Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Kha contributed her amateur historian's passion, as well as a geologist with ground-pen-
etrating radar. Ephraim Rotter, curator of the Thomas County Historical Society, provided
documents.
For Suzi, the work at Thomasville was fascinating and good for her dogs. It's not that the
stakes are lower in these cases than for more recent missing persons, but they are different.
Getting it right matters. Suzi noted that it takes time to imprint the dogs on “the older stuff.”
“To me, they work a little harder and a little slower.”
Looking for the long gone is not straightforward. As Lisa Higgins noted, “Scent is all
over.” We humans might think scent would be strongest down inside the coffin-sized rect-
angular depressions that seem to indicate where bodies were buried in old cemeteries. That
isn't always the case. As Lisa said, we can't know exactly where the dogs are smelling scent
the most strongly. Low spots gather more scent. Animal burrows can make the scent more
accessible in one area rather than another. Where roots engage, the scent can travel, although
the means by which it does that are unknown—and controversial in both the handler and
scientific worlds. We don't know all the mechanisms that make vegetation and roots more
attractive to cadaver scent, although moisture may play a role, roots breaking the soil surface
may play a role, and even certain compounds may become more available through vegeta-
tion. At this point, dueling and contentious theories abound. What's clear to everyone is that
dogs appear drawn to vegetation and trees near a burial.
At the Wolfe Street site, the dogs moved along the partly filled-in ditch, slowing and alert-
ing within a few feet of one another, in the same general area. Suzi lost count of the alerts.
Kha, watching the dogs work, saw the pattern. “Suzi and everybody had just significant hits
in the trench,” she recalled. Then the dogs would go over to the property line. There's one
tree there, on the embankment with a hole in the bottom of it. Every dog indicated enthusi-
astically there, Kha said, acting as if they'd “hit the glory land,” as if someone were “blowing
the fumes up” from the earth below.
When the ground-penetrating radar operators came in, they confirmed anomalies and soil
changes in the ditch where Suzi had flagged dog alerts, as well as on the scrubby flat grass.
None of this is a scientific certainty. Kha knows that. But it's enough, combined with the
historical records, for her to try to get a grant, even in this tight economy, to bring the obscure
site out of the shade. Perhaps the town will add a fence or some markers. Many prisoners
died on that site. If the massive oak tree in downtown Thomasville gets recognition for being
the bigger oak in the Southeast, perhaps the final days of the Union prisoners in Thomasville
will finally get some acknowledgment.
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