What the Dog Knows by Cat Warren

Author:Cat Warren
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: A Touchstone Book

12

The Grief of Others

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.

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