What the Dog Knows (16 page)

One Pennsylvania reporter explained about the supposedly Native American command, “Because it is in a foreign language, the command won't be confused with other speech.”

“An instructor uses an Indian word for aesthetic reasons,” another newspaper reporter wrote of cadaver-dog training.

The term isn't Native American, and its provenance isn't particularly aesthetic: “Napoo” is British and Australian slang from World War I, a bastardization of the French expression “Il n'y en a plus [
ny-an-a-pu
].” No more. All gone. Finished. There is no more of it. British and Australian soldiers became accustomed to two things in France: no supplies on shop shelves, and death. They used the term “napoo” to cover everything from that Gallic shopkeeper shrug that says, “Sorry, but we're out of beer,” to death in the muddy trenches. “Half the platoon got napoo'd last night.”

We humans love words and the stories they tell when they get strung together. It doesn't matter if they're true. Those who would trace the provenance of dog commands are certain where they originated.

“You could tell who people were trained with,” said one seasoned handler in the Northeast. “ ‘Find Fred.' That was Andy's.” Another handler from another part of the country told me, shaking her head, that she always thought Andy Rebmann's favorite command, “Find Fred,” was deeply insensitive, especially if family members were on the scene.

The only problem with the story about Andy's command is that, just like the origins of “napoo,” it doesn't appear to be true. Andy shook his head, though his eyes glinted in sardonic amusement. Never, he said, had he asked a dog to “find Fred.”

“I always use ‘Look for it,' ” he said.

Darn it. “Look for it” is so prosaic. Nor does it capture the essence of brutally practical and politically incorrect Andy the way “Find Fred” does.

“Mor-te,” a North Carolina handler tells her big German shepherd, with an emphasis on the T, so the word ends up with two syllables.

“Where's Mortimer?” another handler urges. “Where's Mort?”

“Where's Chucky?” a handler asks her border collie.

“Find bones,” Marcia Koenig, Andy Rebmann's wife, tells her German shepherds. That one seems to work just fine. Marcia's dogs have found dozens of bones over the past two decades.

The best term, however, belongs to Suzi Goodhope. “Hoffa,” she tells Shiraz, one of her Belgian Malinois.

Not only was Solo learning, and not only was I learning to handle Solo, I was learning an entire new vocabulary, listening to the arguments that would crop up: Should we call that behavior an “alert” or a “final indication”? As long as it's clear in your records, it doesn't matter.

Andy was on his cell phone with Jim Suffolk, and they were reminiscing together. “We used to call them body dogs,” Andy complained. “Now they're calling them HRD dogs. Human-remains detection.” Actually, Andy was leaving out the newest FBI-approved term: “victim-recovery canine.” Or, more obliquely, “VR canine.”

Language always seems to move in a direction where specificity gets lost. Bodies, and death itself, start to disappear under the weight of those terms—collateral damage.

Roy Ferguson out of Sevierville, Tennessee, performs a quiet ritual he started with his first cadaver dog, Cherokee. He sits his current dog, Apache, at his side, and gives the slight black-and-red German shepherd a sip of water. It clears his nostrils and mind. To a single-purpose
dog, those rituals are more crucial than any command. When Roy says “Zuk Morte,” Apache already knows what the game is.

Solo was a fast learner. He was now cued in to the pants and boots and even socks that I wore for training, ready to go as I dragged them out of the dryer, pulled them on, stumbled downstairs. As David made coffee and I brought in the newspapers, Solo would dash from the bedroom to the front door, from the yard to the car, and then back to the house. The gray light was turning pearly; the sun would be rising soon. Stop grieving. Stop dawdling. Outside is better than inside. Let's go.

“It says, madam,” the maître d'hôtel went on, “that you are over your limit.” He leaned down and hissed menacingly. “Do you know what your limit is?”

—Ruth Reichl,
Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table
, 2001

Making dinner for good friends was one of the greatest pleasures in our lives, a familiar regimen for David and me. The anniversary of Dad's death had come and gone, I was turning fifty, and habit again dictated our days. We were back to normal, but it no longer felt as comforting
as it had. Time to bake the bread. Time to spread out the spread. I should have been grateful, but I wasn't. Food and friends were essential but not sufficient.

I was no longer comforted with apples, with flagons of wine. I was sick of routine, at the university and at home. I no longer wanted to pretend an undying devotion to academic life, despite its many privileges, despite my love of teaching—and despite my worrying about how my colleagues might perceive my dogged wandering and wondering. The need to pretend that the world of theory was my natural home had disappeared with Dad's death.

I had lived for half a century. David and I, if we were lucky, might be able to squeeze in a couple more decades together. If he didn't lose his patience with me.

“I just want to be happier,” I told him. I could hear both the self-indulgence and the sloppy thinking in the demand. I needed to dial back on the whine. Some years before, a friend and university colleague asked, “Why can't you just be happy?” I tried to answer her honestly. Happiness was not something I aspired to. I had a good man, a good job, and a dog who was trying to be good—and I was left wanting more. I wanted to be challenged and engaged, to fire on all six cylinders. I wanted to do something that made me lose track of time. I wanted to push my limits. David was a master cook and baker and had apprenticed with one of Paris's best artisanal boulangers. He hung out with chefs, thought about food, and wrote about food. I wanted to master handling scent-detection dogs.

Training Solo to do search work, researching the science of scent, and spending my time with working-dog people was the closest I had gotten to that desired sense of immersion in more than a decade. David and I had been pretty immersed in each other for the first few years of our relationship, but our marriage now gave me the space to play. I kept getting drawn to North Carolina woods and fields, and the dogs and dog people who inhabited them. I was starting to admit to myself that nose work and research were becoming more engrossing
and fascinating than my academic research and writing projects. I wanted to do something practical in my spare time, something that engaged two neglected parts of my inner 4-H child: my heart and hands. My head and health got plenty of attention.

On my birthday night, after our friends departed, David and I talked while both dogs slept. They were exhausted from showing off for company. I knew that taking my and Solo's training to the next level over the coming year would throw our comfortable routine out the window. My midlife crisis would not be assuaged by buying a sports car. David, who loved routine, knew that, yet he was willing to come along for what was bound to be an unpredictable ride.

If I were ever going to use Solo in an actual search, it was time to take the leap: getting us certified to do the work. Certifying Solo meant I would be propelled back into my student years of test taking rather than test giving. Nancy Hook made it clear that certification wasn't enough. I needed to find experienced trainers to work with, beyond her and the Piedmont bloodhound team. If I were ever going to deploy Solo, I needed to up my game, to “bond with the badge,” that is, to find a way to work with law enforcement. If the first ambition, certifying Solo, was uncertain, the second ambition—getting access to the world of law enforcement—was a brass ring.

Cops and courts weren't alien territory to me. As a newspaper reporter, I had covered crime and law for years. Several detectives had asked if I'd ever considered entering law enforcement. I had thought about law school, but I'm not sure what side I would have landed on: prosecution or defense. Ambivalence defined my relationship with any number of institutions, though, including the places that cut my monthly paychecks. I was simply adding more ambivalence to the mix. It goes both ways. Law enforcement is reasonably and notoriously suspicious of volunteer dog handlers. We can be an eager lot, with more verve than sense, overly sentimental about dogs, naive about the complexities of the law.

Lisa Mayhew, who investigates children's deaths across the state for
the medical examiner's office, wanted me to take the next step, too. She had handled cadaver dogs and knew a great K9 trainer who happened to work in my city. It took me an hour to compose the e-mail to Sergeant Mike Baker, head of the K9 unit for the Durham Police Department, asking whether I could meet with him. It was less than a month after my birthday epiphany.

“Sgt. Baker,” my e-mail began. The hierarchy of academic life made the title easy for me to use. Paramilitary organizations have nothing on higher education. Despite the perception that English departments are bastions of leftist anarchy, we have as many ranks, even more forms and reports to fill out, and a stricter definition of who counts and who doesn't, from adjunct lecturers to vice provosts. I made my tone formal, respectful. No humor. No mention of my academic life. Sure, I was an associate professor at a land-grant university, but in the world I wanted to enter, no one cared. On the contrary, it would be best to avoid mentioning it.

Solo and I, I wrote, “have been training fairly steadily since he was eight months old.” “Fairly steadily” was fairly accurate. I had set Solo's training aside for just three months when Dad died. It had felt like so much longer.

I waited. Five days.

Mike Baker e-mailed back, apologizing for the delay, since he'd been out of town. “Hi, Cat. My specialty is in law enforcement dogs, but many of the same theories/principles apply to what you do. If nothing else, I'm sure we could expose Solo to new training areas and obstacles.” He signed off: “Take care, Mike.”

So much for hierarchy. Solo wasn't the only one who would be exposed to new training obstacles. I would soon learn to introduce myself as a negative: “I'm Cat Warren. I'm non-LE.” Not law enforcement.

Defining myself as not something felt like a huge promotion.

•  •  •

The city of Durham, North Carolina, for all its virtues, has a relatively high homicide and manslaughter rate—a fact that city leaders avoid in the promotional literature. “Durham. Where great things happen,” our city motto proclaims. They do. David and I love Durham. It's safe to live downtown, as we do—especially with an imposing German shepherd and a noisy Irish setter in the house. Enough bad things happen in Durham, mostly just outside my neighborhood, to provide the occasional need for a cadaver dog.

Mike Baker followed through on his promise to expose Solo to new training. “Meet us at the old Liberty Tobacco warehouse at eight
P.M
.,” he said. So what that it hit ninety-five degrees at three
P.M
.? That's ideal North Carolina dog-training weather. I, on the other hand, have asthma that gets triggered by days on end of code-orange air. I also like to be in bed by ten. Nonetheless, there I was on the dark streets of Durham, searching for the peeling entrance sign to the Liberty Warehouse, walking past the black-and-white Crown Vics with their engines rattling loudly, air conditioners blasting to keep their furry occupants cool. Sharp, intense barks and some paws pounding against the rear door panels made me jump back and then try to correct my wobble.

I had dressed and redressed myself, tucking and untucking my white T-shirt into my Costco cargo pants, trying the shirt outside the pants, tousling my short moussed hair, trying harder than I ever had to look casual: strong but not butch, slightly made up but realistically sweaty. The sweat was no problem. The mousse melted, making my eyes sting. I walked into the warehouse, one of the last standing auction houses for loose-leaf tobacco, once the economic spine of Durham. It was an increasingly leaky and derelict building, now covered with metal siding, and the natural skylights that once let buyers see the color of the brightleaf tobacco were boarded over. The sloping floors that tobacco farmers drove their wagons down were still there, and huge warehouse beams reached up into darkness.

In front of me, I saw a group of men in navy T-shirts and cargo pants standing, arms folded across chests, watching a dog that looked
like a shorthaired, sharp-nosed German shepherd with a rattail. I had seen the breed a few times: a Belgian Malinois. I looked more closely at the T-shirts and body type. Two women, thank God. The fawn-colored dog, his tail stiff, was prancing on his toes, circling a pickup truck parked inside the warehouse entrance. He sniffed as he went, tracking along the truck's side and underbelly and around the tire wells. At the back, he froze briefly, nose inches from the license plate. Then he leaped like a cat straight into the pickup bed, wheeled around, and anchored his nose to the spot as though an invisible magnet kept it there, while the rest of his body continued to spin in space. I heard a low gentle chuckle, and someone breathed out slowly: Good dog. Good dog! A tennis ball flipped through the air, landed in front of the anchored nose, and bounced. The game was on. The dog's nails scrabbled for purchase on the concrete as he chased the ball through the disintegrated tobacco leaves and dust.