Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
lingered beneath a body for some time. The scent overwhelmed him: It's here, no, it's there,
no, it's everywhere. He wandered around in the miasma, drunk and giddy. He finally stopped
and stood in the middle of the funkiest spot, puzzled. What am I supposed to do with this?
At least one experienced trainer and handler thinks that a version of this dizzy-dog reac-
tion can also happen over great distances and discombobulate the dog and the handler. De-
borah Palman, a retired Maine game warden who broke the gender barrier, becoming that
state's first female game warden in 1978, looks exactly like what I think a retired game warden
should look like: She has close-cropped gray hair, a quiet, competent demeanor, and a sly
sense of humor. She doesn't posture. She doesn't brag on herself or her dogs. Yet if I got lost
in Maine, I'd give great odds of being found, alive or dead, by Deborah and one of her dogs.
Her work has taken her across the vast distances of Maine, from swamps filled with moose, to
hills filled with moose, to fields filled with moose—and bear. She even trained fish-detection
dogs to keep track of anglers who break fishing regulations.
Deborah and her German shepherds have located more than twenty missing people, some
alive, most dead. As a result of working hundreds and hundreds of searches in a wilderness
state with varied terrain, and because of working in a team, flanking on searches, reading re-
ports, and training dogs, Deborah has thought a lot about human-remains scent and even
live human scent: where that scent can move, how far away, and where the dogs can detect
it. How scent can loft over trees and small hills and then come down and get caught or pile
up against a hedgerow or an opening “like debris in a stream.” Over more than a mile some-
times.
“My young dog, she's very quick to pull the trigger on her indication. She comes into a
big pool of scent, she goes wham.” Deborah mimics her high-drive female, Quinn, with a
squeaky voice: “'It's here! I haven't really found it, but it's here.'”
There can often be, Deborah said, “a big discontinuity” between where the scent is and
where the body is. Where scent disperses can confuse the hunt for both live and dead people.
On one case in New Hampshire where Deborah just wouldn't quit, they recorded a dozen
alerts from different dogs. Hundreds of volunteers had searched for ten days to cover the ter-
ritory, receiving scattered reports from people across a mountain valley where they smelled
something at various times of day. Deborah's own dog had behaved strangely earlier that day.
But Deborah saw the deceased victim only by accident, while she was going up a different
trail she hadn't covered in order to find a leash she'd dropped earlier that day. “We're riding
on the ATV to get into town, and being a game warden, I can't help looking into the woods,
and I spot her body off in the woods down the trail. Finding her was dumb luck.”
The victim was lying just off a walking trail in a shady glen. Deborah said it was an enorm-
ous lesson for her—once she'd gone back and studied maps and reports and thought about
her dog's behavior over the days of searching, and even that of the other search dogs. “Your
