What the Dog Knows Read Online Free PDF

problem.”
    She ordered me to leave Solo alone. I pulled my hands away from the greasy treat bag and put them at my sides. I turned my gaze away from Solo’s evilness. Within a couple of minutes, he came over and flopped in the shade. Being bad wasn’t as interesting if I weren’t reacting.
    Nancy and I talked, running down my options. She taught everything from housebreaking to bite-breaking to obedience and trailing. Training Solo for search and rescue wasn’t ideal. I couldn’t leave students waiting in the classroom for a lecture on feminist essentialism because I was running off to search for a lost three-year-old who was in fact playing with Transformers at the next-door neighbors’ house. Nor could I count on my own body being the ultimate fitness machine, capable of running for miles after a dog tracking in thick underbrush; I might end up asthmatic, shambling, sciatic nerves aflame, eyeglasses either fogged or smashed. Lost people needed better odds than I offered.
    That made sense to Nancy. Besides, she had become less enamored of search-and-rescue team politics over the years. She described them in ways that made them sound similar to my English department, without the Victorian charm. More issues emerged. I didn’t want to wear search gear that would make me look like a Girl Scout. Then there was the idea of a team. I could collaborate, but I couldn’t really relate to thecheery phrase “Remember, there is no ‘I’ in team.” It didn’t suit Solo, either. Better that he didn’t constantly have to deal with the hurly-burly of dog society. Sending him out to track alongside several self-assured search dogs? They wouldn’t put up with his nastiness. They’d reduce him to tufts of black-and-red fur spread over the trail.
    There was one way around all of the scheduling problems, my team-player problems, and Solo’s psycho-puppy problems. Nancy was pleased with herself for coming up with it: “a cadaver dog.”
    I didn’t know exactly what Nancy meant, but I could guess. Dead dog. I’m good at putting words together and knowing what they mean. It’s what I do for a living.
    It’s ideal, she told me. The dead will wait. In the meantime, they emit scent. With a few frozen exceptions, more and more scent over time. And cadaver dogs and their handlers work mostly by themselves, in methodical search grids, not alongside other dogs and handlers. The dog’s job is both simple and complex: to go to where the scent is the strongest and tell the handler it’s there. It’s work that needs to be done. Families and law enforcement, mostly, although not always, want bodies found. Besides, she told me, beaming, her smile lines in full evidence, “It’s a ton of fun. You’ll love it!”
    Nancy avoided mentioning that my salmon-colored linen pants were probably not the ideal thing to wear on searches.
    At the end of our session, she sent me and Solo off down the road. I was sweaty, I reeked of liver treats, and I was filled with inexplicable happiness about those who go missing for a long time. Solo, exhausted, slept soundly in the backseat, although his outsize feet continued to twitch, pedaling air-conditioning instead of cyclone fence.
    Nancy, knowing my compulsive habits, expressly forbade me to read about training dogs on cadaver scent. I would screw up Solo’s training by reading too many theories too soon. She had two exceptions: Bill Syrotuck’s Scent and the Scenting Dog and Andy Rebmann’s Cadaver Dog Handbook . I ordered the two books. Then, because waitingisn’t my forte, I sneaked onto the web to learn the basics of death and dogs.
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    No house would stand firmly founded for me on the Ahura-created earth were there not my herd dog or house dog.
    â€”Ahura Mazda, Zoroastrian god
    In 2012, archaeologists in the Czech Republic published their discovery of