Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Sure, I trust the dog; I also like to verify. I don't always trust me. Or the terrain. Or the
search conditions, which are never as easy as the most difficult training you can set up.
Each difficult search provides lessons and inevitable Monday-morning quarterbacking.
Did we miss that bone? Should I have insisted on reworking the area that was already cleared
with Bush Hogs and a multitude of line searchers and at least one other cadaver dog? That
area where the smell of decomposition was so thick that every time a semi drove by, it would
kick up a waft of sweetness that covered our clothes and got up in our nostrils. Where every
dark oily spot of killed vegetation, “body burn,” was accompanied by the fur and bones of
animals. What about that little bone lying next to that small animal skull? Was it something
other than animal? Should I have brought Solo out of the car then and there and run him
over those dozens of skeletons to let him do a preliminary sorting? I didn't. I did what I was
told. And it was only in the days after that I started stewing and rethinking each and every
moment.
I waited for our next assignment. And the next, going up the road to search a barn and
abandoned house. Then we searched around the pond at the top of the hill. And then we
went on, following exhausted investigators up a rutted clay lane to a mobile home in a hol-
low, with an old SUV sitting outside. It had taken us three tries to find it. We kept backing
down one-lane roads because we couldn't turn around without falling off the verge and into
trees. Finally, there it was. Finding the place felt like a small victory.
The woman who had called the investigators, worried about a bone that one of the dogs
had brought home, came out of the trailer and pulled her barking dogs inside and shut the
flimsy door behind them. I could hear them snuffling on the other side. The dogs, she said,
were always dragging something in. I looked at a recently dead vole just to the left of my
boot, its fur matted with dog saliva. That's what dogs do. They bring stuff home. She followed
my gaze and shrugged in apology.
You just never know, she said. She paused and went on. I kept thinking and thinking
about it. You just never know. I couldn't live with that. One investigator assured her she had
done the right thing in calling. It wasn't her job to sort out human from nonhuman. Her
preadolescent daughter was standing silently behind yet alongside her. She looked like her
mother but without the tiny silver rings on every finger and along the earlobes. Not yet fully
pierced. Silent, fey. I knew what her mother meant. Her mind had hooked on a detail, caught
in the threads of “what if?”
The bone was sitting on a wood post. It looked to me like a vertebra from a mammal no
bigger than a possum. It had a fleshy pinkness just underneath the gray whiteness. It had de-
composed for a couple of days. I looked at the investigators, then used a long stick to snag
the bone through the hole where a small spinal column once ran, and took it over to a dusty,
clear area of the yard and liberated it from the stick. I wasn't disturbing a crime scene; the
