A Spare Rib - What the Dog Knows - page 72

I restarted him. Solo's head went down. He slowed even more, plunging his nose deep
along a high ridge of grass. Then he moved away, gaining distance along the ridge, about
thirty feet straight away from me. He circled and stiffened. Then he was down, toenails dug
hard into the ground. Bam. Head back to me, brown eyes fixed. This time I decided to trust
him. He had been so clear. I moved fast and flung the Kong. Solo growled and yowled and
tossed the Kong for himself, bouncing it off his nose, rapturous.
Nancy walked over, lifted the dried cow patty, twice the size of a dinner plate, and showed
me the prize: a few inches of desiccated bone that looked like a small beef sparerib, a dona-
tion from a friend and fellow dog trainer. His own rib, removed in a surgery.
She looked at Solo. She looked at me. “Damn,” she said.
• • •
Names are not always what they seem. The common Welsh name Bzjxxllwcp is pronounced Jackson.
—Mark Twain, 1897
“Napoo,” the handler softly told the huge bloodhound. “Find napoo.” The ginger blood-
hound sauntered off toward the underbrush, her ears and body swaying, brow wrinkled.
I'd started training with a group of handlers from the foothills of North Carolina. I'd get
up at four-thirty A.M . to be on the road by six, just as pale streaks started to lighten the hori-
zon, driving on back roads through Mebane and on to Reidsville, the center of the American
Tobacco Company until the mid-1980s. I learned to appreciate country ham and biscuits
and Dunkin' Donuts coffee at dawn, surrounded by baying bloodhounds and men in cam-
ouflage who chewed or smoked. I liked them a lot. They tolerated me, and they taught me.
For nearly a year, I didn't tell the dog handlers much about my work as a professor or my
politics, even when we were eating lunch together at a Golden Corral. Nor did I tell most of
my university colleagues about my weekend walkabouts.
Ken Young—with his military bearing, his trimmed mustache with a sly smile beneath, an
olive fatigue cap, and a pistol strapped at his side—ran a florist shop. On weekends, he ran
dogs and people. He would stand in front of a group of slouching handlers in the firehouse,
many of them with cuds of tobacco tucked under their lower lips. Ken's version of the clas-
sic sign-off that Hill Street Blues sergeant Phil Esterhaus gave the gathered day shift, “Let's be
careful out there,” was “Now, let's go have some fun out there.”
We did. Nancy and I early on settled on the command “Find the fish” for Solo. The
cadaver-dog handlers from the Piedmont foothills told their dogs to find napoo. They told
me it was a Navajo term for the dead. It seemed to have spread far beyond the Southwest,