Scent of the Missing

by Susannah

  After an exchange we cannot hear, one officer invites the dogs to meet the boy they have searched for. Perhaps the officer has seen them straining and wagging where their handlers stood. At the invitation, the handlers gesture and the dogs come together, and it's like a little ballet as they converge on the spot where the boy stands. Collie, German Shepherd, Husky, two Labs. From dropped shoulders and long arms, the boy turns his palms backward to allow the dogs to sniff, but he does not connect with them. He does not look up. Not at us. Not at the police. Not at his father who, after we begin to pack up for the night, lifts his hand as if to strike his son, then gives him an angry push into the house.

  "Sometimes," says an officer, "it's tough to know if you've done a good thing or not."

  6. FIRST LESSONS

  THERE'S A STORY told about an experienced handler working a training scenario with a young dog who'd just begun to learn to search. The three-story warehouse where they sought a single volunteer victim was an ideal training environment: full of stacked crates, landscaping tools, out-of-season holiday decorations, window-cleaning equipment, discarded office furniture, and the occasional makeshift bed for a homeless person who'd snuck in. The lighting was poor. There were dark stairwells and disused elevator shafts, strange air currents and dead corners where scent hung motionless. The building challenged even experienced teams. But this dog was keen, and this handler wanted to give the building a try.

  Working from the almost-empty ground floor up, the two swept the entire warehouse, and the Australian Cattle Dog pup hesitated in only one spot—a patch of cement strewn with the moldy remains of Halloween hay. He worried at the hay a little before the handler directed him away and upward to the second floor. From there they worked slowly through the still air, threading their way between the corridors of outcast computer desks and finding nothing. Up to the third floor, even more congested and dusty, peppered with pigeon feathers and owl droppings. They worked the room edges, the corners, and made back-and-forth sweeps across the middle of it through debris. The dog showed no interest at all. Knowing they had one planted victim, the handler reversed the search and again swept the third floor. Nothing. Second floor. Nothing still. Losing faith in the dog due to its youth and relative inexperience, the handler began opening crates and tilting boxes over, hoping to either find the victim himself or stir the air enough to shake loose significant scent. The dog did not respond. In frustration, the handler took the dog back to the first floor and moved through it again, quickly. The pup moved back to the flat scatter of hay, and the handler called him away from it twice, directing the dog to the edges of the elevator door.

  The story goes that the dog had now had enough, ignored the handler and marched past him, oblivious to further commands, trotting out of the building straight to the head trainer and plopping down in her lap. The trainer says that when the handler came out, his face flushed with anger, the dog turned away. She says the dog too looked disgusted, like "ain't he a piece of work?"

  After a few moments' debrief, the trainer asked if the dog had shown any interest in anything in the building at all. The handler dismissively mentioned the hay. The trainer stood up and led the pair back into the building, where she ran her foot across the hay and revealed a grate in the floor, and beneath the grate, a ten-year-old child sat patiently in the space of an air duct, looking upward at the three of them.

  I've never heard how the story concluded—if the handler made nice to his dog at that moment, if the dog shrugged off the incident in the way of good-natured canines, how the pair of them fared on later searches. But the tale in all its versions is always cautionary, its warning perpetual: trust the dog.

  It's not as easy as it sounds, because the handler developing trust is also raising a puppy still prone to scatterbrained antics. Many SAR dogs begin training as soon as their inoculations for rabies, distemper, and parvo allow it, between ten and twelve weeks old. Energetic, playful, sometimes highly distractible, they are introduced to search through "runaways," a game where a friendly assistant holds the new puppy and the handler runs a short distance away to hide. The assistant cries "Find!" and releases the dog, which ideally runs immediately for the handler and is praised and rewarded for the glorious find. Handler runaways are repeated enough times so consistent behavior is seen from the puppy, and then roles are reversed: the handler holds the dog and the assistant runs to hide. If the pup seeks the assistant as readily as she had sought the handler in previous exercises, learning has taken place—both for dog and handler. The dog has learned that "Find!" has an objective and a reward, and the handler has taken a first step toward trust. It's an encouraging moment when a handler sees his new dog willingly look for another person just as readily as he'd naturally run for the handler whom he has begun to love. When we see the dog successfully find a wide variety of people hiding in different places during "runaways," the dog demonstrates consistency and the handler's confidence rises.

  From there, simple searches continue—one victim in a "sector"—but the victim's within a close, limited range of location. Now the handler cannot see the volunteer victim in hiding. And small as it may be, the sector is a mystery to the team. This is the moment when a basic understanding of wind direction and air currents makes all the difference to dog-and-handler strategy. It's also the moment where distractions for a young dog may tell—a blowing leaf kicks off a puppy's prey drive and off she goes to chase it; passersby fifty yards away tempt a friendly dog to break off the search and trot over to petition for petting. Another dog crosses into the puppy's field of vision, and the opportunity for play is irresistible.

  It's a tough time for a handler, who can make several wrong choices at this crucial moment for a young SAR dog. Overdiscipline, and the dog can associate working search with punishment and become less willing. Overindulge, and the puppy learns that search is a casual, when-you-get-around-to-it affair. Perhaps the worst temptation is to deny that the young dog lacks focus at this point in training, to use your own eyes to find the victim and credit the dog with the find. Most training teams have an experienced handler or trainer supervising the search, but the opportunity to overcompensate for the dog's young nature still exists. More than false pride is implicated. Crediting a pup with more success than he has earned may push him into harder training scenarios that he is ill-equipped for; a frustrated dog (who may also intuit the handler's frustration) can quickly lose the sense of adventure and fun that fosters a consistent will to work. And the handler's confidence has taken a serious blow. Hide the puppy's immaturity at your peril. Eventually there will be search scenarios where your eyes can't do it and the dog, moved ahead in her training too fast, isn't willing to.

  At eleven weeks old, Puzzle is all paws, fat belly, and big head. Her nose is large and very black, and she seems willing to use it to achieve a goal. There is a lot to smell in this house: food on the stove and leather shoes in closets, the other dogs and cats, and because the house is pier-and-beam, every mouse and squirrel running under the house too. She is not yet ready to begin search training. While we wait for her final Parvo vaccinations and the vet's all-clear to put her paws on new ground, we begin scent games in the house, designed to teach her to find things on command and to associate successful finds with praise. One game involves passing a treat from hand to hand behind my back, then extending both closed fists to the puppy, asking her to identify the hand with the treat and to bump that hand with her nose. Puzzle catches on quickly, and after a few attempts she recognizes the difference between faint scent (was there) and stronger scent (is there now), and she happily bumps my hand with her nose, sometimes chattering at me with yaps and moans to underscore her choice.

  The Poms, too, enjoy the game. Blind Scuppy is invariably accurate. Fo'c'sle Jack, who loves food above all things, learns that the quickest path to a reward is to get the correct hand and be quick about it. Mr. Sprits'l is wary of the game. Inclined to sniff both hands critically, he tilts his head and considers in the way a gourman
d might judge a mouthful of foie gras: I smell the treat, but is it up to my personal standard? When he chooses the correct hand and gets both treat and praise, Sprits takes the treat with great care, trotting off to private spaces, where he will work it with his paws and deliberate.

  We play the "Which Hand?" game for a few days, then progress to a hidden treat beneath one of three clean, upended flowerpots. This advanced game requires that Puzzle not only identify the correct pot but also begin to maneuver to get to what she seeks. I watch these early efforts at problem-solving with some amusement. Puzzle lacks small motor skills and any sense of physics. She's inclined to identify the correct pot and then scoot it across the porch by bumping it with her head, the treat dragging along with it as she goes. After one such effort, she flops down on her bottom and barks angrily at the pot, then turns and barks indignantly at me. The message seems clear: This won't cooperate, and it's All Your Fault. Metatext aside, she has made a good choice. When she barks for my attention, I pick up the flowerpot and she gets her treat.

  I am happy to see her accuracy and her perseverance. In the days that follow, I notice she pushes less and instead stands over the chosen flowerpot, barking for my attention much more quickly. I hope that this is the beginning of what will be direct, communicative alerts on Puzzle's search finds—a sort of I've done my job, now you do yours.

  The games get more difficult, and I begin to hide the treats in the house and yard: under objects, on top of fence posts, wedged in the V-shaped branches of young trees. Puzzle is eager to play, and for a distractible puppy likely to abandon a butterfly she's chasing to flush a bird instead, falling over her own feet as she goes, Puzzle is all focus when the treats come out and I put on her little "search" collar that signals the work is about to begin.

  The Poms watch us. Though they too get to play scent games at least once in our daily training, I recognize they are aware that Puzzle gets more training and more treats. Feeling the pressure of hard gazes, I look up once in the backyard and see a row of three little fox faces staring out a bedroom window at us. Mr. Sprits'l gives a mutter, then an outraged Augh! of protest when the puppy scores her third treat in a row. I realize then that as soon as Puz can safely work outside the yard, we need to begin our training elsewhere. I am ill-versed in dog dynamics, but it seems to me that at least some of the Poms recognize the puppy's unfair share of my attention. Later that afternoon, we play again in the house, each dog taking turns at this scent game or that one. Sprits'l successfully finds a treat beneath my right foot, and when I raise my shoe he takes it after a long, guarded sniff. "Good boy!" I praise him as he stomps off—the treat in his mouth, his ears cocked back and his posture stiff with scorn.

  Puzzle, in turn, watches the Poms. She is especially fascinated by Scuppy. The old dog navigates our yard quite easily, missing objects he has previously marked, sidestepping other dogs in his path as he orients to their scent and movement. Every once in a while I see a hint of what must have been his younger sense of mischief. He will pad slowly and quietly toward a huddle of pigeons, then make a little burst of speed and a bark like a toy trumpet with a mute. With only his nose to go by, Scuppy clearly demonstrates how scent moves, where it sticks, and how it pools. Watching him, I am aware of subtleties that he translates easily, though I cannot smell them at all.

  Puzzle treats the old dog with kindly deference. She's inclined to rush and tumble the younger Poms, but she carefully sidesteps Scuppy and does not interfere with his flushed pigeons or his path through the yard. Sometimes she follows him as a sort of wingman. Other times she simply observes.

  I leave the back door open and watch them lie together in the yard and ferret the scent of bird versus squirrel versus man-with-a-baby-jogger and girl-with-a-dog. Sometimes their noses bob together. Other times it's in a little sequence, like they're doing the Wave. One night I slip out the back door and stand half the backyard away, upwind of them and silent. It's a warm, humid, windless evening. I lean over and wave my hands, wondering how long it will take both dogs to catch scent enough to notice. It takes only moments. Their noses bob with recognition, and Scuppy stiffly rises, wagging, ready to come to me. Puzzle turns her head in the easy pivot of a young dog and smiles from where she lies across the slate. When she sees Scuppy heading my way, she too gets up and follows at a careful distance. Scuppy finds me without a misstep, puts his nose into my hands, and groans as I rub his soft ears, and Puzzle, sometimes competitive and pushy for attention, does not push him away.

  Though I am eager for the day when Puzzle's safe to train with the team, I recognize how much she's learned from all the dogs here at home, quite apart from human instruction. She's a whole-sense dog who will perk her ears at a baby's cry two doors down or pause at the sight of a squirrel through a window, spinning with excitement as Sprits'l yaps through the glass, but it's Scuppy's unwitting instruction that engages her most. A friend asks, "Are you sure it's safe to leave the old guy alone with her?"—a question I have never asked myself. Puzzle's twice his weight now and probably ten times his strength, but in the backyard beside him she moves gently, as though crossing a stream stone by stone. She models his thoughtful inspection of the yard, corner to corner, scent by scent. She mimics his position when they jointly lie across the cool slate sidewalk in the evening. Best of all, she learns from Scuppy that human scent has value.

  Imagine you are walking through a small-town neighborhood at midnight, the houses dark, televisions gone silent, the cars and lawn mowers stilled. Though the cumulative daytime noise level is down a few notches, you move, nonetheless, in a world of sound. This is a time when you can hear small, specific noises and perhaps identify them—the drone of separate air conditioners from three houses in a row or the jingle of collar tags hitting cement when a sleeping cat on a patio rolls onto its side. The ting of one pipe of a wind chime stirred by a moment's air. The strike of a match as someone sits smoking alone in the dark. The chirp of two crickets in conversation. They think better of it and stop their love song as you pass. Eighteen-wheelers on a highway half a mile away. Your own footsteps, of course, and the quality of them, down to the squidgy press of rubber soles on asphalt or the crunch and squeak of gravel you disturb.

  Then imagine that it's your job to locate a single radio playing softly in the alley behind an unknown house in a five-square-block area. You could just run around randomly—hopeful of catching the sound by chance—or organize the process, sweeping back and forth down streets and alleys, attempting to quickly locate anything that sounds like it might be a radio. And though the old AM transistor you search for has a tinny, signature sound, when you move too quickly, that sound can be overcome or disguised by other noises. So you methodically work the area, and at some point in the process you believe you hear it. You move left or right, forward or back, turning in an attempt to narrow down the location, getting warmer or colder, as we say in children's games.

  Warmer now and closer still, and the sound is undeniable, refining and separating itself from all others—you're hearing Sinatra or 50 Cent and then a PSA on sleep disorders. That definition makes things easier, and in a matter of moments you locate the house, the fence behind the house, the transistor radio sitting on a lawn chair just inside the fence.

  Though you've engaged a different sense, in this scenario you've worked something like a search dog, moving through an area in a systematic fashion, acquiring, then filtering out environmental norms to hone in on a specific element. When we watch a SAR dog work, the process seems magical, but when we translate it to human sensory capabilities, we better understand what we ask the search dog to do with her nose: let every other smell go and find only this.

  SAR dogs can demonstrate any number of nose-driven skills.

  Air-scent dogs are frequently used in relatively unpopulated areas to find living victims. Trained to locate and follow the cloud of human scent made by the microscopic skin rafts we shed and odors we create just in the process of living and moving—think of Pig Pen
, from the Peanuts cartoon, and you've got a fair visual on the evidence we leave—the air-scent dog is invaluable on disaster sites and in the wilderness lost-person scenario. Working quickly, a good air-scent dog can determine if a search area has no living person in it or, alternatively, hone to the scents of an injured family or a single person within a large search sector. Children, young people, or athletes with their higher metabolisms shed more rafts and create a greater cloud of scent. Those who are relatively motionless, like babies, or have a slowed metabolism, like the elderly, release fewer rafts. Even so, air-scent dogs are often successful at locating Alzheimer's patients who have wandered away and ended up stuck in brush or debris, unable to extricate themselves. An air-scent dog works very fast and largely nose up until near the source of the scent.

  Trailing and tracking are terms often (incorrectly) used interchangeably. There are many approaches to both activities. The purist may note substantial differences in the two techniques: trailing uses a scent article; tracking may not, for example, or tracking is more likely performed "head down" on a harness, while the dog's head position moves up and down for trailing, and the lead is longer. There are those who might argue both claims.

  Generally stated, trailing dogs may follow both scent in the air and scent that has fallen onto foliage, objects, cement, or dirt in trail. Using a scent article from a specific person, the handler exposes the dog to the scent and then instructs him to find more of it and follow. These dogs may work head up or head down and, once on the scent, trace the movements of the person they seek as closely as possible. Trailing dogs move quickly and randomly, their path transcribing the wide swath of scent left by a specific moving person. As noted in Jen Bidner's book, Dog Heroes, mid-twentieth-century experiments with suspension devices demonstrated that trailing dogs are able to follow a person who has never touched the ground.