Scent of the Missing

by Susannah

  Someone lived here and someone left here with little thought to resale. There are empty, yellowed fast-food sacks on an abandoned dinette table, overturned cereal boxes speckled with rat excrement, and old, old food in the refrigerator. Dirty dishes in the sink, the remains of several meals dried and crusted over. The bathroom has so strong a smell that Johnny and I recoil, breathing through our mouths as we walk down the hallway. Though his nose is more sensitive than ours, the heavy air doesn't dissuade the dog. Buster lifts his nose thoughtfully in the fug—a whole host of rich, human smells—but he turns away, indicating nothing suggests a violent human crime here.

  I stand at the edge of what would have been a living room and watch him work, relieved to think that the dog found no death and no evidence of recent life in this space, that perhaps this house didn't hold missing teenagers for the last days of their lives.

  The dog pads out of the house and we mark it as cleared, making our reverse way back through the waiting goats, who caper a little with excitement as we separate the herd and cause them to regroup and hustle to follow us. Buster's two little goat friends join him, breaking into a trot as he moves out of the pasture as quickly as possible. We slip through the gate, frustrating their follow, and we leave the goats behind. They press against the fence line, their expressions wistful. The Lab shoots us a disgusted look and something of a dog shrug, then sets back to work.

  We enter a long field, where a flock of peacocks joins us in the farthest part of the sector. They follow in a stately progression beside us, replacing the goats that have been left behind. The birds are unafraid of us, unworried about Buster. We search and they move quietly in trail, picking their way with great care, without fluster or gibber. The vivid males and speckled, elegant females are remotely beautiful against the falling snow, creating the surreal impression of a search sector embroidered in brightly colored thread.

  "Is it just me," says Johnny, ever understated, "or does this search just get more weird?"

  Buster seems relieved to be rid of the goats and unworried by the peacocks. He works quickly, crossing the area in four easy sweeps and rejecting it of any interest. We leave the birds to their field and the goats to their pasture and enter the leaning, shabby outbuilding that lacks a door. The first room is full of feed bags and smells of dust, grain, and bird droppings, but the second room is curiously empty apart from a cushioned rocking chair sitting in the center of the floor. Buster moves to the chair, circles it thoughtfully, and as he is sweeping the little room, suddenly yelps softly and backs away in haste, winking his eyes and snorting. We smell nothing, but Buster certainly does. Not a response to human scent, it's as though something burns.

  Johnny looks to his dog that's now pawing at his nose, and we move away from the building as Buster's eyes begin to water and he begins to breathe heavily.

  "What the hell?" says Johnny, bending down to examine Buster's face. He has never seen his dog react so. I circle the outbuilding and peer into the room that gave him the problem, and I can see nothing but the battered chair and dusty floor. Our tracks in. Buster's circling paw prints. Our tracks out.

  I make a note of Buster's curious response, call it in on the radio, and rejoin Johnny. "How's he doing?" I ask.

  "He's okay."

  "Not a good day at the office for Buster."

  "No," says Johnny, still bending down with a careful eye to his dog.

  Buster recovers in moments, but he's eager to move away from that outbuilding, and he's quick to go back to work. The dog scrambles across the field, lifting his nose in the direction of a row of adults watching from an adjoining property, yards and yards away. Three are standing. Two sit in lawn chairs and gaze in our direction over the backs of several abandoned cars. They are swaddled in parkas and hats; some of them cradle a Thermos. I flick a nod of acknowledgment, but they do not respond.

  We finish the sector and head back to Incident Command, where we are introduced to two men and a woman who are, we are told, anthropologists and archaeologists here to potentially protect any find of human remains that may be irrelevant to our search and have historic or tribal significance. One of the young men had seen Buster's contact with the fence and heard about his experience in the outbuilding over the radio, and he bends over the dog now, talking to him kindly and rubbing his ears. The three have come prepared to watch and to wait.

  Several local officers walk across the snow in the field near the oldest house, probing it gently with a pike designed to penetrate dirt and allow buried scent to rise. There's a chance that this current search sweeps over old, old graves. The anthropologists watch, their eyes on the officers but their conversation directed to us. The dogs fascinate them, they say; they have never seen this kind of work before. While I write up the sector report and sketch a map to attach to it, Johnny and others talk with them about the use of dogs for the recovery of human remains from ancient sites. One of the anthropologists jokes that what they really need are "dig dogs," trained to keep archaeologists and anthropologists from picking at the dirt too hastily. A good dog alert could make all the difference. Sometimes, he says, a single strike of pick and mallet can bring up things you weren't quite ready to see.

  There is nothing visibly amiss in the oldest of the houses, but a police canine and Saber have shown strong interest in a bedroom windowsill and upward along a wall beside it. They have also shown interest in a dark spot on the floor. On a blind search after the others had emerged from the house, Belle, working in the basement, went "straight up the wall," according to her handler, stretching toward the same floor area from below. Human scent here, the dogs separately suggest, though the house is remarkably neat and still bears the faint scent of cleanser. Blood spatter from an attack, semen, or old blood from a commonplace injury? Learning that two of our dogs confirmed the police canine, the officers overseeing the search stand together in the snow with their hands deep in the pockets of their black leather jackets and their shoulders hunched forward against the cold. Though the search has re-covered no bodies here, the floor, wall, and windowsill of the oldest house merit forensic examination, and we are far from any place with those resources. Several officers continue to confer while one goes to release the anthropologists and another tells us they have nowhere left for the dogs to search.

  Our work is done, and after the calling agency releases us, we begin to pack our equipment and prepare the dogs for travel. They are tired and withdrawn, ready to go off-duty and sleep in the protective warmth of their cars and their crates. We're ready too. This kind of work needs to be done, and the team exists to do it, but the possibility of poison and explosives on this search made the already difficult work even harder. None of us knows what to make of Buster's response in that outbuilding. Nothing about it looked good.

  Thick snow still falls, and we push through it shin-deep, some of the dogs wading through drifts that brush against their bellies. Despite protective footwear and heavy socks, many of us can no longer feel our feet. The dogs' paws are icy between the pads. Icicle beads have formed like tribal necklaces around the ruffs of the ones with long coats.

  "God," says Cindi, shaking off the search and its dangerous possibilities, "I'm glad that's over." I breathe deeply and rub my eyes, feeling a little winded afterward, suddenly aware of how often I'd held my breath through that sector, how hard I'd stared forward into the white of the snow.

  As we load the vehicles and Buster, Belle, Saber, and Hunter are defrosted and made safe for transport, I look across the fields where we searched, now completely blanketed with snowfall. The human audience is packing up, retracting lawn chairs, their bright Thermoses tucked beneath their arms. The peacocks have taken to branches of low trees, to the dividing fence that separates them from the goats. They huddle beside one another silently, their graceful heads bowed and the trailing plumage of the males counterbalancing their forward weight. The little goats have carved a trail for themselves to the leaning shed. One of the females has jumped onto an overturned t
rough. She gazes toward the truck Buster leapt into, but the rest of the goats don't seem to notice our departure. They saunter idly along the trail to the shed and back again, the untouched snow that borders their route so deep that from where I stand the goats appear to be swimming, only their dark, bobbing heads visible above the white.

  I am home very late from the search. It feels strange, light, and heedless to walk easily through my backyard without scanning for cyanide traps. The dogs have been long asleep when I come in, and they rouse a little fustily, the Poms briefly deliberating whether they should riot when the door opens and then, seeing that it's me, deciding not to. They rise, stretch, and wobble forward in greeting while Puzzle, who cocked an eye in my direction when I came in the door, remains belly-up on the back of the couch.

  Too tired to sleep, I sit beside her, stroking the fine line from her throat along the jaw to her soft ear. She has always seemed a sturdy dog, but tonight I think of tripwires and coyote traps, and I'm aware of her fragility. Had this search been mine to choose as a handler, would I have made the choice to work her, despite the known risks and failed assurances? I don't know. But this is no reprieve. The decision could come up again, and soon. Puzzle is only weeks from her certification tests.

  "Here's a handler's guide to risk management: don't live vicariously through your dog," an experienced handler from another team once said to me, "and for God's sake, don't get attached." The best handling, he said, is done from a distance. He had dogs at home that he loved, but his search dog was not one of them—a working dog in a different place with him. He had to keep her there. They were functional partners only as long as the handler held real affection for her at bay.

  I wonder what he would have made of this search and its potential hazards. Would he have been hesitant at all? Would he have been cautious only due to the investment risk? Or were those long-ago comments to me made in a moment of posturing, and did his colleagues know him as a man who split his hamburger in the truck and let his search dog sleep on the bed? The fellow had been insistent. He had worked several dogs in his search career, and when he told me that "loving a search dog screws with your priorities," I understood his perspective. But I couldn't agree with it. I wondered then and I wonder now if I could ever be capable of that kind of remove.

  19. SHOW AND TELL

  AT THE END of a long corridor smudged dark with recent smoke, Puzzle stands with her nose to a door, her tail waving faintly. Six rooms, six closed doors, and behind one of those, a single volunteer victim buried in rubble. We are in the fire department burn building, and today Puzzle is telling me which closed door to open and which others to ignore. She was given the "Find!" command yards from the building, and in she ran, smiling, her tongue out sideways. I am steps behind her, running from bright into immediate gloom. The air here is thick with soot and the dust of spent hay, and in the flashlight's beam, I can see the swirls of Puzzle's slipstream wash up against the wall like an airplane's wingtip vortices. If she were to disappear down some dark passage, for a time at least I could track her path through dusty air. I sneeze, then sneeze again.

  The airflow here is tricky. The burn building's outside windows are open to today's southerly breeze, while all its internal doors are closed. Here, the scent of a human hidden in a single room can easily slip out the bottom of one door and wash up against neighboring walls or onto the closed door opposite, sticking there in the dust and damp. "Scent traps," these are called, and scent can be deceptively strong there, misleading the dog trying to pinpoint the source. In this exercise, Puzzle's got to know better, and she's got to show me how much she knows better.

  These closed-door drills are some of the hardest, most intuitive work a dog team can do. In a damaged office building full of locked doors, a dog that can indicate the right door to kick in for rescue is a tremendous help to the firefighters who have to break through them. In past training, we've not been entirely successful. Because I didn't yet know how to read my dog, when scent was faint, I was inclined to open every door. And Puzzle was glad to let me do so, smiling there and sometimes moving idly into the empty room and sometimes not, as if uncertain how much to humor me. With closed-door drills, I had to learn to hang back, to stop doing the work and stop opening doors just as a given. When I frustrated Puzzle with our slowness, she began to make her cues bigger: a little scent there, A LOT OF SCENT HERE.

  Today she has her nose to one door and stands expectant. It's clear which one she wants. Last door on the left at the end of the corridor. As I approach it, her wagging tail wags faster: oh-yeah-oh-yeah-this-one-oh-yeah. I decide to test her loyalty to that door, and at the last minute I put my hand to the latch of the door opposite, a wrong choice. Puzzle's tail stops wagging, and when I grind the latch slightly, I hear a little pffft snort out of her that could be a sneeze but sounds like disgust. She does not turn away. She sticks to the door she prefers.

  I stop and turn to the door where she stands. "Is this the one you want, Puz?" I ask her. There is the briefest brow-furrow, an expression of incredulity at my indecision (like a doggie Duh! —I'm not kidding), then a harder wag when I put my hand to the right door latch. She is all encouragement. When I pop open the door, Puzzle gives her two-boing hop as she bounds across the threshold toward the victim for the find. And then she turns and beams at me, giving me so thorough an atta-girl that I laugh out loud.

  It is a perfect moment of joyful understanding between us. From the depths of her total dogness, Puzzle is pleased, and she knows that I am pleased, and after I help the victim from the rubble, she spins and capers down the corridor, smudging herself liberally with soot.

  And what of snakes? In the months after Puzzle's snake-proofing, I realize her experience with the snake in the woodpile was profound. Clearly Puzzle saw the snake before the strike to her face, and its shape, coil, and movement made an impression she remembers.

  After the bite, she immediately became wary of coiled rope and occasionally jittery on walks when we passed someone pulling a garden hose through tall grass. Once, when strong wind catches a length of black rubber tubing and blows it into the street in front of us, Puzzle freezes and barks furiously. I maneuver her downwind of the object, where she wuffles her cheeks for the scent of snake, relaxing only when the scent isn't there.

  And she is willing to generalize. On one training day at the fire academy, Puzzle and I cross a parking lot to get to the training area and approach a fat, hay-stuffed silt filter placed over an open gutter. Puzzle catches sight of the silt filter in her periphery, starts, then presses her body against my legs, refusing to move forward and refusing to let me move forward, either. Her eyes are dark and wide. She barks furiously where she stands. The silt filter is about four feet long and perhaps ten inches in diameter, and to her dog eyes I suppose it looks like the tubby mother of all snakes. Puzzle looks up at me where she has frozen, her expression dumbfounded, as if to say "Look at that mama-jama!" We are upwind, so we circumnavigate the object, and she works her nose downwind of it. A couple of good inhales and Puzzle seems a little sheepish when she recognizes her mistake. She immediately saunters over to the silt filter as if to hide her earlier alarm. There are times when Puzzle's face-saving maneuvers remind me of a cat.

  I look back at the silt-filter episode with interest. When Puzzle had been afraid of Max in turnout gear months ago, she had hidden behind me. When the silt filter first appeared like a snake to her, she instead froze in front of me, unwilling for either of us to go forward. I appreciate that double caution. Is my dog becoming protective of me as she matures?

  Though her sight response suggests what may have happened that night in the woodpile, I don't want Puzzle afraid of every snake-shaped object that we pass. There are too many hoses and ropes in our future. At the fire academy, I lead her past every coil of rope and hanging line, every type of fire hose in motion with the rookie firefighters. The acclimatization works. Puzzle gives these things an eyeball in passing, and that nose works rapidly both on ap
proach and departure, but she no longer spooks as she once did. The garden hose at home she ultimately forgives. She no longer scuttles away, but she knits her brow every time I move it, as though she sure wishes I would smell it first.

  Puzzle has other opinions she's happy to share. On a warm evening, she has stopped in the middle of a training search and has deliberately taken her long lead in her mouth, growling and tugging as though to pull it from my hand. We are searching for a single victim in a mixed sector—partly urban, bordered by scruffy, unimproved "wilderness" acreage—and after I've had to stop and untangle her lead from mesquite thorns three times, my dog is clearly telling me I'm slowing her down.

  "She wants to work off-lead," I say to Deryl, who runs with me.

  "So take her off," he replies, swatting at a mosquito.

  It's a simple solution, but I hesitate. Tonight she's on-lead because we're training in an area we've never been to before. If Puzzle were to take it into her head to run, to let go of this training search and flee on some whim of her own, it would be almost impossible to find her. It's an uneasy moment, and one that plenty of other handlers have experienced before me. The 100 Percent Recall: the dog who always comes back when called. When do we trust a dog's emerging commitment? With a search dog it's got to be solid. It should be solid for Puzzle now.

  It's not hard for me to remember the puppy that ignored my "Come" commands in our own backyard, but Puzzle has become more than that dog. In environments we know well, she commonly works off-lead. And her long wait beside me after my recent neighborhood fall demonstrated loyalty or obedience or a mixture of both. I know I should trust her now. But I dither. I don't know this area, I think. Anything could be out there. And it's getting dark. I make plenty of excuses not to trust her, not to take the chance.