by Susannah
While Puzzle stares at me with challenge, Deryl waves away the mosquitoes that have surrounded us in so thick a cloud I can hear them singing against my ears. We're getting chewed to bits while I deliberate and, worse, whoever the poor soul is out there hiding for us in the mesquite and poison ivy has been chewed even longer.
"Has she ever run away from you before?" Deryl asks.
"Not since she was a puppy. And never from a search."
Deryl is a military man of quick decision, but he says gently, "You've gotta let her go."
I take off the lead, and Puzzle doesn't have to be prompted. She's off with purpose—moving quickly while we run behind her. I'm better now at watching my dog and not falling into holes, but this terrain, with its universally high brush covering uneven ground and dried creek beds, is still a challenge. We crash and huff and stumble, chest-high in the scrub that Puzzle presses through. She moves without pausing, and though I only occasionally see an ear or the flip of her tail as she winds her way between the trees, the sound of her suggests she's on to scent. This is not the intermittent, tentative snap and crackle of a dog casually nosing around. I have begun to learn the sound of my working dog as well as the sight of her.
We are losing light. The deepest part of the brush has already gone gray, and as I cut myself free of brush, I realize that I've lost sight of Puzzle altogether. We stop, and in the distance to our right, I can hear my dog's rapid scrambling through the thicket, maybe thirty or forty yards away.
"She's got him," I say to Deryl. "Or at least she's got someone," I mutter. The team has had a few surprises in the wilderness, finding people who'd sought out private spaces and, surprised (and naked), were not prepared for the launch of a joyful search dog in their midst. Now we are veering right and pushing hard to make our way to the dog, and now we're in the strange nether of light between dusk and dark when flashlights don't help much, but the ambient light is too faint to distinguish low branches and braided vines covered in thorns. I'll start falling any minute now, I think, just as a branch flips my glasses off my face and over my head, where they land like a horseshoe around the upturned limb of a young tree.
"Do you hear her?" I ask, blundering forward again.
Deryl shakes his head. In the distance, probably from the direction of a housing community on the other side of this land, I can hear two dogs barking frantically, and I have to wonder if Puzzle has thrown off the search out of boredom or disgust with my slowness, and if she's now a football field or more away, pressed to some fence and taunting those dogs.
I'm about to call her name when I fall hard, landing face first in a thick clutch of poison ivy thrust upward from the base of a tree, twisting my pack off one shoulder and losing my glasses again.
"You all right?" asks Deryl.
I am not all right in any sense, I think to myself, feeling impotent, swallowing frustration—and worse, weak and nauseated after the fall. I am gathering my glasses, shredded gloves, and twisted backpack when I hear the snapping of branches just ahead and Puzzle moaning her victory wroo, a sound which unfailingly means she has found the victim and is proud of it. And because I was not right behind her, this time she has come back to get me and take me to him—a "re-find," we call it. Re-finds can be a trained technique, but Puzzle, never one to let her achievements go unnoticed, does not have to be prompted to go back. She pushes her cold nose to me and quivers a little.
"Where is he, Puz?" I ask, as her movements into the brush quicken. She crawls through some low spots and bounds over vines in others, and a few minutes later I hear her wroo again, see the light flash of her tail as she alerts on our patient volunteer, lying supine in a tangle of thicket.
"Good find! Good girl!" I shout to her, fumbling mangled treats from my pocket as Deryl helps the volunteer out of the brush and Puzzle bounces and preens. It was a good find. Direct, purposeful, independent, and—loyal. Loyal to the victim, loyal to the work, loyal to me. It was not enough to find the fellow once. In the absence of her handler, tonight Puzzle understood the job wasn't finished until she came back and showed him to me.
"See?" said Deryl. "She told you. And know what else she's telling you?"
"What?"
"She's telling you she's ready. And you better be too."
We are days away from the first of three certification tests—Wilderness, Urban/Disaster, and Clear Building—and now is when our strengths and weaknesses will show. In the plus column is certainly Puzzle's great enthusiasm for this work, our joint tolerance for discomfort, our experience together across all kinds of scenarios (now more than 250 training searches with the team or apart from it), and the fact that neither of us gives up easily. In the minus column is certainly that this dog is much faster than I am. We're not a slow team, but I can't help imagining Puzzle with a younger, stronger handler—an even match for her speed. I have seen her pause just so that I could catch up.
Puzzle, just a few months shy of two, is in that marvelous place where puppy energy and adult strength and coordination intersect. This is a happy time for her, and it shows. After training with the team or after training sessions at home, she is talkative and cheeky, full of dog mutters for me and play bows for the Poms, tossing toys their direction for a game. Her engagement with the world is a pleasure, her energy a challenge.
One afternoon, she finds a swatch of my discarded red SAR shirt, torn by thorns in the day's earlier training, and she runs outside with it to taunt the Poms: I have this and you don't. Dog Keep Away is a very real game. Sprits'l is easily incensed and begins to chase her; Whisky's provoked to chase them both; two new little foster Poms get in on the action; and then Jack has to follow, his signature bark like a rooster's crow. The backyard is in an uproar, and when I go out to investigate, I find all the Poms chasing the Golden. They're galloping and barking and chasing her in great circles around the yard. They are amused to be furious, and Puzzle canters before them, tossing her head, the bit of red shirt waving from her mouth like a flag.
No video camera on hand. I sit down on the stoop and think, Watch this and remember.
I look at the Golden and feel the challenge of her. I was forty-four when Puzzle came to me, and I'm forty-six now. I keep reading that forty is the new thirty, and I don't want to acknowledge that a body slows down, but I've already noticed a change in my own stamina just in the time Puzzle's been by my side. I should be getting stronger with all that running after her, I think. But even the neighborhood walk with the forty-pound SAR pack has become tough sometimes. Other days after training, I'm so tired I go to bed with the six o'clock news. What is up with that?
I'm a healthy eater, get plenty of exercise, am not overweight. I scrutinize my diet with the help of a nutritionist. I take more yoga, more dance lessons, walk farther with and without the pack. I've never been a fan of elevators, but now I try to jog rather than walk up every set of stairs. This dog is ready to run, and I want to run this dog.
"Getting old," says my father about both of us when I tell him I've been tired lately. He is maybe joking, maybe not.
She's ready, Deryl said. And you better be ready too.
There are plenty of dog handlers who are older than I am, running young dogs and making very good work of it. I'm determined not to give in to this—even if I have to eat daily bowls of Wheaties in Geritol, or whatever the modern equivalent is.
20. THE WILDERNESS TEST
I MAY BE the one who pulled up a satellite image and the local weather data, studying them over coffee I couldn't taste, but Puzzle is the one who, on a bright March morning in 2006, looks far more prepared to run a certification test than I do. She strains impatiently at the end of her long lead as she waits at the edge of a nature preserve. She can already scent people on the trails. In a few minutes, we will be given a wilderness sector with zero to three victims and an hour and fifteen minutes to find them. The weeks just before Puzzle's Wilderness cert test, some days I felt ready, and other days completely vulnerable, like those dreams about e
xams you haven't studied for that you somehow end up taking anyway, stark naked.
Today I feel thoroughly prebriefed, which should inspire confidence. I know the area, the terrain, the weather conditions, and I know how my dog works. But I also know the wicked, thriving brush that fills the off-trail areas of the lowest parts of this preserve, which is built on a set of rolling hills. No examiner is going to give us a sector as easy to walk as a city park. And I'm betting my sector will include the low spaces. This is brush with teeth that in some areas grows as high as my chest. Not just uncomfortable. Not just impassable in some places. Scent muddles and meanders through it, and Puzzle and I must get through it too. There is my chief concern.
Puzzle will push her way through anything if it's physically possible to do so. She never seems to feel the thorns and slows only when a web of vines is thick enough to trap her. I'm not as quick to follow, though, and if there's a graceful way to get through this kind of terrain on two legs—even with a knife or small machete—I haven't yet mastered it. The brambles here can check me at every pass—snagging my boots, gaiters, pants, shirt, pack, hair, and hat to the extent that I have to cut myself free. It's the snagging and the cutting I'm not too sure about. (Maybe I should take this test naked.) I am concerned that Puzzle might find scent and push to it beyond my ability to follow. I'm now confident she would wait with her victim, vocalize his presence, or come back to return me to that place; what I don't know is how my slowness might eat up our total test time. There's every chance I could be the one to fail us, and I know it.
I've been warned by the examiners who set up the test. All victims are camouflaged. And all victims have been instructed not to make a sound in reward to Puzzle until I make contact and acknowledge finding them.
Matt will run FAS team for us and has been similarly told to do nothing more than define the odd-shaped edges of the sector and radio call the finds. He is ready to go too. He stands a little apart, and Puzzle wanders over to nuzzle him, wagging as he strokes her head. Puzzle loves Matt. He was her first volunteer victim and is one of her favorite field assistants now. Matt's in his twenties. Puzzle is not yet two. They look capable standing together, very much up to the task. I close my eyes and hope to channel a little of that.
In the presence of modern technologies, there are those who suggest that the canine wilderness search will become a thing of the past. Some canine teams already seem to feel the change. At a conference in Baltimore, I spoke with a woman who had once been on a search team that had primarily worked wilderness, a team that eventually folded because they no longer got calls. "Everyone has a cell phone these days," she said. "And a lot of people have GPS units," added another. Some care organizations serving Alzheimer's or dementia populations have expanded their own protection initiatives for patients—shifting from identifying patches on clothing to GPS locators that make it possible for caregivers to track a lost patient via satellite, even in the woods.
Yet lost children on camping trips and hikers who fail to come home are still a part of the news, as are the disoriented elderly, many of whom are found not far away from the care facility or the home they left, but are found hidden in the undeveloped land that surrounds it, having fallen or strayed into terrain they can't escape. Cell phone batteries die, and it may be a while before every individual in a kayak or out for a hike has a GPS locator around his neck. We train forward. In an urban area like the Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex, our wilderness searches are not confined to Boy Scouts who got separated on a field excursion. The chain-link fence behind a housing development may be all that separates civilization from an expanse of owned but unimproved land, rapidly changing a so-called urban search into a wilderness search that can stretch on for miles.
A potential suicide case we worked years ago centered on the deep brush surrounding a steep ravine and the creek that wound through it—all sandwiched in the middle of a fully developed city. Working across that area, we sometimes couldn't see teammates standing eight feet away—the brush was that thick. Yet there was evidence of human traffic and in the most remote corners, for those who knew the way, wild and sometimes beautiful spaces. A winding stream, untouched bird nests, yellow wildflowers peering over the edge of the ravine, a little waterfall. But if you stood still and the wind was blowing from the right direction, you could hear the distant sounds of organized life: traffic, certainly, and a girl shouting to a friend, "Don't be that way!" Someone with an open window calling his child to come in for the night.
And so we continue to train wilderness, knowing an hour from now we could be called to work a state park or the scruffy back forty behind a multimillion-dollar housing development. Easily half our searches result in some sectors that require compass navigation, GPS orientation, and an ability to watch your dog and where you're going at the same time.
The first two I've got. The last one, not so much.
A word from the test coordinators and we are off, heading eastward along a road to the most downwind point of the sector. With any luck, on the way out Puzzle will get a little scent against the wind and either find a victim outright or forecast hot search spots when we come the other way. The breeze, warm at the front and cool at the trailing taper of each gust, invigorates her. She trots out along the cedar trees that border the sector with her head up. She's not pulling on the lead, but I can feel her excited tension on the line. I always think of the poet Robert Herrick's phrase—"that brave vibration each way free"—when Puzzle quickens before a search.
At the edge of the sector, I give her a brisk rubdown to stimulate her circulation and rev her charge even more. I ask if she's ready to go. She is. Puzzle flips her head around with a grin, and I feel her shiver pleasurably beneath my palms. "Find!" I shout, releasing her from the lead, and off she dashes, nosing immediately into the brush to begin our series of wide sweeps perpendicular to the wind. She is quick as I thought she'd be, and in these early minutes I'm having a better time of following her than I had forecast. The woods here consist more of young trees than brush, and as Puzzle winds her way across the area, I see her stiffen, her head pop up, and she makes an abrupt change of direction, nosing through the wood without a sidestep, working a scent cone. In just a few minutes, she has found the first victim, Don, huddled against a tree beneath a camouflage jacket.
Six minutes.
"Good girl!" I praise her. Don laughs. Tight nerves and a mild cedar allergy make my voice a little warbly, and from a distance I can see Matt also grinning. I sound like a squeaky eighth-grader. Puzzle takes her treat and gives Don a second kiss, and when I call "Find more!" in the most masterful voice I can conjure, she heads back to her sweeps.
We make several difficult presses through the woods again, but I see no sign of scent from her until the fourth sweep, when she leaves the woods entirely and crosses to the path in the middle of our sector. I watch her make a little arc with her muzzle and her eyes narrow with thoughtful appreciation. It's like watching dog radar. By all the signs I know from Puzzle, this dog is about to lock in and run.
I push out of the woods after her and raise up a few feet from the clearing. But I raise up prematurely, just in time to be caught by the low branch of a tree—a right sharp smack to the forehead. "Ohhh—" says Matt, in the way crowds go "Ohhh" after a hard hit on the football field. His face is red. I think he's trying not to laugh. My hat has gone, but before I can retrieve it, Puzzle gathers herself for a leap into the opposite brush. I see her head come up, and she is off and running uphill before I'm clear of the woods she had left.
I ignore the hat, which I can come back for after the test, and run after Puzzle, desperately trying to follow her course through the woods. Puzzle chooses a path that bends to the east before it curves back southwest, and behind me I hear Matt call that we may be crossing out of the sector. I can't be sure, moving as fast as we are, but my dog is certainly onto something human. She scrambles upward along uneven stones, and at the top of a rise, she pauses, as though the scent she'd been cer
tain of had suddenly disappeared. For dog and handler, it's a peculiar "what the—" sensation when a dog runs out of a scent cone. Like being in the middle of a deflating hot-air balloon—a moment of great hoosh and then, now what?
It's a critical point for the handler too, but I've learned that in the wilderness, Puzzle never seems to fret over the now what. She's good about working her way back to the last point of scent. Today, all jumped up in the hard light of the cert test, I'm as likely to misdirect her as to do anything useful for the search. So I just shut up and watch. Difficult to do. Hard not to hurry her. But I've pressed Puzzle in previous training, tried to do the job for her, and have seen the exasperated confusion that followed. Sometimes to be faster, you have to be absolutely still.
Puzzle stands quietly, turning her head slightly to the left and the right. I see her mouth open slightly and her nostrils work. She reminds me of a boy I once played Hide-and-seek with as a child. He was fast and intuitive about all the good places his playmates would hide, and at the moment he ran out of good leads, he'd stand perfectly still and wait for someone to betray themselves by sound. It always worked, and stillness will work for Puzzle too, with her nose lifted to catch the thinnest strand of human scent on the wind. One wayward little gust or one movement out of her victim will confirm it.
Her pause gives me a moment to recover, and behind where she stands, I peripherally try to determine if we are still in the sector or not. Difficult to tell with no map and only a set of directions to go by; the area looks different up here, some of the marking tape is obscured by brush, and I can no longer be sure of our boundaries. Matt, twenty yards away, is also considering, but we don't have long to deliberate. Puzzle suddenly twitches, and she's off again, taking her chosen path west-southwest to a low valley while Matt and I, on intercepting courses, meet behind her. At the base of a hill, she leaps suddenly upward, taking in air with merry, greedy gulps, as though she's wading through a bowl of scent soup. She ignores paths and scrambles through low brush to the top, where a young woman is hidden beneath a camouflage tarp. Puzzle alerts, beaming at the victim, at me, at the victim, at me as I make it to the top.
