Scent of the Missing

by Susannah

  Twenty-two minutes.

  Matt calls in the find, and we all return to the place where Puzzle had first bounded away from our sweeps. We'll begin the sweeps again, working our way through the last third of the sector systematically, looking for evidence from Puzzle that someone else is there. This last area is the tough one, however, a right bastard third of an acre, the stuff of my misgivings. In we go. Even Puzzle feels it. She struggles to work her way through the thicket, and from feet away I can see bloody streaks on her haunches and another on her ear where thorns have caught her. Our pace slows as moving forward becomes a matter of kneeling, crawling, and cutting in some spots.

  I am on my hands and knees working my way around a tree when Puzzle's head pops upward again, and I hear her thrashing in the brush as she shoulders her way to the hottest point of scent, about fifteen yards away from me. She's got someone, and I can hear the foliage rustle with her wiggling happiness, the beginnings of her victory croon. I blunder forward and a branch snags my glasses and twists them half off my head with enough torque that the frame bends and one of the lenses pops out. The offending branch swings back to pop me in the eye.

  The timer ticks forward.

  We're down a hat and a pair of glasses, but ahead, Puzzle has found a third victim: Sara, heavily camouflaged and trying not to giggle as Puzzle wriggles around her in a sort of happy orbit. When the dog cannot easily get to Sara beneath the tarp, she woofs twice in frustration, turns to me, and woofs again.

  Thirty-seven minutes. Matt attempts to radio in the find, but in this low spot, there seems to be no clear signal, and we get no response. He tries to call a teammate on a cell phone, again getting no response. I feel the passage of time, and though we are well inside the test window, we've got further brush to clear. On the third attempt, the teammate answers and promises to relay the message.

  We've connected to the team at forty-two minutes, and though I know the test parameters suggested no more than three victims, I give Puzzle the "Find more" command anyway, just to make sure. This is more than the test for us. In this wood, it's quite possible someone else—a hiker, or a parent and child out for a walk—is in here. If they're in here, I want Puzzle to find them. I want to report that we found every human in our sector, whether a part of the test or not.

  No, she indicates. No one else. She is very sure. She pushes through the last small section of the sector with her head up and her tail swaying lazily, aware she's done a good job and that it's over. When she catches the scent of our teammates in the parking lot, she dashes to them with great show, wagging and circling and wrooing. And hobbling. She's got something in her paw, and when I arrive to debrief, she grins up at Johnny while I kneel beside her to examine it. There's a broken thorn stuck deep in the largest pad. When did she pick that up? I wonder. She never showed me. I clean the wound, marveling at the power of adrenaline. My own arms and hands are crisscrossed with bloody scratches that, at the time of the search, I didn't even feel, but this thorn is large. I certainly would have felt it.

  "Good dog," says Johnny.

  "Good search," says Fleta.

  "Nice hair," says Johnny, and the rest look at one another and laugh.

  Yes, I can see in a car's rearview mirror, the hair has gone every which way, some of it braided with tiny leaves, some of it sticking straight up. And the branch that cost me my glasses also left a cut on my forehead that looks like a second eyebrow. When I smile in the mirror (and I can't help smiling—we passed!) the cut shifts upward a little, giving me a slightly demonic look of surprise.

  Puzzle puts her soft muzzle in my hand. She's drunk some water and blown a few bubbles in the bowl. There are droplets across her nose and forehead. Never a tidy drinker, she dribbles across my palm. She's good on the hurt paw, but she's cut across the face, and one ear's a little ragged. As I clean her wounds, Puzzle seems content. She lies beside me, both paws extended across my leg as I disinfect the cut on her face. I see her ears pivot; she's aware that other dogs are working other sectors. At the sound of distant "Find!" commands, she looks up at me with sudden question, and her shoulders quiver. Let's go! Let's go! I could do another sector easy! her demeanor suggests, but this is our cooldown period, and whether she needs it or not, I do. My legs are shaky with fatigue.

  One cert test down and two to go. We sit together at the edge of a clearing and listen for the sounds of other searches borne by intermittent wind.

  21. CLEAR BUILDING

  FOR THE FIRST TIME in twenty years, I dream of tornadoes again. Tornadoes and running and uncertain spaces in the dark. One week not long after the Wilderness test, I have a storm dream every night, dreams vivid enough to wake me straight up—not frightened, but breathless and full of wonder—like Alice with the Red Queen, running Faster! Faster!

  These aren't the helpless nightmares of childhood. In these dreams, I have choices—this room or that one, leave the car to hide in a gulley or run downstairs to huddle over my dog. And I'm not alone. Puzzle is always with me. I love that she is with me. Sometimes the whole pack of Poms is with us too, their little hedgehog shapes racing over dark fields. I'm amazed how fast we move together. And in the same direction (that is the stuff of dreams).

  "Wow," says a friend who loves to talk dream symbols. "Tornadoes mean upheaval, destruction, fear of separation." She waves a teaspoon at me. "Your life must be in a whole lot of turmoil right now."

  No more than usual, I think. But it's spring, and the civil defense sirens have already sounded a couple of times. And then there is this coming thing with the search dog. We're all about tornadoes these days. We've got the Clear Building test on us soon.

  The Clear Building test simulates search in structures damaged by explosion, or tornado, or flood—structures that may become rapidly unstable. Some call it the Triage search, which thrusts the implications upfront: In very little time, a dog and handler must determine where victims are located in a building or if an at-risk structure is "clear," which would allow responders to turn their attention to other places where victims may be trapped. This is urgent, accurate canine searching against the clock. There's a special command to start the search and a special reward at the end of it.

  Sister to the Clear Building search is perhaps an even harder one—where dog and handler must circle an unstable building and make the victim/no victim call from outside it. In the catastrophic conditions following disaster, this means the difference between a building being shored, stabilized, and entered by first responders, or not. There are so many variables for dog teams here: Where are the open spaces that allow scent to escape? From where to where does the air move within the building? After storm or before another one oncoming, which way does the wind blow, if it blows at all? And in the dark and in the wind, if my dog makes a slight signal that indicates faint scent from some remote, internal part of a building, will I be able to see it?

  These are the searches that wake handlers in the middle of the night. These are the searches that reset priorities in the weeks before a cert test—when the drive to succeed on a test can eclipse the greater duty to the work. The idea that my dog's signals and my subsequent call may be a life-and-death decision for victims and the first responders who serve them is chilling. The trick is to attend this responsibility without stressing over it. It's easy to feel too much, to think too hard—which for me are first-cousin behaviors to second-guessing and failing to trust my dog.

  Puzzle doesn't carry the weight of such knowledge with her, and she'll work most efficiently if she gets no uncertainty from me. Handlers say that if she really enjoys this training now, she'll commit to the job in situations where it is no longer fun. So on the Clear Building scenario I've got to ramp the dog up, let her do her job, and pay attention to her signals while she's doing it. I've got to be upbeat. She's got to be fast, confident, brief, clear. And we both have to be absolutely in sync.

  We've got this, I think, the first time we try the exercise. Even in the dark, I'm better at sidestepping
debris than untangling thorns. And Puzzle loves live finds. She loves to run.

  Puzzle has never been that interested in treat rewards, but the other handlers tell me that zapped weenies really keep dogs motivated on Clear Building exercises. I have a brand-new bag of cut-up microwaved chicken wieners as a special reward for doing this fast, hard job. They are greasy, wizened, disgusting. But I'm suddenly very popular with every search dog I pass.

  We take our first Clear Building practice session on so beautiful a day it is hard to imagine disaster is even possible. Puzzle quivers with excitement near the building we are to search. Part of the building simulates an apartment complex. Part of it simulates a warehouse. Part of it simulates a high-rise. There are a lot of rooms here, a lot of corridors and closets. In many rooms—debris. We'll be running from bright light into dim. I cup my hands around the edges of my eyes to make my eyes adjust.

  Though my head is full of midgies I can't quite ignore—little flustered thoughts about light, and time, and the pair of us failing to find victims, the specter of a real search where failure could mean a death sentence for someone else—Puzzle seems assured. I wish again for a thirty-second sync to the workings of her mind at the edge of all of this. Standing here with my head bowed against the light, I know only that she seems ready to enjoy her work. She likes the wind-up. She sparks like a firecracker at the moment of command.

  The instructor gives me the signal. "Search and find!" I shout to Puzzle with a quick unclip of her lead. She flashes quickly into and through the nearest room, disregarding its tumble of furniture, jumping over an overturned couch that half blocks the door. While I hopscotch after her, and Rob follows as FAS team in trail, Puzzle dashes into the next room. She finds Melody crouched in a corner beneath a desk. Quick work. A good start.

  "Good girl!" I cry (oh, we've so got this), and hand her the brand-new high-value treat to eat on the run. "Find more!"

  Except she doesn't eat on the run. For the first time in her search training history, Puzzle sits, and takes the zapped weenie, and rolls it around in her mouth, and drops it on the ground, and sniffs it and takes it again, where she chews it blissfully, passing the half-inch morsel from one cheek to another with her mouth open slightly, as though to catch every nuance of its taste across her tongue. She has her head tilted back and her eyes closed in a little where-have-you-been-all-my-life? squint of pleasure. It takes her six times as long to eat the treat as it did to find the first victim. Forty-seven seconds. I clock the treat time and groan.

  "Find more!" I cry as she thoughtfully licks her lips. She bobs her head and canters out of the room to another warehouse area where Johnny is hiding behind a door. Johnny inspires a huge alert in triplicate, a Johnny-Johnny-Johnny ecstasy. They briefly connect; he gives her a scritch; I fumble for a smaller chunk of mini-weenie, the size of my littlest fingernail. Puzzle takes it with a modest smile and to my dismay sits down to enjoy it as the timer continues to tick. It's a small bit of wiener that one of the Poms would have downed in a gulp, but not Puzzle. She makes a full meal of the experience, tilts her head from side to side, working it. At one point, she seems to push her lips forward a little, as though to send the weenie's delicious scent up into the sweetest part of her palate. Oh baby! She seems to smile up at me afterward— is this what searching really fast tastes like? A hard run and then canapés afterward!

  Twenty-eight seconds on the second treat.

  "Find more!" I call again, and Puzzle springs up cheerfully, dashing down the stairs and through a first room, then a second, pivoting from her nose and leaping over an air tank to find Teresa crouched behind a coil of fire hose. The room is dim, but I can see Puzzle working her way into the corner. I see the wave of her blond tail and her dark eyes shining up at me when Teresa is revealed. Puzzle glances to the treat bag and sits with a give-the-doggy-her-due expectation. This is the last room. I tear apart a tiny bit of cocktail weiner and give it to her. It's portion-sized for a Barbie doll, but Puzzle seems prepared to savor it, finishing with a little sigh of pleasure.

  We exit the building, me stumbling squint-eyed into the bright, at five minutes, twelve seconds. An early run, not a terrible time, but almost half of it was devoted to chicken wieners.

  "How'd she do?" asks Terry.

  "Was she motivated?" asks Deryl.

  "She did well," says Rob, while I fumble for words to describe the quick finds coupled with the snail's-pace consumption of weenie. With characteristic understatement, Rob looks down at my dog and says, "But I think maybe she needs a treat she can eat a little faster."

  What would that be exactly? Having set a high standard with the chicken wieners, I've painted myself into a corner as far as treats are concerned. Puzzle has quickly learned that this, her fastest duty ever, comes with one heckuva reward. But weenies are slow eating. When we run the Clear Building exercise again, I try a variety of smaller, crispier treats that the other dogs seem to inhale in motion. Puzzle takes the not-wieners, shoots me a look, then dribbles them to the ground—as if to suggest I'm just having an off day in the treats department—before she dashes off.

  Treat or no treat, at least she dashes off, I think. Our times are improving. We're coming very close to the required three minutes or under. As her skills solidify here, I want to keep her motivation high. In time, Puzzle may not need any treat at all during this kind of work, but for now, I want the new activity associated with very good things.

  Zapped wieners seem to be the reward of choice. She loves best what she loved first, but they are killing our time. One day, I cut them up into Chiclet-size morsels—quick for her to eat, but difficult for me to get hold of in the bag, I realize, when she's speedy to a find and I reach for a reward, coming up with nothing more than wiener grease on my fingers.

  Which is enough, apparently. I make a little abracadabra movement over her head; Puzzle gives my fingertips a quick lick and races off again with the "Find more!" command. At the end of the three-minute drill, we come out with all victims in 2:52. I cheer and praise and feed her three legitimate pinches of shredded wiener during her mad samba among bystanders. She is very proud and has added a popping smack of the lips to her whole woo- dig-me vocabulary.

  Success at last! We've worked out the routine. She runs and finds full tilt, and I pound through the building after her, one hand with a flashlight, the other in a bag fondling weenies.

  By the time we take the Clear Building certification test, the vague scent of grease on my fingers is enough to reward Puzzle for the moment. On the test drill, she gallops through both floors of the building, chivvying out a victim in a stairwell, another behind a door, one in a wooden maze, and another beneath a stack of sawhorses, then canters outside and down the stairs and sits to wait for me, her head high (two floors, eleven rooms and a stairwell, four victims, 2:43). I follow cautiously, squinting and winking and feeling for steps down in the bright morning light.

  I talk with the evaluator. Without requiring a command, Puzzle sits at my feet. I can feel her quivering there, barely able to contain her great joy. She is a grown-up, polite girl, but I have forgotten to reward her for this search well done. As the evaluator and I agree that all victims were found within the timeframe, Puzzle begins to nudge the treat bag hanging from my waist. I hear another handler laugh.

  Rob says, "I think you better reward your dog."

  I look down and she looks up. Ah-roo-wow-wow-wow, Puzzle says, smacking her lips with such vigor her bottom scoots a few inches in its required sit. The message is clear: Good search. Quick search. Some fun was had by dog. She noses the treat bag again and eyes me speculatively, as if to say, But you, my dear, could be a little faster.

  22. TRUST THE DOG

  TWO THINGS I THINK I know about the debris pile at this moment: 1) there's human scent but no human here, and 2) there are also no snakes in the rubble, warm from the sun of this midmorning in May. In these opening minutes of the most downwind point of our Urban/Disaster certification test at a fire training
academy, Puzzle has circled the debris pile and climbed onto it with the confidence of a dog that has issued her own all-clear about the snakes. She moves quickly, her mouth open and her tongue already out sideways against the day's rising heat. Her tail, always a barometer of what she's sensing, sways with the rhythm of her movement. I've finally learned to decode the sway of tail that marks Puzzle wandering off-command and the sway of the tail that says she's working, and she is working here.

  Rubble work is a curriculum all its own: a safety risk with its unstable surfaces, angry, fissured edges and twists of rebar, and a scent challenge due to its fitful air currents. In warm weather, heavy debris may double as a happy habitat for snakes. A tornado or hurricane can change neighborhoods into miles of such rubble, and genuine disaster adds additional problems for the work—the presence of hazardous materials within the debris, the potential that a poorly coordinated search can be fatal to the living victims trapped there.

  With their lower center of gravity and the virtue of four feet, search dogs negotiate rubble much more swiftly than we do. I've tried to learn from them the virtues of staying low, distributing my weight widely, and climb-crawling rather than trying to walk upright over it. I cannot follow Puzzle step-for-step across the rubble, and part of the necessary skill requires working apart from the dog, decoding her indications from a distance, and moving closer only when careful size-up allows us to do so.