Scent of the Missing

by Susannah

  Have a friend long enough, and in time he or she is going to have to break bad news to you. Ellen has been the bearer of bad news more than once. Some of it dog-specific. In 1989, when my husband and I were on a trip to Minneapolis for the Twin Cities Marathon, Ellen dog-sat our Bogie, a Shetland Sheepdog and my first dog. High-energy Bogie had taught me valuable lessons about the perils of puppyhood and boredom, lessons that my husband and I believed we had mastered by the time we went to Minneapolis. Bogie was about eighteen months old at the time.

  On the first evening of our trip, I called Ellen to check on Bogie.

  "How's it going? How's Bog-dog?" I asked.

  She said "Fine," but the word had a tightrope quality to it. A little extra fricative on the F, and the long I sound slightly drawn out.

  "Everything okay?"

  "Yes." The second yes almost seemed convincing, but when I hung up the phone, I turned to my husband and said, "Something's wrong at the house."

  We gave it a few minutes, and then I called her back. Ellen came clean. She hadn't wanted to worry my husband the night before his big run, but the truth was ... Bogie ate a chair.

  "Ate a chair?"

  I had heard correctly. Bogie had stripped a bentwood rocker completely free of its wicker seat and back, leaving only the curved wood behind. The chair looked, she said, like what cicadas leave behind when they slip out of old skin. Maybe it could be upholstered. The wood was pristine. He had not actually eaten the wicker, though it was gnawed into a pretty fringe—piled up in a soggy little stack in the hallway. And he had done the whole job with an assassin's silent efficiency. One minute, Ellen was watching TV and Bogie was asleep in the hallway. The next minute, the dog was asking her for a game of tug, and the chair guts lay where he had been sleeping.

  This was the first piece of furniture Bogie ever ate, but in the course of his extended puppyhood, he also stripped a bathroom of carpet from the comfort of his crate and kindly disposed of a set of mauve hand towels we had received as a wedding present and had loathed for years. When Bogie got through with them, there wasn't enough left to successfully wipe a dipstick. Bogie was a voracious and indiscriminate destroyer of furnishings, whose tastes went everywhere. But he had a private standard. He never once touched a houseplant, a roll of toilet paper, or a shoe.

  Fifteen years later, I thought I came to Puzzle wiser. But Ellen's voice on the other end of the phone suggests otherwise. She has been dog-sitting the crew on evenings when I teach a night course. When I call her to let her know I'm on my way home, I hear the guarded tone she'd used with Bogie all those years before.

  "What?" I say.

  "Your dog," she replies. And though I have six dogs, I know which one she's talking about straightaway.

  "What?" I repeat.

  "She ate the fainting couch." Then she clarifies. "Well, first she dug the stuffing out of it, and then she stripped off the rest of the upholstery, and then she ate..."

  "What?" I imagine a Golden Retriever full of foam rubber and upholstery tacks.

  "...all the treats Sprits'l had been hiding between the arm and the seat cushion."

  I sputter a little, trying to frame this, and then I remember all those "Sit" commands in the kitchen, and Sprits'l trotting off with his treat and his small, superior posture, and I think of the early search games I had done with Puzzle, hiding treats in the house—yes, God help me, even in pockets of the furniture—and I can't do anything but laugh.

  When I get home, Ellen shows me what's left of the antique couch, and I peer down at what's left of the treats too. Puzzle has left a few crumbs that are fresh, but other untouched biscuits are discolored and hard as rocks. Sprits has claimed that couch since puppyhood. Sprits has been hiding his treats in the deep fold of that upholstery a long, long time.

  I'd thought I kept a tidy home. I remember his other favorite spots, and before Puzzle can do a thorough shakedown of the entire house, I search under his preferred dog bed, the spot beneath my dresser where he likes to lie behind the curtains. I don't find biscuits, but I do find his collection of stolen leather things: a key fob with one of my old office keys, a cell phone cover, the luggage tag off my briefcase. Sprits'l has long been given to thieving and now, I realize, to hoarding.

  The disemboweled couch has ended his career, and I go back to look at what remains of it. Unlike Bogie, who chewed wicker from a chair for the sheer pleasure of worrying it free, Puzzle has gutted the couch not for its own sake, but in order to find the treats she could smell deep within the folds of its upholstery, deeper than my vacuum cleaner ever reached. It's too late to punish her, and what would I punish her for? Initiative and success at a game I had originated?

  Ellen comes in with all the dogs. Sprits'l knows immediately that something's up with his couch, and he is outraged at the violation. He huffs over the crumbs, circling and chattering. Puzzle watches me study her handiwork. She has no interest at all in the fainting couch now, but she leans against my knee, her tail faintly waving, as though to say yes, it was quite the job, but I got through it. I make a mental note to find an upholsterer tomorrow, and I consider the digging and tugging Puzzle must have gone through to get all the way down to the couch's wood frame. Making the best of a bad thing, I throw a coverlet over the couch, and I hope Puzzle will search for the source of human scent with the same conviction.

  Goldens are soft dogs, I was told by more than one person in the days before Puzzle. Goldens can be easily wounded. They're so eager to please that a sharp word can destroy them. It is so easy to break their hearts and spirits. Some of this seems melodramatic to me, and counterintuitive, since plenty of Goldens are working dogs of all kinds. Puzzle has not yet shown me any great fragility—in fact, quite the contrary. I have let loose a few sharp words, and though she seems to recognize the knock-it-off meaning behind the tone, she has certainly never cowered. But I move forward with her thoughtfully. Behind the puppy willfulness and general blockheaded egocentrism could be a soft, sensitive dog in the making, I suppose, though you would still never know it at this point while on a walk with her.

  As our walk saga continues, I have tried various collars, harnesses, and the Gentle Leader, a check device that wraps over the muzzle and, when the dog pulls ahead too hard, turns the dog's head due to the inappropriate tension on the lead. The idea is that most dogs will learn that pulling too hard results in a self-generated check. Puzzle strains against all collars; she disregards the changed locus of control with a harness. She responds well to the Gentle Leader for a few, optimistic steps, then suddenly porpoises in a spasm of dislike, landing on her side to paw at her muzzle or try to wipe the hated Gentle Leader off in the grass. The more elaborate the device, the less progress we make. For a number of reasons, I do not use a prong collar on Puzzle. Her puppy and adolescent testing suggested that her threshold for discomfort is very high, and there's the possibility that I could do her genuine harm with a prong collar before she ever truly perceived the check.

  "Why does it matter how she walks?" asks a friend. "Won't she do most of her SAR work off-leash?"

  I try to explain that a good walk is at the heart of obedience, and that obedience is at the heart of good search partnership. The controlled cross of a busy highway, an emergency stop when I shout that command from a distance, a responsive "Down" in the presence of structural instability—all these demands in the SAR field grow out of respect and accord begun on something as basic as a walk.

  Trainer Susan weighs in on my two Puzzles. "At search," she says, "she seems more mature than she is because she loves the work. She likes the challenge. And you're following her. But on a walk, you're telling her to do what she doesn't necessarily want to do. To her, obedience is boring. Remember," she adds, "she may look like a big girl now, but she's still a puppy in the head."

  Puzzle and I walk twice every day, an event I try not to dread. She is remarkably strong, fully capable of going from a nice trot to a doggy broad jump in moments. Walks have left me exhausted,
bruised, and sore a few times, and though I pride myself on a long fuse before I get angry, walks have also occasionally left me purple with frustration. The leash is a telegraph line, I'm told by more than one trainer, and I know any tension I have at the outset of the walk communicates directly to her. At this point, she is rarely on my walk, as Susan would put it, and I wonder if Puzzle feels my tension down the leash in the same way she picks up on Jack's guard-up wariness in the kitchen. I wonder if she perceives this as a similar advantage to be pressed.

  We walk on, regardless. I try all the tactics suggested by trainers, dog whisperers, competition obedience instructors, and sympathetic friends with senior dogs who ruefully remember their early days with leashes and "Heel" commands. One Golden owner, who repeated puppy class three times with her beautiful, reddish male, tells me it's just a matter of patience.

  "Walks were hell for the longest time, and then at one point I looked up when Pico was two years old, and I had the perfect dog. People would stop me and say, 'I want a dog like yours,' and I would think, 'Like mine?' My commands for Pico weren't any different. They just finally sank in."

  Two years old, I think, and gulp. Puzzle has just had her first birthday. Even though passersby often comment that she's remarkably mellow for a young Golden, I'm privy to all the shades of Puzzle on a walk, and mellow is not the word I would choose.

  We head out one cool afternoon following a rainstorm, and Puzzle is charged with excitement after being housebound the majority of the day. She's an especially pretty, spirited dog on this walk, glowing in the muted light after the storm, splashing happily through the occasional puddle. People smile passing us. I smile back, huff-huffing. We wrestle for the first block until she settles into the walk by the second. A settle by block two may be some improvement, I think as she trots ahead of me on a "Wander" command, where she is free to explore ahead in an easy lope, stopping and sniffing and occasionally rolling in soft grass, as long as she doesn't pull on the lead and obeys when we pass a dead squirrel or dog poop and I say, "Leave it."

  "Wander" is getting better, but "Heel" is still awful. In heel, she continues to veer away on a diagonal, as willful a disengagement as she can make while still attached to a lead. We work on "Heel," "Stop," "Sit," "Turn," "Wait," "Leave it," and "Stay" as we walk, with modest success. "Sit" is pretty strong; "Leave it" seems to be the only command with 100 percent obedience. Puz is happy to ignore anything I say no to—an excellent behavior for the search field. "Heel," "Stop," "Stay," and "Wait" need a lot more work. Today I'd be happy for improvement on even one of these.

  This is a dog who will tell me she has found a person tucked in a pipeline beneath three feet of rubble. But, Puzzle, why won't you just walk with me?

  I muse on strategy as we turn another corner and head for a busy intersection that borders a park where we often train. Puzzle pads ahead easily, but she must heel while crossing streets with me. I'm preparing for the inevitable struggle across the approaching four-lane when I step on a loose piece of sidewalk that comes up the moment I put weight on it. I come down, smacking my forehead against cement, my right wrist snapping hard beneath my weight. There's a roar in my head, like the rush of decompression out a hole in an airplane, and though my eyes are open, I realize that for the moment I can't see. I have dropped the leash and hit my head, and when I try to turn to look for my dog, I can't see her. I'm aware that I'm near to blacking out.

  "Puzzle, wait," I say, and with a heart sink that I'm probably going to lose her, it's the last thing I remember for I don't know how long.

  I wake to the huff of her breath in my ear, and I open my eyes to see Puzzle in full alert above me, her leather lead dragging free behind her. How long have we been here? I wonder. The daylight seems changed, but my vision is still not right. We are a few yards from the busy intersection, and my dog has not, apparently, left my side. I sit up. The right wrist is bad. My cell phone is shattered. I use my left hand to touch my head for blood and find a chestnutsize lump. Best to sit a moment. Puzzle sits beside me and attends, offers once to lick my face and then waits quietly minutes later when I try first to rock to my knees and then to stand.

  Five blocks from home on a weekday afternoon. I'm not in great shape, but I have no idea who in this neighborhood would be home at the moment to help us and who would not. I take Puzzle's lead in my left hand, and on the "Wander" command she moves soberly forward without pulling. I'm still dazed, but Puzzle heads for home as though she recognizes the reverse course or intuits our walk is done. She moves gently, ignoring the challenge of two barking Dobermans in a backyard we pass. Here is the obedience we've been working on for almost a year, and I cannot know what provokes it—only that she obeyed a "Wait" command while I lay unconscious, either as a form of obedience or a concern that I had fallen, and now she walks ahead as if chastened by the experience.

  "Good girl," I say to her when we get back in the house. She follows me to the refrigerator for ice and to the phone as I call a friend for a ride to the emergency room, and to her credit, she saves me from additional embarrassment when she puts her muzzle to my backside and I feel the cool wet of her nose against my skin. It's then I realize that not only have I blown out the seat of my jeans and my underwear, but I also walked all the way home mooning anyone who cared to note the tall, shattered woman walking behind a very good dog.

  Piloting a Cessna 172 in 1995

  Dade County search-and-rescue handler Skip Fernandez and his partner, Aspen, rest together after working all night in the rubble of the Murrah Federal Building, Oklahoma City, April 1995.

  Fleta and Saber search the rubble after the F5 tornado in Moore, Oklahoma.

  Max and Hunter in a stream bed.

  Jerry and Shadow rappelling, 2003.

  Johnny and Buster in a wildlife preserve that requires on-lead searches.

  Max and Mercy work in the chill air of an early morning.

  Terry and Hoss search the wildlife preserve.

  Fo'c'sle Jack is a certified therapy dog and enjoys interacting with children from the bow of his dread ship Pork Chop at charity events.

  Ellen and Scuppy, age twenty-three, at a Christmas presentation for nursing home residents. Sociable and kindly, Scuppy became an unexpected role model for Puzzle.

  Mr. Sprits'l on the couch he claimed—and Puzzle ate.

  Puzzle, Fleta, and I observe Johnny and Buster finding a volunteer victim buried in debris. Moments later, Puzzle will duplicate the effort for her first formal search.

  I found him! Puzzle and Matt, her first victim. She has swiped a piece of charred wood as a memento.

  That's a lot of vest for a little dog. Puzzle relaxes off-lead at her second training session.

  Left: Scent work in a fire academy "burn building"—Puzzle is twelve weeks old.

  Below: Puzzle demonstrates "postural echo" in a gentle first greeting of Pomeranian Misty, subdued after the death of her owner just forty-eight hours before.

  Search-dog training builds stamina and confidence. Puzzle works a fire escape in 2005.

  Teaching the dogs confidence on a rappel line is a team effort.

  Left: Puzzle posing after a morning on the debris pile—eleven months old.

  Above: Vines, thorns, and the occasional snake: the Wilderness certification test in Texas.

  Left: Mission ready: Team Puzzle after the challenging Urban/Disaster cert test.

  Below: The backyard "playhouse": La Folie des Chiots.

  Happy at her work: a certified Puzzle finds a photographer in a ravine on a training search.

  15. THIS BOY HERE

  WE THUMP ALONG the shadowed lanes of a mobile home park, awkward behind the steady grace of a moving dog. Heavy in our boots, prickly with sweat, we've been out only a few minutes, and we're chafing already beneath the unforgiving rub of packs—packs in which we've crammed every possible thing we might need in the rescue of a six-year-old boy who's ten hours gone. He is asthmatic, diabetic, allergic to bees, frightened of punishment,
inclined to run.

  Braden has light brown hair and blue eyes. Earlier today, he wore blue shorts and a red T-shirt, green and yellow athletic shoes, and glasses. Two front teeth are missing. He was last seen with other children, older neighbors, squabbling over a Game Boy. Up to this year, he's been a city child, but now he lives in this mobile home park that is rural in three directions and suburban only if you look out the front gate and stretch your eyes toward a gated community across the freeway. Braden was not reported missing until he failed to show up for supper.

  Near midnight, his young mother can barely get a word out, sitting on a picnic table beside her boyfriend, also silent, who has an arm around her shoulders. Her head is down. His is up, attentive, watching each addition to the search. Three, four, five police cars, two fire trucks, and now the dogs. A clutch of other family members stand in the strip of yard beside the missing boy's home. They pulse red-blue in the flash of police-car lights and stand disengaged, watching the search but apart from it. There is an open animosity among some of the group that carries out to where we are. Comments are made, derisive laughter even. Some nod while others shift slightly away.

  "Oh, hell no," said one woman at the earlier arrival of the dogs. She shook her head, went inside, and slammed the door.

  "Now this boy here," says an uncle who has come forward, "has a history of this." The uncle is a tall man standing in the cold pool of a street lamp with his hands in his pockets, head bare, his face flecked with leaf shadow from the hackberry tree that crowds the light. He is the designated family representative, and he has not moved from the place where he stands the entire time we've been here.