Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
We were seventy-five yards down a gravel logging road in Georgia that wound into the
woods and disappeared. The kind of road that someone might drive down at night when he's
panicked and looking for a place away from traffic and homes to dispose of a body.
An eighteen-month-old toddler was missing, Roy told Benjamen Ortiz, the handler. The
child was reportedly dismembered and buried. Law enforcement had discovered a possible
grave site down the trail behind them. “Work your dog in the area, come out, and tell me
what you've found.”
Ben nodded and released June Bug. She bounced down the trail like a gazelle, beelined to
a mound of freshly dug humus, sniffed long and carefully, went to another mound, eyeballed
Ben, and snatched something off the ground. Good reflexes are critical in this work.
“Get back to work,” Ben snarled softly. June Bug skittered sideways and levitated over a
log, still munching the mysterious delicacy. It gave her enough sustenance to settle down to
work. Ben stood back and watched without speaking. She moved on and so did he, quarter-
ing back into the woods.
Five minutes later, though it always seems longer, Ben reported back to Roy. Nothing, he
told Roy. No alerts. Both men's faces were blank. Roy thanked Ben formally; Ben shrugged,
snapped on June Bug's leash, and led her back to his SUV. Her whip-thin tail was tucked
between her legs.
Roy kept his own face a blank until the pair had disappeared down the trail. Then he
smiled broadly. “I like the way that dog works.” He also meant he liked the way the handler
worked this homicide scenario. Ben wasn't suckered into finding human remains that weren't
there. Neither was his dog.
Roy, a Sevierville optician, and his wife, Suzie—who looks every bit as much the ideal
scout leader as Roy does—were training handlers in Eatonton, Georgia, the hometown of
Uncle Remus
's creator, Joel Chandler Harris. So it was entirely appropriate that the two of
them, with glee and seriousness of purpose, had mustered the equivalent of a tar baby with
those mounds of dirt. Handlers, anticipating that cadaver material must be planted
some-
where
, got stuck in their own narrative imagination, talking first themselves and then their
dogs into thinking the mounds were graves.
Too many trainings, my own included, proceed in the same fashion: I get to a training
site, be it a mildewed house in foreclosure, a harvested cotton field, or an empty, dusty ware-
house. Another handler or trainer plants the aids—teeth, a bone, bloody bandages—because
it seems pointless to arrive somewhere and not put out training aids. In the missing-toddler
scenario, that seeming pointlessness was pushed further. A number of handlers had driven or
flown hundreds of miles to attend a National Search Dog Alliance seminar that was almost
but not quite in the middle of nowhere. It seemed irrational to come all that way and search
for nothing.
