Scent of the Missing

by Susannah

  "It's amazing," says the father, "how much dogs pick up on things we humans would otherwise miss."

  For a while we eat in silence, then a young man brings his toddler daughter up to ask for a greet and a pet. As the little girl reaches down and says, "Lula, Lula, Lula," her father explains that they lost their Golden a month before to cancer. Lula was an eight-year-old "red dawg," as breed fanciers sometimes call them, a darker field Golden, but the child clearly recognizes the characteristic expression, shape of the head, and plume tail. "Lula," she says. She lifts Puzzle's ear and begins to whisper into it, and Puzzle's occasional wariness with children melts in the presence of this small dark-haired girl, who sits beside her quietly and strokes her shoulder with a forefinger. Her father says little, though he smiles when I compliment his daughter on her gentleness with my dog. He bends down to them both, Puzzle's tail thumps, and I get a sense of the missing dog who would once have completed their circle. When they leave us, the young father's shoulders sag. His daughter may have done the asking, but he apparently needed the contact with Puzzle too.

  We go home to lie together on a lounge chair in the backyard. I stroke my newly certified Golden, who wastes no time going belly-up beside me in the deep shade of pecan trees. Any celebration worth doing is, apparently, worth doing upside down, unconscious, teeth bared.

  "Mission Ready" is the term we apply to dogs that have trained and passed all initial air-scent tests for living victims—Wilderness, Urban/Disaster, and Clear Building. Puzzle is now ready to deploy on any land search involving potential live finds. The tests have been rigorous, but they have simulated many of the most common search conditions. And like all good tests, they have taught us something as well. Puzzle and I can go forward with a thorough understanding of the hard strategy behind canine search and with a confidence in our working partnership. What's next? I wonder, glad to have Puzzle next to me, glad to be ready at last.

  But I am thoughtful too. We can take nothing for granted. This decade's unprecedented disasters—the 9/11 attacks, a levee's failure, and the loss of a space shuttle—have already scribbled new rules in the margins of canine search procedure. And the Columbia disaster continues to raise debate over what dogs offer this kind of recovery and how they may be changed by it. The shuttle's disintegration at 207,000 feet and at eighteen times the speed of sound still instructs us about fire, compression, exposure, and altitude, about the catastrophic transformation of human scent on the wind.

  23. COLUMBIA

  A YEAR BEFORE Puzzle was born, the space shuttle Columbia fell over Texas on a sunny winter morning already giving way to what seemed like an early spring. I first knew of the disaster when suddenly all my dogs began to bark, jerking me from sleep. The dogs—including deaf Scuppy—erupted as suddenly as though someone had kicked down the door, and seconds later I heard a resonant boom, and then a second one, fainter. I had grown up next to air force bases, and the sound of a sonic boom was familiar to me, though it had been decades since I heard one, supersonic flight being banned over the United States in the late sixties.

  Unsure if I had heard a sonic boom or a sequence of explosions, I opened the back door. The dogs rushed out to the yard and there joined all the other barking dogs in the neighborhood. I could identify individual dogs in the uproar: the Wirehaired Terrier across the street, the Border Collie two houses down, the pair of senior German Shepherds a block away. While my dogs raced across the fence line, yapping frantically over something I couldn't perceive, I stood in the sunshine—a beautiful day remarkably similar to September 11, 2001—and looked up at the sky, wondering if I had heard the first moments of another terrorist attack. The sounds had seemed to come from the south, the general direction of downtown Dallas, and if something were happening there, the civil defense sirens might go off soon, I thought, or surely police and fire vehicles from all over town would begin their screaming course toward the area. I listened for sirens and heard none. A mystery.

  The sounds had been so clear to me. Boom. And fainter, boom.

  I turned on a radio outside and a television inside, where two voices from separate stations quickly broke in on regular programming to release early information. Communication with shuttle Columbia lost, the news said—then twenty minutes of deliberation over what that phrase, "communication lost," might mean. On television, there was a tight, curious friction between the official statements and the faces of the people reading them. Though nothing was confirmed, no one on the air seemed doubtful. No one seemed hopeful, either. Columbia was gone long before a NASA press release confirmed it. Homeward bound, the aircraft was presumed destroyed across the skies just west, and south, and east of us, the trouble beginning as far away as the Texas Panhandle, they said, and ending in Louisiana.

  I looked at my pager, as search team personnel were probably doing across the country, and wondered if we would be called. The immediate question for canine teams would involve not rescue but human recovery, if such was even possible after a high-altitude, high-speed catastrophe of this kind. Unlike the low-altitude loss of the shuttle Challenger, where the aircraft itself remained somewhat intact when it fell into the Atlantic Ocean, Columbia's breakup and its outcomes were a matter of great question, debated by every aerodynamics expert that newscasters could get on camera as the day progressed.

  When the search team met for training later that morning, we still didn't know. Word had it that some pieces of the shuttle were still airborne, some still coming down, and that the lightest debris might be falling for weeks. Hard to imagine, looking up into a blue and seamless sky. We'd learned that federal agencies would join forces to collaborate on the recovery of the aircraft itself, but in those early hours, we had no word about plans for crew recovery and whether dog teams would be needed at all. Guesswork at this point was useless. We set up the day's training scenarios, and the dogs of the team headed out in the field to work.

  Late the next afternoon, the pager went off, signaling deployment, followed by a rush of e-mail and faxes. Authorities believed the Columbia recovery would be a long one, and our team would deploy in stages, three dogs and human counterparts leaving the first day, another three dog teams to leave five days later as canine units were rotated in and out for rehab periods. The unspoken message suggested this would be a hard search—grueling physically, difficult emotionally, perhaps tough psychologically. Six of us left Dallas the next day in a tandem of cars at midnight, already girding up for a human recovery we could not imagine. We would snake a course through small towns in the five-hour drive southeast to Lufkin, where we would join search teams from across the country convening in the same place.

  It was a long drive to begin at midnight after most of us had worked all day. There was a lot of time to think. We made our way out of the Metroplex down a major freeway as far as we could take it, then onto narrow state roads, darkness increasing as civilization gave way to stretches of ranchland and wide plains of undeveloped scruff. Too long a city dweller, I noticed how the night sky changed colors as we drove, shifting gradually from a hazy dark gray to an immense and star-flecked black that stretched from horizon to horizon. I had seen this sky before from my airplane, and beneath it I again felt small, puttering down the two-lane in my red PT Cruiser, insignificant beneath a velvet and diamond drum skin. Normally that anonymity was a comfort, but tonight the size of the sky and the size of the job ahead combined in such a way that I drove with both hands gripped on the wheel.

  We drove with our FRS radios on, checking up on one another as the drive wore on and two, then three in the morning approached. A mistake: I'd bought coffee at an all-night gas station on our way out of town—scorched, tarlike coffee that seemed strong enough to melt the thin Styrofoam cup that held it and made my stomach burn as though I were sipping sulfuric acid. The coffee had enough jolt to keep me wide-eyed through Kemp, Mabank, and Eustace, but by Athens I was stiff and achy in the driver's seat, and horribly tired.

  Ninety minutes out of Lufkin, I was in
trouble. I was so impossibly sleepy that I began to slap myself to stay awake, sharp little pops on the face, the way they do in movies. I thought of Jimmy Stewart in The Spirit of St. Louis, playing Lindbergh on his transatlantic flight, dozing off while the plane made a steady descent down to the water, but I couldn't think of it long. This was not a time for thinking about sleepy people in the small hours.

  Time to pull over. I was about to key the mike to tell Max I'd have to stop when suddenly something hit the side of my car with the force of a softball, exploding across my half-opened window and, through it, into my face and hair. I jumped, the car swerved, and immediately teammates began calling on the radio. Though they had not seen the object that hit the car, they saw the swerve and feared I'd fallen asleep at the wheel.

  No, I had not, and I was certainly awake now. No need to slap further.

  Coffee. I could smell coffee, artificial creamer, and the pungent smell of something else. My face was sticky, and the heat of the car and the wind whip from the open window had already begun to dry my hair into crisp, sugary twigs. Someone had thrown a full cup of liquid out of a vehicle going the other way, and whether intentionally or not, they'd broadsided my car—and me—with it. Lufkin was still miles away, but the night was creeping on, and since we were called to an early morning briefing there, this was no real time to stop. I poured a little bottled water into my hand and patted the gunk off my face and eyelashes, figuring I could manage a better wash-up at the Civic Center once we were there.

  The road seemed to grow darker before Lufkin's lights pricked the horizon. Now there were occasional objects in the shadows at the edge of my headlights, objects on the side of the road, objects in the grass alongside it. The shapes weren't immediately recognizable as curls of tires or sheared bumpers or the frame of a chair fallen off the back of a truck. One violent twist of metal extended up from the grass like a rabbit on its hind legs, shiny in some places and dull in others. We were moving quickly, and I didn't stop to stare, but I wondered if we were seeing shuttle debris that previous drivers had moved from the road.

  Two of the dogs worked me over thoroughly when we arrived and, once out of the car, they got a downwind whiff. Both dogs were busy peeing and shaking off the long sleep, but they weren't too busy to stretch up for the sleeve of my jacket, and when I bent down to them, to examine my face. Intently curious about the odd-smelling Susannah, neither of them attempted to lick the residue off my arm. I wondered about that until Hunter's interest in my splashed jacket was so profound that two of my teammates suspected the coffee-bomber had also taken a pee in the cup. One of them peered at the driver's side of the PT Cruiser and noted the precision of the impact and the wide spray of fluid extending to the back of the car. Huge and goopy, like the bird-splat of a pterodactyl doing a victory roll. Might be good, my teammate said, to find a drive-through car wash sometime soon and get whatever that was off the paint.

  The parking lot at the Civic Center was already full. We were early for the briefing, but the area was in motion—a starburst trajectory of uniformed figures walking out and back to vehicles and a number of people moving the other way toward the door. A ring of television trucks circled the action in as close a press to the building as could be managed, bristling with antennae and dishes tilting toward the sky. A passing police officer gestured us in the direction we needed, and we walked into the building caught by a line of cameras marking the new day in the recovery of Columbia.

  The agencies in charge were still getting established in separate areas of the main auditorium. We gathered to wait at the edge of a corridor, watching food vendors and the Salvation Army arrive to set up emergency support. As we passed, kindly staff offered Happy Meals, hot coffee, doughnuts, and foil-covered plastic cups of orange juice. I had eaten a day's worth of food on the drive, suspecting it might be a long time before I ate again, so I was too full to eat anything. One older woman looked so worried when I declined that I took a cup of orange juice to drink on the ride to wherever.

  More movement in and out of the auditorium, then whole groups were ushered out of the main hall and into the corridor. I could hear the tinny whine of a loudspeaker. There was a pointed closing of the doors. We waited there more than an hour, taking turns checking on the dogs in the trucks, who had wisely decided on another nap in the pinkish-gray light of morning. I leaned against a wall and closed my eyes. The corridor was cold and fatigue had stretched my tired nerves to the point that every sensation seemed to leave a bruise.

  "You okay?" asked a teammate, who was also a nurse.

  "Just figuring out a way to get around the tired," I answered.

  She sipped a cup of coffee and said, "I'm trying to tell myself that I've actually had a good night's sleep and that what I feel now is just a hard time waking up."

  It sounded like a good idea. "How's that working for you?" I asked, cracking an eye open.

  "Oh," she laughed, "votes won't be in until noon."

  But she looked better than I did, and she'd been up a lot longer. I looked across at the vendors, on standby as they waited for the auditorium briefing to end. They were primed to serve, gazing back at me from behind coffeepots and big bowls full of ice and juice and bottled water. Inspired by self-deception, I returned to the woman who'd fussed over me as tenderly as a grandmother and tried my colleague's line: "I'm having a hard time waking up." She poured me a cup of coffee the way, she said, her husband the trucker drank it: five plastic thimbles of cream and three sugars. I thought of my earlier car bomb, and I felt my teeth curl, but I had to admit this hot coffee milkshake smelled delicious. The lady pressed me to take an iced-chocolate doughnut, and I did not refuse her, returning to the group charged with enough sugar and caffeine to make an elephant tap dance.

  The auditorium doors opened. An intense young woman arrived to brief us, or rather, to brief Max while we stood in earshot. She identified the chain of command—who we should report to and who, in turn, would report our information upward. She described the small town we would stage from, told us to make certain we took no cameras into the field, and confirmed the place we would return to sleep. We should leave immediately, she said, and expect to be in search sectors by 10:00 A.M. We were to watch out for the media, to refuse to respond to reporters, and to refer them to the designated NASA and FBI spokespersons. As she moved away, she stopped and turned back briefly to look at the group of us. "And," she said, her expression somber as she nodded to the row of media vans outside, "no jokes. No jokes about anything at all." It was a comment out of nowhere, relayed downward perhaps from incident management and designed to forestall gallows humor, that desperate levity that sometimes shows up on searches.

  Easy to comply. We weren't laughing and didn't have a joke between us, but we left Lufkin duly cautioned. Dawn had given way to another mild day in late winter, and we drove to the place of deployment on a gray ribbon of road beneath a dome of blue sky.

  Shadow's ticked coat threw sparks in the sunlight as she moved confidently, person to person, introducing herself and petitioning for treats. We were standing outside a small-town meeting hall with our dogs and our gear amid a number of other canine teams. From a distance, the crowd of people, backpacks, and dogs on this bright day might have suggested a happier gathering. It would have seemed a good day for a group hike or a geocache expedition. But here where we stood, the dogs alone were lively among us. They had all had naps. They were experienced enough to recognize their handlers' gear and their own. Perhaps they smelled the surge of human scent each time the door to the meeting hall opened and someone pushed definitively through, as though an announcement were about to be made.

  Search management personnel braided their way through the crowd, accounting for us as resources and prioritizing locations on the map where we should be sent. Something about the process seemed a little slippery. We'd been on standby for hours. We'd given our team IDs, our names, our dogs' names to a sequence of persons who have come out with clipboards to crosscheck how man
y of us were able to deploy. So far, we'd seen no canine teams move from the command post into sectors, but long standbys can be the rule on major searches. One police officer from a Houston suburb said that he and his dog sat here in the grass all day the day before, on standby to work but never sent out. At least, he said, I'm getting paid for this. I couldn't tell if he was grinning or gritting his teeth. He looked at two brothers who had taken vacation days from work to assist the search. How much vacation you got? he drawled.

  The officer's story circulated, causing the occasional mild exclamation and a number of squared shoulders, drooping heads.

  Many of us removed our packs and arranged them in lumps that doubled as pillows; some of us stretched out on the rolling slope of pale grass to make up for lost sleep. The rest stood and watched the dogs as they idly wound back and forth at the ends of long leads. One young man seemed particularly nervous about the TV cameras trained on the group from a distance. He repeatedly shifted to the middle of the group, borrowed a dark jacket to cover his bright shirt, and turned his back to the parking area across the street. He had called in sick to work from three states away and was worried his boss might see him on national television. One of his teammates suggested a temporary hair dye, pointing to a supermarket just across the street. She was only half-joking; she said their team rarely had the luxury of employer support. The camera-shy young man would have a hard time avoiding attention. He was tall and his lovely German Shepherd bitch was a stunner, a showy girl with dark eyes and an intelligent expression. Ready to go and sensitive to every change, she occasionally barked with excitement, causing her handler to speak sternly to her in a low voice, afraid her exuberance would turn cameras their way.

  "A Husky," said one woman to Jerry. She had a Border Collie at her feet, a bright boy so keen to get on with it he seemed to crackle where he stood. She looked down at Shadow, who amiably returned the gaze. "I would have thought they are too much a one-person dog for search work."