Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Then Solo disappeared from view. He had taken his first hot-dog leap, launching off a
sandy cliff as it crumbled beneath him. He landed hard in the creek bed below. His maneuver
thrilled him. The investigators, distracted from their argument about whether quicksand lay
beneath the still-high water, watched with bemusement as Solo tested the two hypotheses.
He ran down the stream bed, dropping his jaw to scoop up water and sand like a dredging
shovel, humping his back like a porpoise, tucking his tail between his legs, spitting out the
sand, then turning around and doing it all over again. It wasn't quicksand.
I explained to the investigators that this particular behavior did not represent Solo at his
most disciplined. Purpose and fortitude and focus would arrive momentarily, I promised. I
showed no amusement. We were looking for a victim, not playing games.
Solo had already moved on. Having expelled his ya-yas, he put his nose down in the creek
bed, then slowed to a crawl and cricked his long expressive tail. He was working. That tail set
showed that he wasn't smelling animal, which makes the kink defensive, held higher above
his back. Nor was it his human-remains scent crick, where he holds his tail lower and parallel
to his back but with an odd piggy curl at the end. No, that was a live human scent tail. He
surged out of the creek to the other side, and I could see now where a small portion of the
cliff, created by the sandy sediments washed down from roads and construction projects, had
collapsed on the far bank of the creek. The sedge grass there was bruised and broken.
I knew the police K9 hadn't made it that far, so neither had the police. Deer, raccoon,
beaver, and fox—the only herbivores and mesopredators that manage to survive in these pol-
luted woody swamps—don't create that much of a mess. It must have been a human.
Solo is neither trained nor encouraged to do live trailing, except when I tell him to go
find David in the house or yard. Solo's job is to hit the edge of the cone of cadaver scent and
then define its parameters, spooling back and forth until he comes down the cone to its tip:
ideally, the source of the scent. But in a swamp and woods this size, it could take some time
until he hit scent. If he hit scent. So it wasn't stupid to have Solo start his work from where
the suspect most likely fled, the point last seen.
Solo didn't care where I started him. He was playing his favorite game. He didn't realize,
though, that his favorite game had escalated. He was looking for an entire body, one that
probably had been out for four days in a warm, wet environment. Its scent cone might be
huge. We were early in our work. Solo hadn't found a whole body before; nor had he been
exposed to one, even in training.
If the body were here, it should be easy for Solo to find. He was used to looking for parts
per million—a tooth here, a bloody cloth there. While Solo and I had worked on many acres
at Nancy's farm, and I had watched him pick up scent from training aids a couple of hundred
yards away, I had no way of knowing what he might do in this case. Just a year before this
search, Solo trained on a large cardboard box that contained both dirt and a blanket that had
