Scent of the Missing

by Susannah

  Tracking dogs, on the other hand, may follow a combination of elements: disturbed vegetation and scent left by footsteps on the ground. An excellent tracking dog—sometimes called a "cold-scent dog"—can follow a path that is days or weeks old, even if the track has been blurred by the passage of numerous other people. This technique is often attributed to the Bloodhounds we associate tracking runaway criminals in novels and film noir, their nose-down posture as famous as their throaty bays. Bloodhounds are, however, excellent trailers on a cold scent too. The Bloodhound is famous for its number of scent receptors: 230 million as compared to other scent-working dogs, whose estimates range between 200 to 220 million. And both, of course, outstrip our human gift of scent. With forty times fewer scent receptors, we are significantly unversed about the spectrum and prevalence of human rafts.

  Human Remains Detection (HRD) and cadaver dogs are trained to alert on the remnants of human death. The two terms are not necessarily synonymous. Cadaver dogs specifically recover deceased humans and locate skin, hair, bones, blood, and the indeterminate mix of scents made of semen, urine, sweat, and the process of decomposition, which has an evolving scent of its own. HRD dogs are also often able to discriminate between human and animal ash. These dogs may alert over graves from a century before. One of the most remarkable possibilities with the HRD dog occurs when human remains are buried near the root structures of trees. HRD dogs may put up their paws and stretch to alert on the relevant tree, which exudes human scent as part of its photosynthesis and related processes.

  Search dogs can also effectively work from boats on water to recover the drowned. Though theories vary as to what, exactly, the dogs catch scent of from the water—some say the creation of gases an intact body creates, others suggest the more straightforward scent of natural oils, skin remnants, and decomposition—the SAR dog can be extremely useful to recovery dive teams and drag crews who need to narrow the range of an underwater search.

  Skeptics abound. A SAR team's quickest allies come from the public who run hunt dogs, or those who work seizure-alert or cancer-detection dogs, from law enforcement officers with search, bomb-, or drug-sniffing canines of their own, and from those who are willing to suspend disbelief for the moment to learn. And the dogs don't necessarily make it easy to believe. To the uninitiated, a dog in a sector that doesn't have a workable scent can look suspiciously like a dog having a good time in the bushes. And a dog actually on a scent that's wavering in conflicted air can look downright confused—checking empty corners, turning circles on a sidewalk, or snaking sideways for a moment to pick it up again. It took me six months of running with experienced handlers before I could begin decoding the subtler signals of a searching dog in progress. And the dogs too finesse their skills with experience. Every time we train, I learn some new pause or movement from dogs I've worked with for years.

  Where skepticism becomes a problem is at the point of deployment. A team can be called to a search because someone in charge has brought in all available resources, only to arrive and find that search management isn't sure how to assign the dog teams and is pretty much convinced that dogs are useless anyway. Persuasion and explanation on-site take time, time that some situations can't afford. And so the condition perpetuates itself: Bloodhounds are sent out to run a city park days after an abducted child has been taken to another area, or air-scent dogs are asked to track a single scent only after two hundred volunteers have grid-walked through the field the day before. Dogs are not "the magic bullet," as one trainer I know often says. Search dogs are a resource like any other, and their work must be understood if they are to search effectively.

  "We hate to see the dogs come in," one detective said to me a few years ago. "It's a sign of defeat—means we've turned a corner and that the victim is probably dead."

  I said, "Hey, we have dogs that do live finds too. With our dogs, it's such a priority that they certify in live finds first."

  Perhaps he sensed I was about to go into an unwanted rafts and metabolism lecture or worse, into some fanciful realm he usually reserved for neighborhood psychics on a crime scene. "We only use dogs for human remains," he said definitively, shaking his head. "Live people just don't smell bad enough."

  Head trainer Fleta holds Puzzle in the soft grass of a local fire training facility. Ahead of us is a railway tanker, to the left a double row of demolished cars, to the distant right a simulated disaster site, the "debris pile," where Puzzle will eventually learn to find victims buried in rubble. Today's training includes Puzzle's first "runaway" searches with the team. The objective is simple: find the woman who is now unseen and get the treat she took with her.

  Puzzle may not yet have shown any deep affinity for me at home, but on command from Fleta she scrambles across the grass to find me where I've hidden behind a car. She gallops ungracefully, rounding the corner of a smashed vehicle too quickly. The physics of puppy fat and wayward legs aren't with her, and she falls over with a little skid, righting herself with a shake and continuing on to where I crouch. She wags wildly as we praise her. We do a second find-your-handler runaway, and the second time she measures her pace a little better. We see her briefly hitch at the place where she'd found me previously, but when I'm not there this time, she lifts her nose, snags a thread of scent, and pivots at that nose point, changing direction, heading for me in the new spot. This is a moment of revelation for both of us. Puzzle learns that sight has its own limitations and that in this game, scent prevails. I have the opportunity to watch her blink-quick decision to trust her nose.

  We repeat the game with a reverse of position. I hold Puzzle while Fleta shows her a treat, then cover her eyes as Fleta runs and hides thirty yards away. At the command "Find!" Puzzle trots forward a few steps, then dashes wildly in the direction Fleta traveled. Following behind, I notice with some amusement that the puppy is wagging so hard her tail's propeller action almost seems to make her fat bottom loft. "Good girl!" I hear from Fleta. "Good girl!" I also praise. Puzzle takes her treats and trots back to what she must think is the starting point. She flops down in the green grass, snitzes once, and tosses her head with a grin so wide it eclipses the rest of her face. She looks like a little blond Halloween pumpkin laughing there, full of merry confidence and more than a bit of mischief.

  The squirrels at home are less enthusiastic. Puzzle's nose has become a problem for them, and I see three lined up on the roof of the garage, leaning forward on their paws and cussing the puppy in long-winded bursts of angry chittering. I watch one deliberately push a broken stick until it falls and hits her over the head. It's a small stick that she ignores, because at the moment Puzzle is head down in her fourth newly dug hole. Quick and intent, she paws at the soft earth rapidly, her bottom high and little plumes of rich black dirt shooting out from between her legs. The more she digs, the more the squirrels scold, and as I watch I soon realize why: Puzzle is digging up their buried pecans. She doesn't eat them, preferring instead to drop them on the slate sidewalk, mission accomplished, then turn to nose across the ground to a new spot with a likely nut beneath.

  It's eight in the morning, and as I look around the yard four holes are in plain sight. There could be more around the corners at the edges of the yard. In the half-hour since her breakfast, Puzzle has undone a single squirrel's long workday, unearthing a week of winter food. There is no doubt the squirrels are watching and disapproving. I guess that these three are probably residents and that it's their hard labor she's made short work of.

  She turns her attention to a flowerpot whose plants have long since died dramatically. The coleus lies in a limp Sarah Bernhardt pose over one edge of the pot, but Puzzle is far more interested in the other side of it. The squirrels and I watch as she raises up on hind legs and balances her forefeet in the dirt, then begins scratching a hole in that uneasy position. It's slower work, involving balance and great care. I watch her occasionally pause to consider the hole, and at one point she puts her nose down into it and huffs. I hear the echo of her sn
ort against the sides of the terra cotta, and I see a little blizzard of dirt fly immediately upward into her eyes. She lifts up, blinking a little, her nose black with dirt to her forehead, the tips of her paws also black to the wrists. She hops down from the pot, sauntering toward me in a posture of quiet triumph. The squirrels riot across the shingles as she drops a sheathed, very black pecan at my feet.

  But before Puzzle and I can interact about the digging and the pecans, she stiffens, lifts her nose, and then trots to the edge of the backyard. She stands there a long moment, nostrils working, though there's nothing I can see through the thin spaces of the privacy fence. She huffs and moves forward, her tail slowly beginning to wag. I still see nothing.

  "What have you got, Puz?" I ask her, just as I hear the rapid tip-tip-tip of paws and the harder, ungainly slap of feet as Gerand and his new dog, Token, approach the house. I can hear Gerand gasping, Slow... down... dog.... slow... down... dog, but Puzzle wuffs happily and races Token on the other side of the fence, and neutered though he may be, it's the female dog Token pays attention to. He sparks to her unseen energy, showing off, perhaps, connects through the fence, then makes a little revving sound and pulls Gerand harder northward. Puzzle presses her nose to the place where he was, savoring the delicious last scent of them as they leave us. She heaves a little sigh, sits down with a plop.

  "Good girl to let me know they were coming, Puz," I say, though I know she doesn't understand.

  I haven't talked to Gerand in weeks. And it sure doesn't seem like I will today. I climb onto an overturned flowerpot and watch the pair of them go. Token, nose high, is on his own agenda, but when they turn the corner, Gerand has his own face lifted. He's moving well. He looks bright and engaged. And he looks happier than I've ever seen him. The universe prepares you, he once said to me. I look down at my own dog. Oh, doesn't it just.

  7. TRUST FALL

  WHEN YOU STAND at the edge of a building with your heels hanging free over the side, kinetics create a delicious little tension that travels right up the nervous system to your brain and to your heart—a hot, silvery sensation like breathing mercury or swallowing sparks. Standing there now, at the top of the "high-rise," a tall building used at the fire academy, I feel wind strum my rappel line, and I consider mortality. Or simply humiliation: a misstep that sends me flailing over the side to smack against a wall on the way down and my own late correction on the line that forces a teammate at the bottom, working safety, to pull taut and suspend me there like a spider caught in her own long thread.

  There are a dozen ways to get stupid on a rappel line and just a few ways to be cool. I don't fear heights, which is in my favor. I'm still working on cool. I've already kissed brick a few times today, blowing out the left knee of my fatigues. Both my elbows are bloody and bruised.

  Today marks Puzzle's third weekend to train with the team, and it's also the day that human teammates are scheduled to rappel and work on high-angle rescue. We are at a fire department training facility, and rookie firefighters are half a football field away from us, working a large engine, fighting a simulated tanker blaze. We have watched them climb a long ladder and sway there, and now they release water from that high angle of attack. This is the maneuver, backlit by flame, which we see so often in movies.

  Autumn plays tricks with us. It's warm this morning, and a light wind carries mist as far as Puzzle's crate, which I have placed in the shade of the ladder tower a distance from where we work. Some dogs are prone to separation anxiety, a concern we don't want Puzzle or any young search dog to share, and so she is crated at a distance with her stuffed lobster and a treat and something to watch—in this case about twenty young firefighters working the tanker. She lies comfortably there, lifting her nose and squinching her eyes shut, happy about water in any form and particularly happy about this mist on a warm day in the shade.

  When I walked away a half-hour ago, she didn't whimper. A good sign, said a colleague to me, but I remind myself that Puzzle hasn't yet seemed concerned when I've left her in any venue. I can see her from where I stand seven stories up, a blond bit of pocket fluff against the dark floor of her crate.

  Earlier we rappelled from the ladder tower, much closer to where Puzzle lies, a three-story structure open on all sides planted in the middle of a parking lot. It's no great height, but the backward launch from the top of it can still be scary. I envied the double-handful of us that launched confidently backward with an arc of a jump and a landing soft as an astronaut on the moon. Three little swings and two little touches to the building and they were down on both feet, looking up and grinning to the rest of us. My own descents lacked that easy grace, characterized by an awkward spurt of trajectory that resembled a hippopotamus giving birth on the run. I had some trouble rappelling from the ladder tower, which has no walls but does have an open metal framework along the sides. The experts among us managed to gaboing-boing-boing down with their feet precisely contacting the framework. Not me. I either missed the framework entirely, swinging completely through and then banging it hurtfully on the way out again, or contacted the metal braces in a sort of straddle, a right smart rap on the backside, on the ischiopubic ramus, said one of our paramedics, which somehow made it hurt more.

  Now, at the top of the high-rise, the wind is blowing warm and fitful from the south. We are rappelling down the protected side of the building out of the wind, but up here on the roof in queue for our turn to drop, the wind puts hair in my eyes and whips the sleeves of my T-shirt, making me feel a little shaky, a little scattered. I'm about tenth in line, with plenty of time to watch and learn. Or not. I peer over the side to Deryl, holding the line on the ground. He is an imposing man, but from the roof he seems small. When I go over the side, it'll be Deryl providing safety if I forget how to rappel. From here, it's not the size of the guy that makes me feel safer, it's the intensity of his focus. A good man. He would be quick on the line to stop my falling self two beats before I might know I'd lost it.

  I move away from the edge of the tower. I look at the teammates ahead in line and realize that ten years ago, probably none of us would have forecast we'd be on the roof of a building together, preparing to step off the edge of it. Backward.

  "You couldn't pay me to do that," said a visitor to a booth the team had hosted during a neighborhood safety fair. She was speaking collectively, gesturing to the brochures and photographs we had at the booth depicting the working life of a canine SAR team. They are candid shots without airbrush, and in them we are rappelling with dogs on line with us, pushing through mesquite thorns in the wilderness, sweating in 105-degree heat on the debris pile while we traverse it behind our dogs, watching for signs of human scent. When I told her that we are an all-volunteer group, she gave me a little laugh and a doubtful twist of her head, and said, "You do this for fun?"

  It's a common question, and one I'm often at some loss to answer. We do it for service would be the summary response, and accurate too, but sounds a bit lofty, and canine SAR folk are not generally a lofty group. We trudge through Dumpsters too often, carry our dogs' warm poop bags too frequently to claim much glory. Though certainly some of the training is fun, the work itself is challenging in every respect.

  Behind every experienced handler with a dog or assistant in the field is an implied rigor: years of training scenarios and practice searches—three to seven hours weekly in all types of weather, campouts involving ten to fifteen hours of wilderness training, classes in everything from scent theory to medical assessment to meteorology to report writing to building construction and situation size-up and, following that, required exams. And for many, daily training on some aspect of SAR, whether decoding dot-dashes from a Morse code CD or tying figure-eight knots on a bight with a sample bit of rope. And work with the canines at home too—a reliable dog on a disaster site may have hundreds of hours of "Heel" and "Down" and "Stay" from his handler, training that proves he can control himself amid chaos and respond appropriately on command. Early in my experience with th
e team, a colleague said, "To work volunteer SAR, your idea of what makes a good weekend has to be flexible."

  A news reporter once mentioned off-camera that our volunteer status surprised her. She had figured "canine SAR teams were made up of elite, paid professionals." I'm not sure how she typified elite, but paid wouldn't apply to most canine SAR teams I know. The reverse is true: most of us pay to be able to do this. Canine SAR units are often not-for-profit organizations, but contributions rarely equal the yearly expense of running even one dog. Unpaid we may be, but professional we strive for. Canine SAR is part of America's long, worthy tradition of volunteer emergency response, going back to the earliest days of colonial firefighting.

  Among our team members are a few common denominators. About half of us are former military. A good few are former or current first-responders—police, paramedics, firefighters. We have professional dog trainers among us. A handful of pilots. A few scuba divers and a couple of rock climbers. But we are also students, entrepreneurs, bookkeepers, schoolteachers, engineers, tech support personnel, and one of us aspires to be a pastry chef. Though our working backgrounds are disparate, we're generally outdoorsy and unafraid of getting dirty. And we all love dogs. It's also safe to say we share a deep sense of responsibility toward our fellow human beings, driven by an impulse to serve that training intensifies and the search field completes.

  Canine search-and-rescue attracts a lot of interest—an interest that increases in periods following catastrophe or after a particularly riveting news story illustrates the poignant connection between a dog and the human he has found. Many teams have no lack of short-term volunteers, some who are simply interested in the work as a hobby, others who believe it's a simple matter of putting a family pet in a vest and walking around until he finds something, still others who are attracted to the media attention and vicarious glory. And some, of course, who have both an urge to contribute and a willingness to give up, in our case, weekend mornings and some weeknights to training. Work with our team also means risk: even in training we may crawl over unstable rubble, hike through wilderness and emerge from it bloody, or lie in crushed vehicles on a hot summer day while waiting to be found by a young search dog that is still learning.