by Susannah
"So what is this puppy supposed to do for me?" she asks a little skeptically, but she grins because Puzzle has suddenly turned on the charm, wagging and smiling and pawing at the agent's extended fingers.
"Well," I say. "She's not going to do anything but love you at the moment and maybe mooch a French fry, but she's passed her first aptitude tests, and she's heading home to train to be a search dog." I show her my team ID and Puzzle's green in-training vest, the smallest size of which is still three times too big for her. She looks like a puppy in a barrel.
The woman glances at the ID and the vest. "Wow. You are my first search-and-rescue dog," says the agent. She rubs Puzzle's ears, causing a sensation so pleasurable that the puppy's eyes almost cross.
"She knows 'Sit,' 'Stand,' and 'Come,'" I respond proudly—thinking, boy, I hope she still does —and resting Puzzle on the counter.
"Sit," says the agent, and Puzzle plops down on the counter with such gusto that she knocks my driver's license to the floor, grinning with her tongue out sideways. She clearly adores the woman, who leans closer. Puzzle licks the mustard from her nose.
"I couldn't do it," says the agent.
"Do what?"
"Train a puppy and then give it up to someone else."
I lean forward to help her untangle Puzzle's forepaws from her hair. "The good news," I say, "is that I won't have to make that choice. I'll be her working partner. She'll be a search dog, my search dog, but she'll also live with me."
"Ohhhhh—so she's going home, then," says the agent, handing me a boarding pass.
"Yes," I answer, reaching for the pass awkwardly, realizing Puzzle has somehow flipped in my arms and is butt-upward, her tail waving gently beneath my chin. "She's going home."
In the airline terminal, Puzzle is extremely social with two passing pilots, a child pushing her own stroller, and the three TSA agents who pass her among them after her collar, harness, and vest set off the security sensors. She tilts her head so winningly at a cowboy-booted man on a cell phone that he hangs up and crosses the gate area to pet her.
"Now this looks like a dog that could get away with anything," says the gentleman.
I tip her up to look into her face. "This sure looks like a dog who will try."
"She's got a good head, good big black nose. Gun dog?" he asks.
I shake my head. "Search-and-rescue."
"Bless you, Ma'am," he says, then, "You'd better give this one something to do fast."
He pets Puzzle, engulfing her head in his large hand. Then he walks away with a chuckle, with a better-you-than-me shake of his head.
By contrast, our flight attendant, who later catches sight of Puzzle out of the corner of her eye during a trip down the aisle during the flight, gives a nervous little shriek. I feel sure the young woman saw the puppy come aboard, but now Puzzle sleeps upside down in my arms, her round belly upward, feet akimbo, head limp and lolling backward toward the aisle. Gravity has pulled down the puppy's ears and lips and bared her fangs. Her eyes are open but unseeing, rolled up in her head with the whites exposed. It's not a good look. It's not even canine—more Hell-Spawn Bunny of the Undead.
"It's a puppy," says my seatmate, helpfully pointing to the paws, the nose, and the tail.
"I'm sorry," stammers the attendant. "F-for a second, I thought I was seeing some kind of a ... a ... mutant."
"She's going to be a search dog," I add. I exhibit the little green vest.
"Oh. I'm sure she'll be very good," says the flight attendant. But her expression is shifty. She hurries away.
The exchange has roused Puzzle a little. A couple of huh? what? snorts, and she stretches all four paws upward, trembling with the extension. She is briefly stiff as roadkill, then relaxes. In less than a minute she begins to snore: a treble skkkiiiiinnnnnnnnnk from just behind her nostrils, then a deeper skkunnnnnnnnnnnk farther back in her muzzle. Her eyes roll slowly upward again, the whites staring dully across the aisle toward two other passengers. One grins. The other flinches and turns back to his in-flight magazine.
I look down at Puzzle and consider that I've never seen a Golden puppy photographed from this unflattering angle. There are probably reasons for that.
"She doesn't have to be pretty," says the grinning man across the aisle, his voice kind. "She just has to be smart."
The Poms look like they've been to a horror show.
Puzzle's nap aboard the airplane has refreshed her, and she has entered the house all bounding energy and curiosity. It takes her only moments to put her nose to the butt of every Pom that rushes forward to inspect her, to flush a cat from the laundry basket, and to knock over a row of plastic bottles I have set aside for recycling. Now she has suddenly discovered the stuffed lobster that's made the trip with us, and she takes the over-large toy in her mouth, rushing up to little Sophie with it, shaking it meaningfully: booga-booga-booga, lobster-booga! Sophie honks and skitters, her dark eyes wide.
Undeterred, Puzzle drops the toy and prances up to Maddy, one of my oldest cats. Maddy has seen dogs come and has seen dogs go, and, totally fearless, has found a laissez chien attitude serves her well. She flops down on the floor as Puzzle approaches, squinching her eyes shut as though the puppy is something to be temporarily endured, like an enema. Puzzle moves very slowly, giving Maddy a thoughtful nose-over. The introduction seems to be going well until the puppy gets to Maddy's bottom. Some curiosity there gives Puzzle pause, and she huffs a snort straight up Maddy's backside, which causes the cat to loft with an insulted squawk and leap for the back of the couch. Maddy misses, overshoots, lands hard behind the couch, scrambling two other cats hiding back there—and they jointly riot, heading for the closest high thing any of them can find: a large potted ficus in a ceramic pot by the window. It is a big tree, in a big pot, but they are three senior cats with weight issues and motivation. As they struggle to climb frail branches, their weight overcomes the ficus, and it tips over before I can dodge the couch and get across the room.
Four things happen almost simultaneously. The tree falls, the pot shatters, the cats shoot apart like pieces of exploded TIE Fighter, and Puzzle leaps into the debris with the first bark I have heard from her: a bright, happy hark! of satisfaction. When I pull her from what's left of the tree, she has already snuffled into its root ball, emerging with a triumphant expression and a dirty nose flecked with Perlite. I get the sense that if a puppy could waggle her eyebrows at the lot of us, she would.
Wow! Wow! Wow! Whisky shrieks about the new dog in her house.
Augh! replies Sprits'l, apropos of it all.
5. ALL THE WRONG THINGS
PISSED AT HIS GIRLFRIEND, says the brother of the boy who is missing, or at least that's the version we get from the officer who interviewed family members an hour ago. Pissed at his girlfriend and hitching a ride with a friend to Austin for the weekend. He left the house before supper and slammed the door and headed right, said the brother, who watched him walk down the hill and out of sight. He was still wearing the khaki pants he'd worn earlier while waiting tables, stained with grease and ketchup. He was so mad he didn't stop to change. Just threw his things down and pulled on another shirt as he walked out the door, before their parents got home.
Two search dogs, however, disagree. Charged by their handlers to determine direction of travel, both dogs show little interest in the route suggested by the missing boy's brother. The dogs have been sent out to trail the boy separately, the second handler unaware of the conclusions drawn by the first team. Neither dog confirmed the brother's gestured route. Two officers clearly believe the dogs, while one is torn. The brother's story is brief and consistent. I've heard it twice myself, and it's not difficult to imagine the boy slamming out the door and hooking a right toward his friend's house, hitching a ride to Austin, and leaving the girl behind.
The friend in Austin, however, says by cell phone that he last saw the boy in question earlier that day at school. If he'd gone to Austin, says the friend, he didn't get there with him.
And he adds, "Like his parents would even let him go."
The missing boy is a good-looking kid, two school pictures tell us. Last year's photo has a little baby fat that's missing from this year's shot. His hair is longer too. He appears confident and capable—he looks into the camera easily—and he was either cavalier about his sophomore picture or ill-prepared for it. He's wearing a faded, wrinkled T-shirt in this most recent photo, and his hair is mussed. There's a little tuft of it sticking upward from the back of his head, like a cowlick that aspires to a miniature peacock fan. His grin is crooked, and there's a pink scar from the corner of his mouth that points to his jaw. He appears uncertain in the freshman photo, but in the sophomore shot there's a little "dare me" expression in his eyes.
We get a lot of school photos in the pre-brief of searches for missing children, but sometimes a family will bring out their own candid shots too. It would be good to see a picture of this whole boy in the context of his house, his neighborhood. The way he dresses. The things he carries, values. But not this time. His parents, who made the 911 call after searching awhile themselves, offer a school picture and little else.
They stand silent on the porch of their house. His two younger brothers straddle bicycles a few feet away in the driveway. The bicycles are sized for smaller riders. Both boys have their feet on the ground and their knees rocked outward, their forearms resting on the handlebars. Though they stand apart, the family resemblance is apparent between parents and sons. Even at midnight in the shadows, I can see their faces settle into the same lines, pale and remote in the thin light of a waning moon and the streetlight one house over. They do not talk to one another or touch. They stand together but not together, the tension between them palpable.
The parents do not come forward to speak to us or to meet the dogs that will search for their son. It can go either way on a search; some families want that connection. Others do not. Neither has the community rallied to this search, which is also unusual. Though we see the occasional flick of light when a curtain is drawn back, no neighbors come out to support the family or speak with the police.
But before we arrived, the boy's mother located the jacket her son had tossed over the chair in his bedroom. A meticulous woman: she paid attention to the concept of a "scent article," bringing the jacket out caught between salad tongs so as not to touch and contaminate the fabric with her own scent. The officer that briefed us leads Jerry and Shadow again to the jacket now lying on the sidewalk of the house. Jerry directs Shadow to smell it, and she takes a brief, thoughtful scent. She knows the scent, has smelled it before an hour ago when sent out to confirm or deny the brother's statement. When Jerry commands her to "Find that," she ignores the eastward path the boy's brother says was the last way he went, choosing instead to wind her way north in the darkness. I am assigned to field assist the pair in this sector, and I follow a few steps behind, taking notes and watching Shadow. She avoids the street and the sidewalk of her chosen direction, sidestepping instead to an alley bounded by a mangled, uneasy fence that separates the neighborhood from open field beyond.
The wood and wire fence sags with the remembered weight of all the people who have climbed it. The field beyond is dark, broad, and scruffy—and for sale, weathered twin signs at either end seem to suggest—land waiting for development, only minimally kept neat. A line of trees bounds the far eastern edge of it. From this distance, the trees seem to hunch forward toward the field, like a line of vultures waiting for something to fall. The police say this field is a common thoroughfare for the dog-walkers and teenagers of the area. The dog-walkers let their dogs "run loose and shit free," as one officer puts it, while the teenagers use the field as a shortcut to a pizza joint and a convenience store. Sometimes the kids simply walk into the trees, for drugs or sex or both. The field and that stand of trees is a concern, a likely venue for poor choices or drug deals gone bad. Two busy streets intersect at the far edge of the wood, creating an area that is both quickly accessible and relatively obscured. There have been other kids in trouble there; other crimes across the four years the land has been for sale. Earlier this evening, police already searched into the tree line. They've found nothing.
Shadow walks along the alley, slipping through the infrequent light. Her liquid movement before us is beautiful: now a silver dog, now black, now silver, now black as she crosses in and out of the dark. About seven houses from where we began our sector, she slows, pauses, and mutters to Jerry. She puts her nose to a fence, then moves around the side of it, pawing at a warped gate buckling outside its frame, a gate that no longer aligns with its catch. Shadow is interested here. Very interested. She sticks fast with her nose to the gate.
Jerry moves to the front of the house to see its address, then calls the location to the officers in charge. They confirm this house is the home of another friend of the missing boy. But the officers have already visited it. Having spoken to the friend and his parents, they determined the boy is not there—though he'd visited there frequently, always coming in from the back gate through the kitchen. They say Shadow must be interested in old scent. The scenario is logical enough, and Jerry directs Shadow to move on. She does so with reluctance and some grumbling, a low, musical singularly Husky note. Her lope away seems unwilling.
Jerry wonders if anyone has checked with the boy's girlfriend. I call the question in by radio as we move northward down the alley to a dark area where a street lamp has gone out. We move with flashlights only now, Shadow glowing in the distance ahead of us. She pads steadily forward, but without the excitement of a dog on the scent she's been asked to find. Occasionally she pauses and turns her head to look back at us. Her pale blue eyes snap as they pass through the flashlights' beams. She turns away and lopes on.
The radio crackles; we have turned the volume down to prevent disturbing the neighborhood asleep. I murmur against the mike and hold the radio to my ear. Incident Command confirms that the girlfriend has been reached. She had no information about her missing boyfriend and (this said in low parenthesis) seemed surprised by any question that the two of them had fought. Jerry shakes his head and we walk on, coming to the end of the alley and turning eastward toward another street and a reverse sweep to the south.
Shadow grows less interested the farther we move east. She sparks again only once as we are southbound the next street over, crossing purposefully between two dark houses with us tiptoeing behind, then across the street. She mutters a little, working quickly, and as we watch the direction of her interest, Jerry recognizes we've returned to the front of the same house that she had originally engaged before. We call in second interest and head back to finish the sweep we'd briefly abandoned.
I can hear handlers calling Incident Command from their sectors southwest, southeast, and northwest of us. Routine calls noting time and location, none of the dogs showing any interest at all in their assigned areas.
Tonight we use an additional resource. One member of our team is a professional man tracker out of a police department in California. He and another FAS team member have begun "cutting sign," looking for footprints or other indicators that might confirm or deny the brother's story, anything that might suggest the boy's direction of travel. They know his shoe size and his height, have a fair approximation of his stride. By flashlight they will look for evidence of transfer: crushed grass in the road, alley dust in the grass, fresh mud on the depressed wire where someone has newly climbed over the fence. Man tracking is a painstaking process that requires good vision and an ability to note the signs of disturbance left by any creature that crosses ground. Terry's long experience makes him fast and efficient. Webb, his assistant, has caught on to the job quickly.
Jerry, Shadow, and I are at the farthest bound of our sector when Terry calls to Incident Command. He and Webb have found what appears to be likely prints in the grit of the alley we had first walked along. Not our boot prints; these belong to someone else. No sign that someone had gone over the wire and into the field today, but three pri
nts in dust and tamped grass a few steps away suggest track—they lead to the area where Shadow had put her nose to the worn gate and held fast.
Jerry and I look at each other a moment. Shadow has worked ahead about a house-length, loping quietly southward now on the fourth street of our sector, but her demeanor suggests we are nowhere near the scent she has been told to seek. The other dogs are coming in. Nothing, their behavior tells their handlers. We conclude a final sweep and head back to the command area ourselves. As we walk, I can see flickers of light in my periphery from all quadrants: the other teams returning. Their flashlights punctuate every step, occasionally silvering the eyes of the dogs now trotting quietly beside them.
At Incident Command, two officers have agreed that fresh track and a dog's intense interest is enough to justify a second inquiry at the house seven doors to the north. They will return to that house and wake the family. Team by team, we head back to command and begin drafting our sector reports, chewing our pens and sketching sector maps, writing the narrative that explains who searched the sector, how it was searched, any problems in the sector, any area where the dogs might have shown significant response. We write, but we are all turned a little toward the command post radio. Our own radio is silent. I can occasionally hear the murmur of the police communication from the line of parked police vehicles near us, somehow sounding matter-of-fact and urgent at the same time, but nothing across ours.
Almost simultaneously, the dogs look north: noses up, ears wheeled forward. Their postures mark the boy's return before we see or hear it. He walks slowly back to his house with a police officer on either side. His head is down, and he walks with his arms folded across his chest. His right hand, beneath the fold of his left, is clenched into a fist. His parents meet him at the center of the yard, and the three stand rigid there, the boy and mother silent, the father speaking in short, emphatic tones with the officers who brought him back. The two younger boys retreat into the house. We never see them again.
