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fore flipping in crazy circles and throwing himself down on it with melodramatic yowls and
moans. You're killing me here. Guests laugh, escalating the noisy theatrics. If a particular find
during training poses a challenge, he'll self-reward by doing a couple of extra victory laps,
snaking through trees and leaping over obstacles, swinging the tug toy.
On searches and during training, he is still capable of being a jackass. During a recent
search, two large dogs chained up in a backyard were too much of a temptation. Solo minded
me but at the last minute; that's not sincere obedience.
It's rare these days, though, that I get truly angry at him or even embarrassed. It's not that
I've gotten softer; it's that he has gotten better. And it's a sign of the beginning of the end. A
summer training at Nancy's ended with her throwing up her arms as he panted into an indif-
ferent alert on a cadaver hide, tongue hanging on the grass. “Just pathetic,” she declared. She
looked at him with scorn and then at me accusingly. “You really need to start another dog,”
she said, “if he's going to be around to teach it anything at all.”
I searched for excuses. It was, I said with triumph, the prophylactic antibiotics he'd been
on for a bad tick exposure. Maybe it was his boredom with her hides. Same time, same place.
Same dead stuff. Been there. Smelled that. Nancy knew my protestations were a delaying tac-
tic.
Working dogs depend on their fitness and strength. At some point, climbing the hill at
the solid-waste landfill to follow an evocative scent coming from the other side will hurt too
much. The best nose in the world attached to arthritic hips or legs won't cut it.
I spent the first three years of Solo's life wondering which full-bore accident or macho
posturing might kill him: running at top velocity into a barbed-wire fence on a search and
bouncing of it like a bird hitting a window; deciding to take on a herd of cows; charging
out of a warehouse and belly-flopping of the loading dock onto the pavement below. He
survived those and many more incidents of our combined bad judgment. Then we reached
homeostasis for a few years. He was at the top of his game mentally and physically, no longer
as impetuous.
When a big water moccasin came thrashing out of the murky water and toward us during
one search, I simply called Solo off and we moved on, leaving the snake to its territory. We
could search pastures filled with horses and I didn't worry. I could speak in low, quiet sen-
tences and mostly not at all—unless we flushed a coyote from her den or a fawn out of a
swamp.
Those years were lovely and temporary. Solo is now eight, the age where physically, things
start to go wrong no matter what. Like me, he is headed downhill. And because he's a dog,
he's moving faster than I am. As always. Dogs don't last. At best, he's got just a couple of years
of work left. How can I know? By being ruthlessly honest and not telling myself stories about
old dogs and their wisdom. Not just joints and muscles suffer from age. A dog's sense of smell
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