What the Dog Knows (33 page)

A historian by nature, Kha decided this part of Thomasville's Civil War history, as well as the historic black cemetery, needed sunlight cast on it. She learned about cadaver dogs through a town librarian who was with a Florida search team just south of Thomasville. Dogs, Kha learned—including Suzi Goodhope's dogs—were being used in the Mississippi Delta to find 800- to 1,200-year-old human remains from the mound-building civilizations that lived there. Kha got in touch with Suzi, who connected her with cadaver-dog trainer Lisa Higgins.

Historic human remains weren't an obvious choice for Lisa. She had plenty of criminal and missing persons cases to deal with and a grueling seminar schedule. Lisa also admitted that in the beginning,
she was deeply skeptical that the dogs were capable of detecting ancient remains. She has been converted, partly by watching her own dogs alert on remains going back more than 800 years, partly from watching other top handlers work their dogs. In several instances, she's received clear confirmation from excavations.

So Lisa brought Dixee and Maggie to Thomasville. Suzi brought her two Belgian Malinois, Temple and Shiraz, or, as she calls them, “the guttersnipe and the princess.” Temple was a shelter rescue with post-traumatic kennel disorder and probably only part Malinois. Nonetheless, she carried many of those genes: high drive, opinionated, and hardheaded. Shiraz is like a piece of delicate, expensive china, also opinionated. With a fine nose. Shiraz's father won best of breed at Westminster.

Kha contributed her amateur historian's passion, as well as a geologist with ground-penetrating radar. Ephraim Rotter, curator of the Thomas County Historical Society, provided documents.

For Suzi, the work at Thomasville was fascinating and good for her dogs. It's not that the stakes are lower in these cases than for more recent missing persons, but they are different. Getting it right matters. Suzi noted that it takes time to imprint the dogs on “the older stuff.” “To me, they work a little harder and a little slower.”

Looking for the long gone is not straightforward. As Lisa Higgins noted, “Scent is all over.” We humans might think scent would be strongest down inside the coffin-sized rectangular depressions that seem to indicate where bodies were buried in old cemeteries. That isn't always the case. As Lisa said, we can't know exactly where the dogs are smelling scent the most strongly. Low spots gather more scent. Animal burrows can make the scent more accessible in one area rather than another. Where roots engage, the scent can travel, although the means by which it does that are unknown—and controversial in both the handler and scientific worlds. We don't know all the mechanisms that make vegetation and roots more attractive to cadaver scent, although moisture may play a role, roots breaking the soil surface may play a
role, and even certain compounds may become more available through vegetation. At this point, dueling and contentious theories abound. What's clear to everyone is that dogs appear drawn to vegetation and trees near a burial.

At the Wolfe Street site, the dogs moved along the partly filled-in ditch, slowing and alerting within a few feet of one another, in the same general area. Suzi lost count of the alerts. Kha, watching the dogs work, saw the pattern. “Suzi and everybody had just significant hits in the trench,” she recalled. Then the dogs would go over to the property line. There's one tree there, on the embankment with a hole in the bottom of it. Every dog indicated enthusiastically there, Kha said, acting as if they'd “hit the glory land,” as if someone were “blowing the fumes up” from the earth below.

When the ground-penetrating radar operators came in, they confirmed anomalies and soil changes in the ditch where Suzi had flagged dog alerts, as well as on the scrubby flat grass.

None of this is a scientific certainty. Kha knows that. But it's enough, combined with the historical records, for her to try to get a grant, even in this tight economy, to bring the obscure site out of the shade. Perhaps the town will add a fence or some markers. Many prisoners died on that site. If the massive oak tree in downtown Thomasville gets recognition for being the bigger oak in the Southeast, perhaps the final days of the Union prisoners in Thomasville will finally get some acknowledgment.

•  •  •

All of us, five middle-aged white women, looked at the open land in front of us. We were in West Virginia, 780 miles to the north of Thomasville, Georgia. A hill's curves ended at a pond half covered with duckweed. A red-winged blackbird trilled “conk-la-ree, conk-la-ree” before dropping off the power line to the reeds below. The hill was awash with blooming Bermuda grass, white and pink clover, a sprinkle
of horse nettle. Streaks of green shot across the crest of the hill and just below the crest. A bull thistle interceded here and there. The six slaves reportedly were buried without coffins and not too deep. Maybe a child or two was there. A few might have slabs of granite on top of them, thought the farmer who owned the field, to keep animals from disinterring them.

It had taken a half hour for Kathy Holbert and her good friend and fellow cadaver-dog handler Lisa Lepsch to negotiate the search with the old man who owned the cattle farm, with its pristine white house and barns. Some of that time was taken up with listening to his memories of cattle drives from Montrose to the slaughterhouse in Elkins when he was young. About the two herding dogs who didn't mind getting kicked in the face and would challenge the recalcitrant back into line. His master herder, a long-haired red dog, was scarred and tough as nails. Probably not an Irish setter. Much of the talk was about the rules of dog engagement: that the gates be opened and closed quickly. That the dogs not stress the herd. Whatever the outcome, he said, he didn't want any archaeologists digging. If the bodies were there, they should be left in peace.

This site, unlike Thomasville, had no surviving documentation that we were aware of—if, indeed, anyone who could have created a record had cared enough. The oral history of the slaves, three men and three women, who perhaps lay on this particular West Virginia hillside in unmarked graves, had already served a modern purpose as a small branch of a bigger protest against a highway. The stories of the buried slaves—combined with endangered flora and fauna, Confederate and Union historic sites—helped prevent the huge ribbon of Route 33, a Senator Robert Byrd pork barrel project, from being laid across a section of Randolph County. The highway ended at Montrose and began again beyond.

When slaves were there, the top of the hill would have been filled with apple trees. Apples always played a big role in West Virginia agriculture. Any orchard would have had at least five or six varieties:
for cooking, for eating, for cider, for preserving, for shipping, dried, to England.

Digging a grave in that orchard would have been difficult, with tree roots and rocky soil interceding. That was what West Virginia had: rocks and apples, salt and coal. What it didn't have was a lot of slaves; it was a mountainous region with few large plantations, and tobacco grew only in a few areas. Cotton nowhere. Other than the salt mines, where slaves like Booker T. Washington toiled, most West Virginia slave owners were farmers with fewer than five slaves.

Just because slaves were relatively few in number didn't mean they were treated humanely. Some scholars believe that the treatment of Appalachian slaves was worse than on many Deep South plantations, with accounts of much harsher physical abuse and families torn apart more readily. Far too many scholars, one researcher wrote in frustration, “confront me with the mythological construct” that Appalachian slaveholders were “small farmers who only kept a couple of slaves to help their wives out in the kitchen.”

The farm's owner, ninety-two, told Kathy and Lisa that the slaves hadn't been allowed to leave the farm. Some of the children, he said, had been sold. If that were the case, it was probable that they walked in a coffle, bound together with ropes, a frequent sight in West Virginia in those decades. Nearly one in three slave children in the upper South in 1820 was gone by 1860.

It was just after nine
A.M
., and the sun was glaring when Kathy started Strega loping down the cow path. Strega's rear moved sideways due to her aging hips as she went toward the pond, folding back like sable-colored origami. She moved along the outer edge of the pond, not bothering to dip herself and not slowing until she hit the end. She held her nose low to scoop scent. Nothing here. Nothing here. No reason to quarter or hesitate. Ten yards later, she slowed and flipped back on herself in that distinctive way a scent-detection dog does when it notes something relevant. She leaned over a drainage spot. I could see, tracing back up, where the water percolated off the rocky hill and
down into a dimpled spot at the bottom before entering the pond. Strega paused there, sniffing, turning around several times, leaving, then going back to it. She never looked at Kathy, who was standing back about a hundred feet, silent, letting her work. Kathy is a noninterventionist handler. Strega left the drainage and slowly worked up the hill toward its crest, using her good, deep nose. This is behavior that experienced handlers and trainers have seen with dogs working toward victims, even those who are not buried. The scent can percolate down the hill or toward water from a great distance. Scent won't always be strongest right on top of a grave.

After more than 175 years, one shouldn't expect vegetation to be different above the buried, Kathy said. Nonetheless, at the top of the hill, a slightly concave area was filled with purple and white clover and mats of shorter, greener grasses that seemed woven more tightly than in other places on the hill. Strega stopped, turned in a tight circle several times, and whuffed audibly. Then she sat and stared at Kathy.

And so it went for the next two hours. Renzo, Lisa Lepsch's massive black shepherd, found a spot on the other side of the small hill. It wasn't concave, but it stretched out for fifteen feet or so in a green streak across the top of the hill. He sniffed around the edges of the space, walking slowly, then came into the middle of it and stood there looking at Lisa, who chuckled. “He's good at defining things,” she said.

Rocco, Ann Christensen's young shepherd, alerted where Renzo had shown interest, flinging himself down in abandon. Whump. Dusty, Charm Gentry's Beauceron, alerted there, too, after mincing through the field and occasionally popping straight up like an antelope that had found a snake beneath her. So did Kessa, Ann's gray sable shepherd.

On that hill of four or five acres, the five dogs walked and ran, quartered back and forth, slowed, then alerted on two general flat spots where Strega and Renzo had alerted. Dogs can alert on top of other dogs' spots, although that's not how they are trained. Handlers can subconsciously signal to their dogs. None of the handlers was working
the problem blind. While the dogs and the oral history overlapped, using GPR in that rocky environment would be impossible. Once we left the field, all that would remain would be the stories and GPS locations marked in the dogs' training records. No names. No headstones. A field of clover and thistle.

“I've never done anything that old,” said Arpad Vass. Then he continued. “But it does not surprise me that a dog will alert. Clay makes a nice vault.”

•  •  •

There's little science to shed light on what is happening when dogs sweep through an old graveyard. Archaeology is already a speculative discipline. What can dogs' noses add? What are they alerting on? Handlers' unconscious cues? Old decomposed trees? Gravestones, when they are there? Are people simply watching the dogs work, adding historical fantasy to evocative landscapes, and creating erroneous paint-by-noses pictures?

Several teams across the country now work with old burials; a few are starting to get consistent and more verifiable results with the combination of ground-penetrating radar, dogs, and oral and written history. Scattered excavations here and there—proof positive—are corroborating those finds. The arena of cadaver dogs and historic remains is still clouded and contentious, though. It's particularly hard to prove the worth of working dogs when dealing with old burials, because more often than not, excavation (aka confirming proof) just isn't going to happen.

Mary Cablk has done research using historical-remains detection dogs on the Old Spanish Trail on several possible burial sites, including some blank areas. Now she would like to corroborate, with core sample testing, where the dogs alerted and where the GPR showed changes.

“The historical human-remains detection is something that I go back and forth on,” she said. “Do I think that dogs can do it? Yes. Do
I think that all the teams out there across the country who claim they can do it can do it? No. That's what I call faith-based dog work.” Are dogs trained to detect ancient remains, as Mary notes when she is at her most skeptical, simply “great anomaly detectors”? She wonders whether the anomaly might be simply a change in the surrounding soil chemistry rather than ancient remains. Are the dogs alerting on the pottery urns that human ash was placed in, in some cultures, rather than the ash itself?

Mary is not the only skeptic and not the only researcher trying to develop peer-reviewed research on the issue. The work on using dogs for archaeological work is just beginning, and it's all over the map, literally—from Bosnia to Hawaii, from California to the Mississippi Delta. Since no one has established exactly what volatile organic compounds cause dogs to alert for more recent deaths, old graves raise even more questions.

“Dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return” has a scientific basis. At some point, most of us rejoin the earth in a way that should confound a cadaver dog as well as any instrumentation: We're not grave dirt, we're not dirt mixed with adipocere. We're just dirt, plain and simple.

How far back can the dog go? It depends on how much scientific verification we want. Solo has alerted on an eight-hundred-year-old bone from the Mississippi Delta, and I've watched a number of dogs do the same. And, of course, it depends on what the dog is actually alerting on—it was thought until recently that it could only be VOCs. The human body simply lets volatile organic chemicals go up and up, until the body stops communicating in that fashion. No scent understood as human decomposition should still be holding forth into the air column. And yet, good dogs, trained on the whole spectrum of decomposition, appear to know. The soil seems almost permanently changed.