Scent of the Missing

by Susannah

  The debris pile here represents years of donated cement from torn-up street department projects. In addition to the jagged concrete, there are lengths of old pipe and an upright series of unearthed water department vaults that once would have contained switching devices. Standing in the center of the pile, the vaults—resting on their sides—look like the world's tiniest apartment high-rise. You can crawl in the ground floor, climb up through a hole in the ceiling to the second floor, then climb up through another hole to the third floor and the "roof," perhaps fifteen feet high. Scent works oddly in this small space, rising or falling and, in strong winds from the east, swifting around inside the little structure like a canned tornado, then pushing out the top to drift down on another part of the pile, yards away. It can be a good place to hide a victim and watch the dogs work out the tough find.

  We are fortunate to have access to the pile, a constant challenge with its always changing configuration. Though we are able to work it fairly often, it's not a space to take for granted. One misstep or careless move can easily result in the rescuer also becoming a victim, a risk shared by the dogs. Though none of us have been seriously hurt on training debris or actual disaster sites, the possibility exists. Search dogs have been severely injured doing rubble work, and search dogs have died from it.

  Puzzle is on task. She seems to enjoy working rubble. But she has always seemed to me to be aware of her small size and the risks here. I wonder what she makes of debris beneath her paws, with its uneasiness and the vibration of air funneling through its open spaces. Puzzle crosses the pile methodically now, moving over the fractured cement in a series of calculated jumps and scrambles. She has found volunteer victims here before and seems ready to do so again, but a first diagonal pass across it, and then a second in the other direction, have resulted in no locally hot scent. Or so it seems to me, watching her. Though Puzzle is definitely engaged here, she shows me nothing in the low spaces along the edge of the pile. The breeze is variable. I can't be sure how well air is moving across the rubble, so I gesture her around the debris a second time just to make sure. I instantly feel a conscience twitch about the failure to trust my dog the minute I tell her to do it. She circles obediently counterclockwise around the pile but makes no quickening movement there.

  Nothing in the debris pile itself, but in three places she has scrambled upward to the highest spot on the upwind side and bobbed her nose appreciatively away from the pile, her little anticipatory gesture I associate with the scatter of faint scent. She doesn't bring her head down toward the rubble, and unhindered by me (this time), she moves away from the debris pile with the easy, dismissive movement of a dog who is certainly willing to find a human but is convinced there is no human here. She was a good girl to circle again when I asked her, but now she switches away from it with a bit of a priss to her step: The debris pile is clear. Got it?

  We work across the area in wide sweeps, passing railway cars, a partly demolished box truck, a row of wrecked cars. She has no interest in any of them, but on the second sweep, upwind of the debris pile we have cleared, her head pops strongly, and I release her from the sweep to let her run. She dashes across thirty yards of turf to find her first victim, Rob, hidden in a propane gas training tank. Puzzle is ecstatic when he snakes his hand out to pet her; she is all wiggling and crooning, taking her praise as due and her treat as a politeness. She smiles as she takes the jerky, then drops it on the ground. I look back to the debris pile, directly downwind of us, a fair distance away. Was it Rob whose scent she had at the top of the rubble? The wind is blowing the right direction, and because it was funneling through the open tank over him, I think it's likely. Puzzle's proud of her find, but she isn't telling.

  We return to the place we had abandoned our sweeps back and forth across the sector, and this time, alongside a railway tanker, Puzzle stiffens, turns her head to the ladder tower and lifts her nose. Again the narrowing of the eyes and the change in her breathing. It is the same gesture I saw earlier on the debris pile: scent-but-not-scent-here. I watch her work and note the direction of her nose. She is uninterested in the tanker, rejecting anything nearby, and when we turn to sweep back the other way, she abandons the sweep to head for the base of the ladder tower, where she has to make a choice: go in the enclosed first floor or climb the stairs for the open floors above? Puzzle puts her nose to a crack beneath the door, huffs, and turns away at once for the stairs.

  The day has begun to warm, and she's panting heavily. I give her a quick drink from her portable water bowl before she heads upstairs. Puz is a sloppy drinker. Water has settled in the deep pockets of her jowls, and moving more quickly than I, she dribbles on me the whole way up, a 7 percent solution of dog spit and cold water. I get an unexpected charge from this and laugh, trotting upward faster. This is the same ladder tower I rappelled so badly while my twelve-week-old puppy watched. Today it feels a very different place beside her. Puzzle rejects the second floor and the third, not hesitating on the stairs but climbing to the very top, where she finds Teresa crouched in the northeast corner of the roof. We are all excited—Teresa is a perfect second victim. She has honed a lovely high shriek of congratulation that would give any prideful dog a boost, a good dog! of such an octave she makes Puzzle face-whip herself with her tail, a puppy behavior I thought she had long left behind.

  This is a cert test, so we're not taking Teresa's pulse or offering her water or asking her if she knows what day it is. But we are not totally cavalier, either; we help Teresa to her feet (I lift and Puzzle supervises)—and then we're off again. Back down the stairs. Another drink of water and a return to our strategic sweeps. Puzzle dashes across the next two passes, and I get the sense that she has caught the strategy of this sector and that she would prefer to set the rhythm of it—especially now that I've relaxed a little and have remembered to trust her a lot. Her canter away from me is bright. I get an impression of proud head and flashing blond tail all the way to the brushy fence line, where her passage flushes a dithery bird she does not follow. She meets me coming back the other way.

  The next sweep includes a peculiar little structure known as the "maze," for firefighter confined-space training. It looks like a horizontal series of ventilation shafts hooked together or stacked on top of one another. Doors and hatches here and there, a little ladder for access to a door on a second level. Puzzle is interested in the maze. She huffs at one door and rejects it, choosing to trot down the length of the plywood structure to a second door, where she oofs and wags and grins in such a way I think it must be one of three family members in there—Matt, or Johnny, or Cindi. And it is. How did I know that? Puzzle belly-crawls into the shaft to give Cindi a wag and a cold nose, and in some first stray flash I recognize that though her alert signals are consistent, Puzzle greets individuals with hellos as specific as a human would greet differently a neighbor, a colleague, and a friend from childhood. Puzzle buries her nose deep in Cindi's outstretched hand, coming up with a smile, gulping slightly, as though she'd just taken a long drink of favorite human and oh, that was nice.

  We return to our sweep across the area, which this time includes the burn building. There's been a recent burn here; the interior is black with soot that licks the walls upward, and the building's scent of smoke and ash is strong enough on this warm day that my eyes water. It must be even stronger to the dog, but Puzzle moves through the building without any apparent distress. She sniffs at one pile of sooty, soggy hay before clearing the building of any human scent. Quick work in that dark space, and if Puzzle hadn't had so much experience in the thick air of that building, I might wonder how easy it was for her to distinguish human scent among all the other overpowering smells associated with the earlier fire. Would I smell a single wildflower in a room full of Limburger cheese? But she and the other dogs have literally grown up searching here. With few exceptions, no in the burn building means no.

  Puzzle exits the building wearing stripes across her haunches and a grubby, speckled tail. This may be the
first bonus of the day for her. My blond dog loves being dirty. She flashes me a grin as we head next for the multistory high-rise. Puzzle's having a good time. She is undeniably fresh.

  I resist the urge to stop, bend over, put my hands to my knees, and take a breather. I'm exhausted without really being tired. I feel strong enough to push a car off a pedestrian, but my neck is tight. As Puzzle bounds into the high-rise, I am really, really glad I skipped the coffee this morning. Caffeine on top of today's nervousness would not have been a good thing. Supercharged with yi!yi!yi!, I would have moved like a wind-up chicken on speed, skittering after Puzzle in the dark. Not the best mindset for paying attention.

  I flip on my flashlight as Puz takes her bearings in a large warehouse room on the first floor. It is full of ladders, barrels, and red fire mattresses, and it has a couple of closets behind steel doors at the end. Even to me, it is an environment rich with scent. In warm weather, the mattresses smell much like the gymnastics mats of my elementary days, but heavier somehow, and sweatier. Air can move oddly here, a strong current through the middle of the room created by the doors at either end, the stairwell at the north entrance, and windows with heavy metal shutters, while air in the corners can settle motionless behind objects.

  Puzzle picks her way confidently to the center of the great space, stepping over the rungs of ladders lying flat on the floor. She turns her head slowly, her nose lifted. A moment later, she moves to one corner and shrugs out of it, no scent, then trots along a clear space of floor to the back door. There she twitches at the bottom of the door with some interest. It is locked, and before we leave the room, I motion her to check the other corners, the cracks underneath the closet doors. She does so, dismissing them to return to the back door leading out of the building. That return gives me pause. I think of her earlier behavior on the debris pile, scenting Rob in the tank yards and yards away, and in this room we could again be downwind of human scent outside.

  We leave the room and circle the building. A few clouds have passed over the sun, and the wind has risen slightly. At the back of the high-rise, Puzzle canters to the flashover bin, and at the moment I'm thinking we may have a victim in the bin, a bent elderly man comes around the corner of it and almost collides with me, Puzzle beside him at his knees. I'm startled. He holds his hands up as though he were being robbed and mumbles something I cannot understand.

  Puzzle has found him, but he's not one of our volunteer victims. And he is somehow here but not here. When he speaks to me, his eyes don't connect and his words are unclear. He raises and lowers his hands as if to submit to something or to avoid my dog, but in another way he doesn't seem to recognize she's there. He takes out a card that indicates he is a patient in a care facility and has communication disabilities. He extends the card for me to read.

  I am about to direct him to Max when a security guard drives up and with a kind word gently moves the elderly man to her vehicle. Puzzle and I watch her drive him away. He gazes straight forward, anticipation in his posture, as though this change was in his plans. I get the sense he has been picked up in other places and moved to somewhere else before. The last I see of him is the flash of white card as he flips it through his fingers.

  "Good dog," I say to Puzzle, who has never seen one of her victims chauffeured away on a golf cart. "Find more!" We return to the cert test and to the high-rise, where there are other rooms to clear.

  Don is probably the happiest of our volunteer victims to be found. He's at the farthest end of our sector, and he's been hidden in one of the stuffiest rooms of the high-rise, buried in old uniforms for quite a while, long enough to have sweat a little and spread his scent wide over the tumbled clothing that surrounds him. He is as obvious to Puzzle as a fly vibrating the strands of a spider's web. She snuffles in and finds him; he pushes himself up out of the pile, blinks into the light, and gives Puzzle a pat of congratulations. We watch him walk back to the group waiting at the academy.

  Four official victims and one unofficial one; we have another half of the high-rise to clear. Puzzle has dropped her bottom on the cool cement with an air of finality. I give her another drink of water from the collapsible bowl, and when I tell her it's time to go back to work, she rises affably, but I get the sense that she knows the air moving through this building far better than I do, and really, though there's a lot to be interested in— did you note the scatter graph of pigeon droppings in the farthest room?—there's nothing to be urgent about; there are no other humans here.

  Puzzle wanders through a central room full of lumber. I have always liked this room's fresh wood smell, but its narrow space and strange currents can give dogs trouble. Today, Puzzle pauses intently in one corner and, in a response I have never seen from her, does not alert but begins to paw at something that's caught her attention. She exposes some kind of weighted vest. I bend down to inspect it by flashlight, noting a quarter-size smear of what appears to be dried blood at the back of the neckline, as though the vest had once chafed a raw spot on the person who had worn it. Curious. I can't smell the blood, but I can smell sweat and something like grease. Two scents to the hundreds it must have collected as firefighter after firefighter wore it. Now that Puzzle has inspected the vest and knows that I have seen it, she shows no further interest. It isn't live, she seems to suggest, but it certainly has a lot of human on it.

  We move quickly through the rest of the ground-floor rooms and up the stairs, where Puzzle dashes through the overturned furniture of three apartment rooms and then into the topmost warehouse area. Several plywood structures give it winding air patterns and curious crawlspaces. Puzzle has searched this room occasionally before, and some exciting thing about it always makes her race. She does so here again, her nose low as she gallops its circumference and around again to me, her expression bright. Great room, terrific space, she seems to be saying, and thanks so much, but nada.

  The high-rise is clear. We exit the building, do a quick sweep of the lumber pile and the flashover bin, and with another toss of her head, Puzzle exits the sector. She pauses and turns back to me in a gesture of easy partnership, and something in her ease overrides every nervous urge I have to double- or triple-check the closest spaces we have cleared. I already regret my are-you-sures of the earlier debris pile. Puzzle flops down in the grass and begins to roll. She's happy and absolute, wiggling her hieroglyph across the turf: Trust the dog. Trust the dog. Trust the dog.

  Right, I say to myself. Enough. We head back to the classroom building, the team, and the three evaluators standing there, ready to make our report.

  An hour later, Puzzle's about to have grilled chicken and a kid's cup of ice cream on the patio of a favorite restaurant, and I'm planning on a mimosa—light on the orange juice, double the champagne. We're at a favorite local café that allows dogs. The porch is generous, with heavy cast-iron tables covered by umbrellas; the atmosphere is upbeat. My dog recognizes the scent of the place a block before we get there, and when we turn the corner that leads to the front door, her pace quickens. She's wearing her orange work vest, and those already seated make little comments as she passes, remarking about her size (petite), her coloring (blond), her leash behavior (beautifully improved). Some people remark with open curiosity about her job. They've missed search and rescue printed on the side of the vest, and I see them bend together a bit as they try to figure her out.

  We stand at the door and wait for a table. Puz cranes her head and weaves back and forth a bit as the door opens and closes, either hoping for the beautiful scent of chicken or to catch sight of favorite waitpersons who spoil her. After a long day of search work, there's nothing she likes better than to lounge under a café table and receive a nice grilled chicken breast with rosemary, a to-go carton full of cool water, and the general praise and admiration of young women she's known since puppyhood, young women who smell splendidly of fajitas, melted cheese, and ice cream. This looks to be a very good day.

  A young man we don't know seats us at the only available table.
I sit, Puzzle quietly lies at my feet, and heads turn to consider her thoughtfully. On the other side of us, a couple is curious. They glance over and put their heads together, then glance over again, as if hesitant to ask something. Their adolescent son, I notice, is pointedly not looking at the dog. It's a strange combination. As Mom and Dad slowly inch their chairs toward Puzzle and occasionally flick an inquisitive glance at me, the boy in perfect counterpoint inches away.

  Finally, the father speaks. He says, "We are wondering about your dog. Does it really say 'Search' on her vest?"

  When I nod, the son makes another five-inch hitch to the other side of their table.

  "What does she look for?" his mother asks.

  "Bombs?" asks the father.

  "We were thinking criminals, but she doesn't look mean enough."

  "I wondered if she might be a drug dog," the father continues. The boy gives another scoot to the left.

  When I shake my head and say no, explaining that Puzzle searches for lost people, the teenager at the table looks up for the first time. I point to the other side of her vest, where the embroidery more clearly reads SEARCH AND RESCUE. The boy relaxes so visibly that I expect his parents to notice, but they are all about the dog at the moment.

  "Glad it's not bombs," says the father. "I hate to think of a sweet dog like yours in that kind of danger."

  "Drug dogs come to your school, don't they, Cody?" they turn to their son and ask. He shrugs and nods, squinting up at the sun now shining down on him, and he scoots his chair back the way it came, just a little enough to be in the shade.

  His mother explains, "They smell the lockers and the cars in the parking lot once a month."