What the Dog Knows (15 page)

Training Solo stopped. I could not bear thinking about death all the time. In any case, there was no time. I left David alone with Solo and Megan and flew back and forth to Oregon to spend a couple of precious remaining weeks with Dad.

He was dead just seven weeks after that phone call. He was cremated in the Pendleton wool bathrobe he had loved so much. We cast his ashes to the winds in the Cascade Mountain meadows of Oregon near his home.

When the Man waked up he said, “What is Wild Dog doing here?” And the Woman said, “His name is not Wild Dog anymore, but the First Friend, because he will be our friend for always and always and always.”

—Rudyard Kipling,
Just So Stories
, 1902

I didn't dream of Dad at first. In that vaporous line between wake and sleep, though, I would relive his last weeks and sit up, pulling in my breath.

Everything and nothing had changed in those few months. Solo
now looked like a powerful Velociraptor—his head still too big for his body, his tail like a large motile rudder. He'd missed me as I flew in and out of town; he let me know by screaming and crying, then dashing off to grab a toy to shove in my lap: Play
now
. He wasn't a dog who did depression. If I stared at him vacantly, that was a cue to play fetch, not to comfort me. Solo had bonded even more with David while I flew from coast to coast. While Solo's so-called obedience training might have suffered slightly in my absence, he and Megan were now compatriots. They spent their time on a Kabuki-theater version of dog play: all performance, dance, and tease. Megan didn't believe in contact sports. In my absence, she had trained Solo to interact in a way I couldn't have imagined him capable of with another dog: playful, subtle, light on his feet. He still swaggered, but he had developed a sense of humor with her. He needed more time outside, where he could run and sniff and not be in my face. With me, he thought contact sport was required.

I thought about the options. I could continue to mope. Or I could call Nancy Hook. I called Nancy. Parents' deaths create a void, she said. No matter what you thought of them. And you really liked your father. Come on out and bring Solo to train. So I did.

I had missed an entire season at Nancy's farm in Zebulon. I left while it wore the tans and grays and browns of early winter, though undershoots of brightness lurk year-round in North Carolina. Nancy had exchanged her winter Carhartts for lighter camouflage-green pants stuffed into tall rubber boots. Her blond-red hair was stuffed under a baseball cap instead of a wool knit cap. She had become one of my measuring tools of normalcy—her laughter, her ease in the world, her ability to be simultaneously direct and comforting. Her ability to slap me upside the head without it hurting too much. She was sane, and her sanity infected me.

A well-meaning friend asked me, “Are you grieving properly?” Probably not. It was hard to grieve in the middle of a soft Carolina
April, walking through muddy chartreuse fields filled with mist and cow pies. And cows. It was hard to grieve when I had to watch my feet and control Solo, keeping him away from Whiskey's fence, from the chickens doing their herky-jerk insect dance in the yard, from Rocky, Nancy's Morgan horse who didn't suffer dog fools gladly, from the Herefords looking doleful, then dour.

“Get that high, panicky tone out of your voice,” Nancy told me as Solo started lowering his body toward the ground and giving the eye, preparing to stalk the mama cows with their new calves. I dialed it down a notch and used my low big-girl voice. It worked. Solo reluctantly swung back toward me, and I hitched him up until we got farther from the cows, and I could free him. He wanted to make clear that he was the winner of the dog–cow debate, so he sauntered over to lift his leg on an electric fence before he started his search. We could hear the
bzzt
of electricity from twenty yards away. He didn't flinch. That, Nancy told me, is exactly what you want in a cadaver dog. If he could ignore that jolt, in that part of his anatomy, nothing would shut him down.

I didn't shut down, either. I trained Solo several times a week. I found new places to train. At our local feed-and-seed warehouse, where pigeon poop and running mice distracted Solo only momentarily. At the mall across the street from our home, where new construction materials—including pallets and concrete blocks and pipes—created a scaled-up version of our early foundation work. Check here, check here, check here.

Solo created new problems for me to think through. He was a wild dog. My training notes were littered with issues: He needed a better alert. He was distracted. We'd transferred to a down-and-whine alert, but he wouldn't whine. Then he wouldn't down. When we transferred to a rubber Kong toy for a reward, he didn't want to give it back. He didn't want to search next to the dog lot if Whiskey were there and the two of them could fence-fight instead. He would stare at the cows and
wonder: What merriment could he pursue? Nancy reminded me to keep my voice low and forceful.

Solo's puppyhood issue of being a singleton kept raising its ugly head. One day during training, an obsequious stray—a female yellow Labrador—came running and wagging and crawling across the field while we were training. Solo flashed his teeth, rolling her repeatedly. Then he attacked Wolfie, the German shepherd search dog he should have been collaborating with. Except for Megan and two or three neighborhood exceptions, he hated dogs his own size. And small dogs. They were a pain. Nancy rescued Boston terriers, and I had to rescue one from Solo. Solo lunged, the grass was wet, my foot slipped, my voice skyrocketed into high soprano. These were the things that made me cry and made Nancy shrug. Solo hadn't killed Yankee; he'd just considered it.

“Blast, blast, blast,” Joan wrote me after I described yet another incident of unfortunate behavior. “Aggression and the canine mind are so very interesting . . . and sad, when it is your dog. The one thing I can say is that if he wanted to do harm, he could and would have. So, as nasty as these incidents are, he doesn't appear to be hurting dogs physically.”

She was right. He was all teeth and hackles and growls. He never drew blood. Nonetheless, David and I made a difficult decision and neutered him, hoping a touch less testosterone would move the needle on his tachometer down a few points. Afterward, I threw him back into obedience classes. I learned to time interventions, to break his stare-down with another dog by blocking with my body, to de-escalate, to communicate a clear message: Obey no matter what, you little shit.

We survived the Night of the Snapping Terrier without even a growl on Solo's part. We got through the happy-pit-bull-adolescent-on-top-of-the-shepherd incident without tooth hitting skin. We realized that Solo would never be normal with other dogs. Yet he was
becoming more and more responsive with us. He was no less energetic, but he was becoming our friend. He would look at us steadily with his dark chestnut eyes and occasionally even lay his heavy tadpole head on our laps and fall asleep without demanding instant game gratification. He loved humans, including babies and children.

Nancy was making our training problems harder and harder. Before I knew it, it was midsummer, less than four months after Dad's death. Solo was fifteen months old. It was easy for me to keep track of Solo's life and Dad's death: They ran on parallel tracks, going at the same speed, but heading in opposite directions. Solo's first birthday and Dad's death were five days apart. Then there would be a second birthday for Solo and a first anniversary of Dad's death. On it would go.

Solo and I stood in a large cow pasture north of Nancy's house. Great blue skimmers and common whitetail dragonflies, looking like pieces of chalk on the wing, buzzed across clumps of cut grass to land on cow pies. It was humid and hot. Solo and I stood at the top of the pasture. It had a swamp and pond at the bottom, where some of the cows hung out. Solo was whining as I held him. Before I sent him, I tried to figure out which direction the wind was coming from; the moist air was barely eddying.

“Find the fish!” As Solo pushed away from me, Nancy narrowed her eyes and looked at me, giving me the international symbol to shut my mouth and keep it that way. She threw away the invisible key. Yes, sensei. No nervous chatter, outside or inside. I channeled Bruce Lee. “A good fight should be like a small play, but played seriously. A good martial artist does not become tense, but ready. Not thinking, yet not dreaming. Ready for whatever may come.”

The field was huge. I'd worked it before with Solo, but Nancy had conveniently started forgetting where she had planted some of the training materials. She was also teaching me how to sketch a search pattern by fixing on spots on the horizon. I told her that I'd use the big
deciduous tree on the hill as one marker. She laughed at my highbrow botanical vocabulary. Solo ignored my pattern. He threw his massive head up and ran downhill, into the cow-poop-filled swamp. He slowed, his tail stiffened into the loop that let me know he was near cadaver material, and he lay down in the muck, staring at me, silent. His new alert. We'd abandoned the whine as an alert two months back, when it became increasingly clear to Nancy that his life was one big whine. We'd abandoned the food because a Kong on a rope was more fun.

“Throw it. Quick!”

I obeyed, clumsily.

Nancy gathered up the training aid. There was more out there. She swept her hand up and across the pasture. Anywhere out there. It was hotter out. Solo panted, not getting a whiff of anything. Nancy critiqued my pattern. Too much zig. Not enough zag. I wanted to give Solo some water out of my new water bag. She reminded me that we had been working for less than twenty minutes and it wasn't that hot out. I gave him some water anyway. It gave me a chance to catch my breath.

I restarted him. Solo's head went down. He slowed even more, plunging his nose deep along a high ridge of grass. Then he moved away, gaining distance along the ridge, about thirty feet straight away from me. He circled and stiffened. Then he was down, toenails dug hard into the ground. Bam. Head back to me, brown eyes fixed. This time I decided to trust him. He had been so clear. I moved fast and flung the Kong. Solo growled and yowled and tossed the Kong for himself, bouncing it off his nose, rapturous.

Nancy walked over, lifted the dried cow patty, twice the size of a dinner plate, and showed me the prize: a few inches of desiccated bone that looked like a small beef sparerib, a donation from a friend and fellow dog trainer. His own rib, removed in a surgery.

She looked at Solo. She looked at me. “Damn,” she said.

•  •  •

Names are not always what they seem. The common Welsh name Bzjxxllwcp is pronounced Jackson.

—Mark Twain, 1897

“Napoo,” the handler softly told the huge bloodhound. “Find napoo.” The ginger bloodhound sauntered off toward the underbrush, her ears and body swaying, brow wrinkled.

I'd started training with a group of handlers from the foothills of North Carolina. I'd get up at four-thirty
A.M
. to be on the road by six, just as pale streaks started to lighten the horizon, driving on back roads through Mebane and on to Reidsville, the center of the American Tobacco Company until the mid-1980s. I learned to appreciate country ham and biscuits and Dunkin' Donuts coffee at dawn, surrounded by baying bloodhounds and men in camouflage who chewed or smoked. I liked them a lot. They tolerated me, and they taught me. For nearly a year, I didn't tell the dog handlers much about my work as a professor or my politics, even when we were eating lunch together at a Golden Corral. Nor did I tell most of my university colleagues about my weekend walkabouts.

Ken Young—with his military bearing, his trimmed mustache with a sly smile beneath, an olive fatigue cap, and a pistol strapped at his side—ran a florist shop. On weekends, he ran dogs and people. He would stand in front of a group of slouching handlers in the firehouse, many of them with cuds of tobacco tucked under their lower lips. Ken's version of the classic sign-off that
Hill Street Blues
sergeant Phil Esterhaus gave the gathered day shift, “Let's be careful out there,” was “Now, let's go have some fun out there.”

We did. Nancy and I early on settled on the command “Find the fish” for Solo. The cadaver-dog handlers from the Piedmont foothills told their dogs to find napoo. They told me it was a Navajo term for
the dead. It seemed to have spread far beyond the Southwest, going as far north as Canada and as far east as North Carolina. It was an evocative and mysterious command. Some handlers added “ka-ha” to the front of it, as in “ka-ha napoo.”

The unusual command, handlers said, kept family members on the scene of a disappearance from getting more upset. If there were reporters around, they wouldn't be clued in that the dogs were searching for a body. Both claims seemed a bit of a stretch, especially since the media appear entirely clued in, if there, and families, while ever hopeful, mostly aren't idiots.