takes little time. The handler places the snake on the ground, where it begins its graceful side-slither to the north, and Puzzle backs up to the fullest extent of her lead, circling wide away from it, every muscle stiff with alarm. Though she had received the associated shock, she did not react to it—not even a flinch—as though every part of her awareness was focused on the snake.
The snake pauses a moment in its own meander, splendidly poised, then slopes into motion again. Puzzle responds with another half-arc away from him.
Good choice, I think, and because I'm too often from the if-a-little-is-good-more-is-better school, I ask if we should double-check Puzzle's aversion with another exposure to the snake, another shock.
Fleta shakes her head, grinning a little, watching my dog counter-curve away from the snake on tiptoe, her fur on end and tail rigid. "No shock on that last one," she says. Puzzle's expression is so tense she appears walleyed. "But I think we can safely say this is one dog that's snake-proofed. And then some."
18. A HANDLER'S GUIDE TO RISK MANAGEMENT
THE ELECTRIC FENCE isn't live, authorities tell us, just minutes before Buster brushes against it at the edge of our sector, catapults back, and yelps from the shock. Snow has been falling heavily for the past hour or more, and the fence has become almost impossible to see in the first place, especially where it threads through overgrowth and seems to disappear. The farm we search on this midwinter day is decrepit; the three houses sitting on the land haven't been lived in for a long while, but the property is in use. The fence is certainly live—perhaps to discourage predators or trespassers, or to keep the livestock out of what once would have been the farmhouse yard.
Buster shakes off his shock and, after a word of encouragement from Johnny, continues working his sector, stepping deliberately over a woundless dead rabbit, so newly dead that when I pull off my glove and hover my hand over its fur, I feel the rabbit's residual warmth. Snow has fallen thickly in past minutes, and now the dead rabbit appears to be made of lace, her dull eye frosted over. Soon she will disappear entirely, as the ground has quickly disappeared beneath our feet.
Our search here, two states away from home, is just as ambiguous. There could be the remains of one teenager on this land, or two, or none. The authorities are guessing, pursuing a lead from a lead from a lead that has led them in unexpected directions on a case almost a year old. The area is remote. Where once this farm might have been on the far side of the small town it adjoins, hard decades have caused the town to recede and the outlying farms to fall to ruin or give over to other forms of enterprise.
The three houses here reflect generations across a previous century. Unbound by city code or ordinance restrictions, they are placed in a haphazard clutch on the land, as though to take advantage of utilities connected to each house on the property before. The oldest of them—a modest structure with a wide front porch—was probably built in the early 1900s, the smallest of the three looks like a 1950s ranch with its red brick and wide windows, and the last of the group, closest to the road, appears to be the newest of the homes, built perhaps forty years ago at the height of a neo-Mediterranean era. It is a light brick house with arched windows and iron burglar bars, black scrollwork on the porch railing, and a rusty iron Don Quixote lying face-down in the dirt. This would be a quiet, uninterrupted place to hide someone—living or dead—which is the possibility now. I'm working a sector beside Johnny and Buster that involves the Mediterranean house and a long, narrow stretch of land behind it that includes pasture, outbuildings, a burn pit, and a row of stables leaning over to the point of collapse.
Though the snow gives the scene an air of gentle benediction, we are all tense here. We came to this search after a two-day briefing that warned about possible dangers in the area. The calling agency has been frank: in the places we are to search, there are likely hazards. There may be meat-baited, cyanide-laced coyote traps, the so-called M-44s that can look deceptively like pieces of old pipe or sprinkler heads. These could be an obvious danger to our dogs and even to us. Before we deployed, we studied pictures of the devices and a whole series of warning signs required to be posted on property where the traps are embedded—and then we were told that plenty of ranches have the traps but not the signs, worn away by weather or never posted in the first place. Several of our handlers shook their heads at the briefing, unwilling to risk this danger to their dogs. The calling agency answered with a promise to have the search areas swept first by grid walkers trained to identify and dismantle the devices.
The coyote traps are not the only possible problem. There are meth labs deeply hidden in some pockets of this terrain, protected by homemade explosives on tripwires. Some of the labs may be abandoned, but the explosives could remain. Day two of our briefing included pictures and samples of the devices and tripwires, often more difficult to see than the coyote traps. There seemed to be a thousand ways to blow up unwelcome strangers, and that would be us. Any search is better with a good prebrief, but despite the promise of trained ground sweepers clearing the way ahead of our work, we ended the briefing session pensive. We made the long trip to the search area subdued.
Today, the farm where we search has been swept and theoretically cleared of all dangers, including the electric fence, supposedly off, that shocked Buster. This does not inspire confidence. After apologies and assurances, we work forward, hoping the fence is the only surprise we'll get in the field. Johnny and Buster move carefully ahead while I sweep sideways back and forth beside them, looking beyond them both to anything that appears to be a threat. Lovely as it is, the snowfall doesn't help matters much as it obscures the ground before us. I see livestock moving easily a distance away—perhaps this suggests the area is safe.
There is a small herd of pygmy goats on this land, and a few donkeys. We've been warned that the donkeys are probably not dog-friendly. It's hard to know what to make of their stares as they approach the fence that cuts our sector in half. The fence is live, and they seem to know it. They are cautious not to touch the posts and strands, but they crane their heads carefully over the side. They gaze at us steadily with an air of expectation, their fuzzy faces sugared with snow, and one occasionally extends his jaw forward and brays. The hard, metallic screech of the animal echoes less now than it did an hour ago, softened by the snow's accumulation. When we approach the fence as part of our search sweep, two donkeys bring their ears forward and one lays his ears back. I don't know much about donkeys, but my money bets the one with the big brown spot on his forehead and the laid-back ears is the dog hater of the group. The others just seem social. One pretty chocolate-colored creature extends quivering lips toward the pocket of my jacket as I pass, which suggests someone else has been feeding her treats from pockets. Every time she does it, the tender expression in her eyes looks like she just wants to give me a little taste.
The goats are even more aggressive. Not one of them is taller than my knees, but what they lack in height, they make up for in confidence. They are not shy, rushing forward as though we are the bearers
of food or god-sent relief from goat boredom. Two of the smallest, twin silver and black Agouti doelings, seem to have something of a crush on Buster. As we leave one part of our sector and enter the next where the goats wander, these two rush forward to sniff at his haunches. There's a funny, complicit little tremble between them that shudders snow off their coats. They begin to follow him as he works. Buster's a farm dog and used to barnyard animals, but he's not sure what to make of his growing entourage when the rest of the herd follows these two from a respectful distance. When he stops, they stop. When he turns, they pivot also, plodding his new direction, their small heads bobbing.
"Shoo—go on now," says Johnny, clapping his hands and waving. The herd skitters slightly sideways a few steps, but their focus is on the two females who are love-locked behind Buster and who have ignored Johnny entirely.
I know less about goat dynamics than I do about donkeys, but it's interesting to watch the rest of the goats defer to these two small females, who seem to be the power players here. Who are they to the herd? What about them makes them leaders? Charisma aside, they don't make this sector easy to search, and Johnny and I confer a moment. As Buster and Johnny move forward, I begin stomping and waving every few feet, singing off-key to distract the goats enough to give the dog some room to work. Some of the herd isn't sure what to make of me and scatter a little farther. Buster's two smoke and silver girls shoot me cynical looks from the slit pupils of their golden eyes, and then they ignore me too.
The herd follows us to the white brick house with the burglar bars, but they pause at the edge of what would formerly have been a yard. They come no farther. We step onto a bare cement porch that has a fragment of a woman's shirt lying a few feet away from the door. It was once part of a western shirt, red yoke and sleeves, white from the yoke to the waist. One pearl and metal snap remains. It looks too clean to have been here long. Buster is uninterested in it. I note the scrap of fabric but don't touch it, writing down its description, and we enter the house, which smells of moldy shag carpet and cat pee.