What the Dog Knows (25 page)

And the bones sang chirping

With the burden of the grasshopper . . .

—T. S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday,” 1930

There are only two options. Except that one of them gives rise to a third option. The one that gives me nightmares.

The first option is as close to ideal as you can get, given that you are looking for dead people: You and the dog help find someone or part of someone. The person's disappearance and death is usually sad, sometimes tragic, and sometimes not so sad. For me, it's not nightmarish to find someone. It doesn't create post-traumatic stress. It represents success. I celebrate, but quietly. I understand when people make mournful faces and suggest that it must be rewarding but certainly not enjoyable work. For me, it's both. What Solo and I do isn't dutiful volunteer service. I train the dog and myself because, first and foremost, it's fun. I don't dread getting called out. I hope we are: It's a challenging puzzle that pushes both of us to our mental and physical and scent limits. Plus, I get outside, often in the woods, and I can watch Solo use his nose—one of the most pleasurable sights on earth. I hope we find the person we're looking for.

Option two is not finding someone. Speculative searches are part of the job. Most searches end with no victim found. Option two haunts me more than option one. My mind keeps poking at the possibilities, wondering about the weaknesses in our search strategy, in the dog's work, in my work, turning over other options, seeing if they resonate, testing a theory, discarding it, picking up another and feeling its contours. Inevitably, option two involves trying to imagine what happened at the end for that victim, and where, and how.

Option two can stretch out for years. Or longer. Nonetheless, it, too, falls within the realm of normal. Not finding someone happens all the time. It's not just in underdeveloped countries that missing people stay that way. In the United States, the list of “endangered” people—law-enforcement-speak for highly likely dead—had nearly forty-eight thousand entries in 2012. That's a medium-sized city filled with no resolution.

The grief and nightmares of not finding someone belong to the
missing person's family and friends, not me. It would be presumptuous to appropriate them.

My nightmares about searches—the ones that rightfully belong to me—rise from option three: if I ever find out that we missed someone or something in an area we were responsible for searching. I know a number of handlers feel the same way. It's our special dread. As much as I hate an occasional false alert, I hate a false negative even more: where a dog ignores or accidentally overruns scent that's out there. It can happen. To make option three even worse, unless the remains of the person you were searching for are found—and found at a comfortable distance from the areas you searched—you never entirely know.

Sure, I trust the dog; I also like to verify. I don't always trust me. Or the terrain. Or the search conditions, which are never as easy as the most difficult training you can set up.

Each difficult search provides lessons and inevitable Monday-morning quarterbacking. Did we miss that bone? Should I have insisted on reworking the area that was already cleared with Bush Hogs and a multitude of line searchers and at least one other cadaver dog? That area where the smell of decomposition was so thick that every time a semi drove by, it would kick up a waft of sweetness that covered our clothes and got up in our nostrils. Where every dark oily spot of killed vegetation, “body burn,” was accompanied by the fur and bones of animals. What about that little bone lying next to that small animal skull? Was it something other than animal? Should I have brought Solo out of the car then and there and run him over those dozens of skeletons to let him do a preliminary sorting? I didn't. I did what I was told. And it was only in the days after that I started stewing and rethinking each and every moment.

I waited for our next assignment. And the next, going up the road to search a barn and abandoned house. Then we searched around the pond at the top of the hill. And then we went on, following exhausted investigators up a rutted clay lane to a mobile home in a hollow, with
an old SUV sitting outside. It had taken us three tries to find it. We kept backing down one-lane roads because we couldn't turn around without falling off the verge and into trees. Finally, there it was. Finding the place felt like a small victory.

The woman who had called the investigators, worried about a bone that one of the dogs had brought home, came out of the trailer and pulled her barking dogs inside and shut the flimsy door behind them. I could hear them snuffling on the other side. The dogs, she said, were always dragging something in. I looked at a recently dead vole just to the left of my boot, its fur matted with dog saliva. That's what dogs do. They bring stuff home. She followed my gaze and shrugged in apology.

You just never know, she said. She paused and went on. I kept thinking and thinking about it. You just never know. I couldn't live with that. One investigator assured her she had done the right thing in calling. It wasn't her job to sort out human from nonhuman. Her preadolescent daughter was standing silently behind yet alongside her. She looked like her mother but without the tiny silver rings on every finger and along the earlobes. Not yet fully pierced. Silent, fey. I knew what her mother meant. Her mind had hooked on a detail, caught in the threads of “what if?”

The bone was sitting on a wood post. It looked to me like a vertebra from a mammal no bigger than a possum. It had a fleshy pinkness just underneath the gray whiteness. It had decomposed for a couple of days. I looked at the investigators, then used a long stick to snag the bone through the hole where a small spinal column once ran, and took it over to a dusty, clear area of the yard and liberated it from the stick. I wasn't disturbing a crime scene; the dog had already done that by toting the bone home from wherever he'd found it. I took Solo out of the car and ran him past it. He caught the scent, hooked around when he smelled the decomposition, sniffed briefly, then moved on. Not the kind of decomposition that would garner him a reward. The investigators and I took Solo to the back area of the property, where the dog had emerged with the bone. He ran the area quickly, without changes
in his body language, without looking at me, working the edges back toward the car. The woman thanked us. We thanked her. For caring.

Next, we searched around a pond. Nothing. A trail to a deer blind. Nothing. A barn. A spot where hunters dump deer parts. A mattress covered with stains on the side of the road. Side roads with piles of trash at the end. Every white garbage bag, every black garbage bag. Hand sweep. Check here. Check here. Check, check. Time search started: 10:03
A.M
. Time search ended 10:17
A.M
. Time started: 10:42
A.M
. Time ended: 11:22
A.M
. I gave Solo a break with water and a full blast of air-conditioning until his tongue stopped dangling sideways off the shelf of his jaw.

Down the road to the next pull-off to start the clock all over again. No interest. No alerts. Break for cold chicken sandwiches and soda. For coagulated greasy pizza and bottled water. Back to work off gravel roads. Checking drain pipes. Going down into the creek running parallel to the road. Over the deadfall along the tree line.

This is the reality of searching: You cannot see the world in a grain of sand. It's the opposite. The grain you are looking for is so infinitely small, so lost in the world, that it might never be found.

And yet it wasn't all mournful. Toward the end of one day, we watched Solo, who should have been exhausted, levitating through the high grass, clearing a final area before quitting time, bouncing like a black-and-red India rubber ball, backlit by an early-evening sunset. He made us smile. A happy shadow who goes out in front of me. I drove home so tired that even the tickle of a tick on my neck elicited only a flick from my finger. Solo, dried mud flaking off his guard hairs, was sacked out on the backseat, not a whine left in him.

Later, when I learned that searchers had found human remains in an area that Solo and I hadn't searched, I didn't care that we weren't the ones who had located them. All I felt was a gut-wrenching relief that remains had been found at all. It was a deeper, selfish, and utterly prosaic satisfaction to learn that I didn't have to continue worrying about option three for this case any longer. I could cross it off my list
of nightmares. We hadn't skipped over anything. Solo's big nose hadn't gotten close enough to stand a chance. After I got off the phone with the kind investigator, I pulled to the side of the road. I just sat for a while, until I could breathe steadily again.

•  •  •

North Carolina doesn't feel dangerous to me. It shouldn't. It's much safer here than it was in the 1970s. The murder rate, like all serious crime, has dropped precipitously since the 1970s and 1980s, when poverty and crack ruled—more than 60 percent. Poverty and addiction still take their toll, but their cut isn't as deep. Statistically, I'm very safe. I don't have an abusive partner or parent. I live in a decent neighborhood. We don't have guns in the house. I don't need to sell my body to feed a drug habit. We have a noisy Irish setter in our house who devilishly encourages the German shepherd to be noisy as well.

Nonetheless, my relationship with my surroundings has changed since I started working with Solo. I no longer watch turkey vultures gliding in lazy circles, especially if more than three stack up in the same thermals, without wondering whether they're smelling something more than a white-tailed deer carcass far below. We keep track of vultures on searches, although it doesn't take much to attract them. One day I watched four on my urban street competing over one squashed squirrel, clumsily landing on a neighbor's tarpaper rooftop before swooping down to squabble over a couple ounces of protein.

It's not just in the woods that my viewing habits have changed. I used to avoid and scorn the top of television news and web news, with their insistent focus on violence and crime—the cheapest, easiest thing to cover and get high ratings. Now I tune in quite purposefully if someone is missing. Then I obsess about whether I'll get a callout on that case. Why bother training otherwise? But with a couple of rare exceptions, when they ask for volunteers, I don't call the police. I wait for them to call me. That doesn't keep me from wishing and hoping.
When the burden of not acting becomes unbearable, I'll call Nancy Hook, my equivalent of a twelve-step sponsor for this compulsion, so she can remind me what I might lose by calling law enforcement: my dignity and self-respect. “You're not an ambulance chaser,” she'll tell me sternly. “You're a professional.” We'll chat, she'll make me laugh, she'll tell me she has to go feed the horses, and I'll remember that I've got a curriculum committee meeting I'm almost late for.

After the meeting, if the itch returns, I can always channel Andy Rebmann's stentorian voice: “You do not self-deploy,” he said, slowly emphasizing each syllable, glaring at search-and-rescue volunteers at a seminar. I've seen SAR-team self-deployment. It's not pretty. Nancy and Andy are right: It has the same scuzzy feel as personal injury lawyers—the kind who advertise with 800 numbers on late-night television—showing up at the scene of a wreck.

In my defense, the thinking I do about missing persons cases isn't entirely wasted. Even the callouts that never come can add to my knowledge base: Google Mapping how to get to the area if I'm called, thinking about winds and temperatures and humidity over past days. If the area has been defined in the news, I stare at the satellite view, look at the dents in the vegetation, wonder if they represent a creek or a trail.

One also has to be prepared for what a body might look like. Andy has a slide show that provides a whirlwind tour: There's rigor mortis, putrefaction, skin slippage, and liquefaction. Jay damage. Crow damage. People tied up, burned up, pulled up from lakes, crushed in disasters. Scattered by bear and coyote. Handlers need to have a realistic notion of what bodies look like after a few days, weeks, or months out in the environment. A search is not an academic exercise. Bodies are never pretty in early stages; later, they can fade into their environment like camouflage. It's critical to be able to recognize a spot where the soil has turned so acidic from a body lying there that plants die.

Soon enough, the bodies deflate and fade into the North Carolina woody foliage, a slightly darker or sometimes yellowish leathery accent
under the dark green. You would have to know where they are to see them. Or have a dog around who can tell you.

On a recent search, the detective flanking me asked me whether cadaver dogs can miss or skip over a body. It depends. I looked around at the impenetrable woods on one side and the clear-cut mess on the other—logs lying crisscrossed, shrubby growth coming up in between. A swamp lay behind us; suspicious tire tracks were visible along the dirt road. We had punched in several places where slight deer paths, or even a break in the vines and undergrowth, provided a gap. The working presumption, not a stupid one, was that someone trying to carry a body wouldn't have an easy time, either. If Solo hit scent, he would follow it if he weren't too exhausted and panting to bring in scent. But his nose had to be in the proper place. Getting his body levitated over impenetrable brush isn't that easy. Hasty searches over dozens of acres don't give 100 percent coverage. People talk about grid searches or line searches in a casual way, but in many areas in North Carolina, doing that would take a phalanx of Bush Hogs running in front of you. This was triage. Everyone does his or her level best—a bit of whacking with a machete when it's feasible, saving a bit of energy when you can see a spot for entry just ahead.

You try to maximize the odds by knowing as much as you can. Before I tackle a new kind of search—say, an Alzheimer's victim who wandered off, someone who was separated from a violent husband, or a drug user who was desperate for a fix—I will go back and hit the research.