Scent of the Missing

by Susannah

  Jerry shook his head. "Well," he said, "she only works for one person, me, but there's no question she wants to do it."

  Shadow grinned upward and mumbled something in Husky that could have been You betcha. Shadow, the dog of many consonants and vowels.

  Jerry's leadership and Shadow's commitment had made them a strong team in the field. I had watched their accord a long while. Though I had not seen Shadow evolve from puppyhood, I'd seen the working outcome. Theirs was a unique partnership managed differently from the Lab or German Shepherd pairs. Definitive, unforced, amicable. Jerry knew how to tell her what he needed from her, and he knew how to reward her for doing so. The woman appeared unconvinced, but she admitted she'd never seen a dog like Shadow work. Jerry was equally undisturbed. There are all kinds of breed biases in canine search-and-rescue. He gets the Husky comment a lot.

  A helicopter descended into a clearing half a football field away. Its rotor continued to woop-woop-woop at a low RPM after it landed, suggesting this was just a short stop. But it sounded to all of us like progress, and the rotor-wash excited the dogs too as it stirred the border of low brush at the periphery of the clearing and scattered scent every which way. They raised their noses and wuffled. Some huffed and some bobbed their heads; some knitted their nostrils rapidly together and apart. One older Retriever seemed to just close his eyes and savor, like an aging vintner of scent, his mouth slightly open and his jaw working as though the smells were rich enough to chew. I could imagine the dogs happily sorting today's squirrel and yesterday's rabbits and the passage of a coyote ten days before—and all our human scents—greasy, tired, car upholstery-and-fried-chicken us. A row of dog ears perked. Two men with notebooks and dark jackets ducked out of the helicopter and dashed purposefully across the grass to the command post, disappearing inside.

  Afternoon had raised a breeze, and the clear blue sky above had begun to give way to mare's tail cirrus. The pilots among us looked up. Our good weather was about to change; tomorrow would not be fair. Someone inside the command post with access to a forecast must have heard the same, because minutes later, two men were rigging an antenna, and five others were raising a tent. The command post itself suddenly seemed to stir. We could hear the clatter of chairs and the occasional bump against a wall.

  "Is this it?" asked the young man with his back to the cameras. "Do you think we're about to go?"

  "Believe it when your feet hit the sector," said a woman as she shredded the top of a hamburger bun into neat chunks and dropped them in a clean poop bag. She was obviously experienced at this, and we watched her with a sort of fascination as she shredded each piece almost identically to the one before and after, neat little cumulus puffs of hamburger bun, as though she were about to make bread pudding and was worried about the presentation. Dog treats? A field snack, maybe? Pigeons back at the motel? We watched without asking why. At this point, we were easily—and groggily—engaged by anything at all.

  Later that day in the tent put up against forecast bad weather, I continued to wait to be deployed, sitting by a man called JD from a sheriff's department several states away. He'd arrived the day before and was already a little grumpy with frustration. Between us, we counted seven roll sheets we'd signed in an eight-hour day of standby, all brought by different people saying, "Don't leave. Don't go anywhere, but be ready to deploy. And sign this so we know who's here."

  "Obsessive-compulsiveness?" mused JD about the seven roll sheets. "Or incompetence?"

  "Evolving situation, change of leadership maybe," I said. I was as eager to go to work as any of us, but I wondered how someone plans a large-scale search even as they recognize they don't really know what's out there. And how do you know what's really out there when things are still falling? This was catastrophe beyond known poses. I could imagine all the issues of combustion, trajectory, physics, and mundane things like personnel safety and jurisdiction. Man, I was impatient to get out there and search too, but I felt a certain sympathy for search management, many of whom were red-eyed and gray with fatigue.

  "Did you search yesterday?" I asked JD.

  "Nope," he said. He and the earlier police officer compared notes. JD's weary Coonhound had melted into the grass, now consoled himself this second day by worrying a hotspot on his forepaw and farting.

  "It was like this, then?"

  "A-yup."

  Not long after that exchange, we were fitfully, finally deployed—with warnings about the media, the locals, and our own behavior ("no jokes, no press ... no goddamn cameras in the field"). We loaded up our packs into cars and trucks and headed out, ten vehicles of dogs and searchers, and twenty minutes later, as we reached the edge of the sector we were about to search, we met the lead vehicle coming the other way.

  "Back to base!" the driver called. "We've been called back." The cords of the driver's neck were tight. He mouthed something else and spat, screeching away with a chain of us behind him. JD was quiet in the seat next to me. His face darkened to a purplish red. Believe it, the woman among us had said, when your feet hit the sector.

  While her handler and I watched, a search dog inspected human effects found in an area of dense, unpopulated wood. "Will she find more of this?" the NASA representative asked her handler as the dog worked her nose across several items he had offered. Her handler nodded, and after a brief discussion about direction, we were off. The dog's head was up. A gray and shining creature, she moved on long, muscular legs toward the deepest part of the wood.

  "The question is," I heard one man say to another, "will she find it fast?"

  She seemed to. We moved quickly—handler, assistant, and two agency representatives—behind the dog as she penetrated the wood, and after a series of passes across the sector, stiffened and paused in a clutch of young trees.

  "There's interest," said her handler quietly, watching.

  A light breeze threaded fitfully through the wood, and the dark gray dog began moving more rapidly across the small area, perhaps fifteen by twenty feet. She worked methodically at the periphery, her nose to the air, the trees, and the ground—clearly trying to isolate where scent began and where it ended and to find a cone to follow to the scent's source.

  "What is this?" asked an agency representative quietly. He was a dark-haired, youngish man with his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his jacket, intently watching the dog move. She was all concentration, her body taut with focus.

  "She's got something," said her handler, "and she's trying to narrow it down so she can give me a location."

  The dog's circling became more rapid, and as the wind rose a little, I heard her mutter with frustration. She pawed at the turf, passed her nose along the brush, as though the source of the scent was elusive.

  I looked up into a young tree next to where I stood and thought I saw a bright red and blue fleck of something in its topmost branches. Putting my hands to its supple trunk, I shook the tree once, then harder. The flitch of fabric fell and with it, apparently, fell a riot of scent. The dog grew frantic, circling haphazardly, stumbling now and colliding with trees, her mouth open as she huffed and ferreted for a source.

  "Jesus," said the other man with us, who had been silent all the way from the command post.

  After a dizzying few minutes the dog returned to her handler, dropped down to sit beside him, and moaned. It was an exhausted, anxious sound, as if to say she'd tried to show him something, but the scent was too much everywhere here.

  "What she's got?" asked the second man.

  "She's got a whole lot of scent, but it's not—coming from one place," said her handler. He spoke with confidence in his interpretation. "I don't know if there's anything here large enough to re-cover."

  We stood a moment, then without a word crouched carefully where we'd been standing. I rolled cautiously onto my knees, spidered my fingers apart, and leaned forward on them, scanning the turf. The dog did not move but lay among us, panting rapidly as we studied the ground by inches, looking for anything we might be able
to identify. The breeze now was both friend and adversary. The gentler gusts turned over the smallest leaves, revealing areas we were reluctant to touch, but the moving air seemed to worry the search dog. She didn't rise again but lay where she had dropped, her head between her paws, her expression tight.

  "Nothing," said the dark-haired man.

  The dog's handler shook his head also. He couldn't see anything either.

  "Just this," said the second man, and he pointed to the ragged scrap of red and blue fabric the size of a tarot card that had fallen onto a patch of raw ground. They studied it together. One took out a recovery bag as his colleague unfurled a length of crime-scene tape. From my knees, I marked the spot with the GPS, jotted the coordinates in my notebook as backup, then pushed up awkwardly to stand.

  The handler moved and his dog rose to follow. Waiting for a signal that I too could step free of where I stood, I watched the pair leave the area. I could hear her handler's praise, but the young dog's head and tail were down. Was there too much scent for her? Did she think she had somehow failed? Her confident demeanor was gone. She seemed to have withdrawn even from her partner, moving stiffly away from us as though she were old.

  Columbia fell over towns, farms, and forests. The developing search began to reveal just how great an area was affected. In the days we worked there, we heard the circulated stories of miraculous misses and amazing recoveries. Hot chunks of metal that had barely missed school buildings or wedding parties, heat tiles flung across a pasture like cards from a bad hand of poker. The debris field was generous.

  At the command post, someone wondered if we would recover more than the shuttle in the deep woods we were searching. This area had its meth labs and its body dumps, we'd been told. There could be anything—or anyone—out there. We were to report all human finds, but it could well be that some of them would be entirely unrelated to the loss of Columbia. Someone else commented that there were probably some mighty anxious criminals straining forward on their barstools, watching the evening news in a state of wince, unprepared for the presence of thousands of search personnel across the woods of East Texas and Louisiana.

  Perhaps due to the careful choices made by search management, perhaps because shuttle fragments were so widespread, every sector I searched beside canine units recovered something of Columbia. Though the dogs were charged with crew recovery, human colleagues also took GPS readings and noted the fall of the shuttle's physical debris for written reports when we returned to base. Some pieces were recognizable—straps, switch panels, or fragments of studded circuit board the size of a stamp. One great upended object resting against a tree in deep wood was, we were told, a toilet. Dogs had apparently shown great interest there the previous day, tugged their handlers a fair distance to arrive at the spot. Their handlers debated whether it was the ammonia in its cleaning solution or the associated human scent that had caused the dogs to respond so strongly.

  Though I can't speak for everyone associated with the recovery of Columbia, the teams I worked with—my own and others from across the country—approached the work soberly. We made no jokes, took no cameras into the field. Sometimes a NASA representative, often an astronaut, accompanied us into sectors. We flagged mechanical debris with strips of brightly colored construction tape. When the dogs indicated human scent, our response to the finds was respectful: we alerted search management and remained beside the find until an official and a NASA representative could complete the recovery. Unlike the knots of pink, green, and orange construction tape that marked shuttle debris, areas with finds of the crew or personal effects were marked with yellow crime-scene tape. As the search extended over days, it became possible to read the recovery on the long roads leading through forest to new sectors, the tails of colored tape revealing the end result of Columbia's fall.

  That first day in the shadows of late afternoon, the sunlight filtering through the trees to land on charred or shining debris seemed a kind of blessing. "God light," said one of the searchers a little wryly. He was a student cinematographer from Georgia, less faithful than visual perhaps. But I was glad of the sun; we needed light sometimes in the private spaces where debris had landed.

  This was a region of hardship. On some farms, we sidestepped thin, hungry livestock. We slip-slid past empty chicken coops, into slaughtering pits with our notebooks and our GPS units, wading through old blood and skin and feathers to mark a single shard of motherboard thrusting upward from the sludge. We found corkscrews of metal and tiny actuators from the shuttle deep in the woods, scattered across makeshift tent cities suggesting profound human poverty.

  On one farm where debris had peppered the top of an aged mobile home, we were met at the end of a long dirt drive by a little boy in a suit and bow tie, scrubbed pink to the hairline. Skittish of the search dog, he appeared close to tears, uneasy and babbling. He was reluctant to lead us back to the house. At first he confused us, until we pieced together his conversation and realized he knew nothing about the space shuttle. But someone in his family must have learned that federal government representatives were in the area, without knowing why. This boy was the youngest son of a family of a dozen children. His mother had sent him down the twisting drive to assure federal agents that all the boys and girls got food on the farm. They did their school at home. They had clothes and shoes, and there was no real need to take her children away.

  Another homeowner met three of us in her driveway. She was dressed for work, a coat folded over her arm, fidgeting with her car keys as she explained she had to leave and her small farm was ours to search. She had been out already, had seen some new damage on her roof. She'd found a few computer parts, she said, and something she thought looked like upholstery. She knew for a fact that the things she had seen hadn't been there long. She'd be glad if we'd move all of it as soon as possible. She said it was like living in the middle of a train wreck—all these strangers and all this stuff everywhere. The knowledge that it was even there made her uncomfortable on her own land, and very sad. She balanced her purse on her shoulder to gesture how far her farm reached, pointing down a graduated slope that led to a creek that was sometimes there and sometimes not.

  And then she turned back, remembering to warn us about her dogs: five dogs out on chains, where they lived at the corners of her land and nearest the pens for the animals. They were lean dogs and half-wild, and they were there to keep the wild hogs and coyotes away from her stock. She said the chains were secure enough, but not to get too close. These dogs weren't hunt partners. These dogs weren't pets. They weren't dog-friendly. They weren't human-friendly, not even to her, except for feeding time. They didn't really have names.

  "How long are the chains?" asked the handler, a colleague from another team, his pretty Border Collie sitting at his side.

  The woman thought a minute. She couldn't be sure. The chains had been there since her grandfather's day, forty years or more. So go, she said. But don't take your dog off that leash. And good luck. Her voice was tired.

  When she left, the handler said grimly, "This will be interesting." With his dog in a tight heel, we entered the land through a gate not far from the house. The farm was not a large one, but the land was difficult to see to the fence line, choked with standing farm equipment and old cars, dipping down as it did toward the creek bed. We could see two pens of goats and beside them a pair of dogs chained not far away, instantly aggressive, barking angrily—a female and a young male, much alike in their postures and voices, straining to get to us. I saw the Border Collie stiffen beside her handler. With a quiet word, her partner said to let it go.

  Two dogs known and three unseen. The handler gave his girl her command, and as we headed for the most downwind point of the sector, out of nowhere another dog leaped out of the brush as though conjured, a roaring, rust red creature that seemed to be on us before he was checked by his chain. He missed the Border Collie by only feet. She froze, ears down and tail tucked, trembled as her handler pulled her in.

  "Let it
go," he repeated, his voice shaking with the nearness of this. While the chained dog raged, it took a moment for us to assess his tie-down, mentally calculating arc and just how possible it would be for us to get to the farthest point of the sector. We stood still, and the rust red dog also quieted—growling low, watching us with cold eyes. I had no doubt that if he broke free, it would be short work for him to maul two humans and kill the search dog.

  A long, considered moment. A breeze rose as we stood there, and something in it made both dogs turn the same direction. The Border Collie woofed a shy single note, and her handler looked to her, then at me. The red dog's gaze turned back our direction.

  "All right," said the handler. "We'd better get in there. And we'd better hope that chain holds."

  He gave a command to his partner and she stepped forward, still trembling slightly, her head up and eyes forward despite the angry drone of the other dog. Moving down the slope, I walked behind them with an eye to that chain. It's a fine line, working past aggressive dogs in the field, whether fenced, chained, or held in check by a human: don't engage, don't provoke, get on with the work, but don't underestimate the situation either. We were still uneasy when we moved down the rise out of sightline. The back of my neck prickled. Red dog's absence was somehow scarier than his presence.

  We sidestepped what appeared to be slaughtering ground with an acrid stench of its own—dried blood, remnants of skin, and bristly hair. Rounding a truck and battered trailer, on the other side of the creek bed, we could see chunks of raw metal and scorched circuitry in the thick brush ahead, a swatch of fabric, entwined strands of wire caught on a roll of old fencing. The search dog sprang forward with intention: from some artifact or another, human scent, whether Columbia's or not.