A New Calling
I want a German shepherd.” I kept my head tipped down to hide my tears and pretended to scrub at a stubborn spot on a dish. Our last Afghan hound, Khan, had died, and we were dogless.
My husband, Jim, leaned against the kitchen doorjamb and watched for a few moments. Quietly he walked up behind me. He reached out with his right hand and shut off the faucet. Gently he wrapped both arms around me and rested his chin on my head. “You don’t want another Afghan hound? We can afford a good one this time.”
It was true. But while we had the cash flow to purchase expensive breed stock and now owned the facilities to house them, the time to make it work didn’t exist. It took both our salaries to pay the mortgage, car payment, day care, and myriad other expenses of day-to-day living. We were both working seventy-hour weeks and now had a four-year-old to think about. In the long run, our son would have more opportunities and we would have a secure retirement. In the short run, life was a demanding grind to be endured, and pleasures like showing dogs were unrealistic dreams.
“I want a dog I can have outside with Shane and know it’ll keep him safe, not one he has to watch and keep out of the road.” I turned and buried my face in Jim’s chest, hugging him to relieve the pain of losing Khan. I’m not sure what got his shirt soggier, my tears or my wet hands.
“Get what you think is best. You know shepherds.”
The next day I looked through the local paper and found an ad for a German shepherd puppy. I deliberately arrived early for our appointment to make sure the facilities hadn’t been spruced up to impress a potential buyer. Three months old and the last of the litter, the puppy had a kennel run all to herself. The facility was spotless. The parents’ bloodlines were good with excellent hips and no inbreeding. More importantly, the parent dogs were there on-site, clean, healthy, and polite. I paid the fee and loaded the puppy into my car for the short trip home.
Shane’s eyes shone. He immediately took to being tumbled and covered in puppy kisses. Jim took one look at the fur-covered tornado and named her Tasmanian Devil—Taz for short.
Taz had a lot more drive than I remembered my parents’ shepherds having. Certainly she had better lungs. The first week we left her in the kitchen when we went to bed. She whimpered and howled all night. My husband evicted the dog to the kennel, and she immediately slept through the hours of darkness. Turns out she didn’t want to be a house dog.
Taz grew into a pretty, eighty-five-pound, black-and-tan girl. She never slowed down. One spring day when Shane was six, he and the dog were outside playing. He came through the door with his face, stomach, and pants coated in brown, slimy mud. His facial expression resembled some tribal masks I’d seen in Hawaii, with scrunched-up eyes and an open, down-turned mouth. His words were incoherent. He released a deep huff, turned, and stomped away. That’s when we understood the problem. There were muddy paw prints up his back. Taz must have mowed him face-first into a puddle like the characters in a Roadrunner cartoon.
I continued to travel for work, which sounds glamorous but actually ranked slightly above getting hit by a truck on the fun meter. At one airport I found a book titled So That Others May Live by Caroline Hebard. It was the autobiography of a woman who became involved in canine search and rescue. Shane loved to have nonfiction dog stories read to him at bedtime, and this book was perfect. In it, the author outlined just what she looked for in a search dog. It fit our Tasmanian Devil to a tee. My fingers itched to write for information, but how could I do search and rescue on top of everything else?
The next trip hit my breaking point. I unlocked my office door when my boss’s assistant signaled for me to come to the president’s office.
“You’re leaving tonight with a customer to qualify a mold in Germany,” my boss said. “You have a 6:00 p.m. flight. Make sure the customer is happy.” He shuffled some papers and glanced up at me as if my continued presence annoyed him.
“I need more notice than this. My husband is out of town, and I don’t have anyone to watch my son.”
“Sounds like a personal problem. Be on the plane or don’t come in tomorrow.” He turned away from me and picked up his telephone.
I glanced at the ticket receipt and turned back to his assistant. “How long has the boss known he was sending me on this trip?”
“I don’t know for sure, but he had me get the ticket last week,” she said.
When I got back from Germany, I found a new job with less money, less travel, and the understanding that my son ranked higher than a “personal problem.”
I found the search and rescue book tucked under Shane’s bed. I wrote to the address in the back of the book, and they put me in contact with the closest search and rescue team, seventy miles south of me. It wasn’t long before Taz and I were making almost weekly treks to learn how to man-trail.
The team encouraged me to start my own group, and after making the trip in an ice storm, I took their advice. Taz took to search and rescue (SAR) like a flea takes to fur. She wasn’t fond of human remains work, but if I asked, she’d do it. Shane loved going out to hide for the dogs to find him. I think the dogs thought he was the most directionally challenged kid they ever met.
Other people joined us, and we applied to the American Rescue Dog Association (ARDA) to become one of their units. We took courses in first aid, map and compass, and radio training. Taz and I started to run together so we could meet the fitness requirement to run three miles in thirty minutes.
The ARDA people had drummed into my head that when I started training a SAR dog, I had to give her positive encouragement when she pointed out human scents. On one of our runs we went by a small private homeowners’ association boat dock. As we passed the dumpster, the stench made me cough and gag. Taz did a skidding change of direction and clearly had hit a human scent. She headed straight for the dumpster. Visions of finding a body filled my mind as I followed her. She blew past the dumpster, continuing toward the Porta John.
I breathed a mental sigh of relief. She didn’t break stride at the potty but whipped around a tree, where she stopped and circled a fisherman relieving himself after a long morning (and I’m assuming a large thermos of coffee). I’m not sure if he understood my ecstatic, “Good girl. Good find.”
Jim converted an old bread truck into a base camp. Maaco painted it white for free and a sign maker added our logo as a donation to the team. We had a lot of camping equipment, and Jim built shelves and counters inside the truck to hold everything. SAR was something we began to enjoy as a family.
When Shane was eleven, I picked him up from a sleepover (although I think very little sleeping was involved). By this time my young son was an expert at map and compass, so we gave him a location, and he took off with a tarp and a sleeping bag. I headed out with Taz and one of the base camp operators following me.
I had bronchitis that day. I got tired early and wanted to go home, so I called Shane on the radio. No response. I wasn’t worried; Taz had my full trust. But the base camp operator panicked. He started hurrying up and down the trails, shouting and looking for Shane. Taz had slowed her pace to keep track of me, and she gave me a quizzical look when the man got out in front of her.
“Ignore him, Taz. Find Shane.”
A short distance later she turned into the trees, pushed the leaves that had fallen on his brown tarp out of the way, and slipped inside to lick Shane awake.
After two years of training and preparation, we were ready. National evaluators came from New Jersey and Maryland to test our capabilities. Taz and I pulled the long multiple problem. We would be given a search with two subjects in an area so large we would need to work for a block of time between two to four hours. The test would be deliberately started late in the day so that the majority of it would be done in the dark.
The evaluators set up the problem, expecting me to take it easy on my eight-year-old dog and myself by working along the contours of the ridge instead of climbing up and down hills repeatedly. That wasn’t our style. I checked the wind and sent Taz to work, heading up the first wooded incline. Fifteen minutes later we had both subjects.
The evaluators weren’t going to let us scurry back to base camp and lounge in the relative warmth of a tent in winter. They told me to pretend we had a third subject and prove both my dog and I could keep working for long time periods. Taz and I tramped through a big patch of wild sage and bulldozed our way through brambles. After two hours we were two hills and almost half a mile from camp. The evaluators told me to take a heading back to base. Taz and I took off in a straight line. I would have danced my way back. I knew we’d passed, but the rough ground and heavy vegetation limited me to the occasional skip. Taz read my mood and raced circles around me all the way back. We were approved to take searches.
My first real search came a few months later when Taz located a drowning victim. The first day they put us out on an airboat into the open section of water. Taz identified the gloves of the missing man. When we hauled them into the boat, she cringed, tucking her tail and head and giving me the saddest look. It was her natural response to the scent of death.
The next day we worked on the ten-inch-thick ice surrounding the open water. At a pressure crack, Taz alerted. Other dogs were brought in, but no one could confirm her find. Several days later, underwater camera crews located the man fifteen feet from where Taz alerted and almost two hundred yards from where everyone expected to find the body.
Another time a fireman called us to find two CPR dummies in the fireproof gear he had lost during a rescue diver training. In the space of two hours, Taz found both dummies, the back half of a car someone had dumped in the lake, and a flipper one of the divers had lost. That convinced the fire chief to use dogs on water searches.
When the towers came down on September 11, many of my friends and their dogs responded. I didn’t go. The smell of death saturated the air. I knew it would stress Taz permanently, and I couldn’t ask that of her.
Taz was always there—my go-to girl. At ten she developed a brain tumor and became blind. Her replacement, Clara, had to step up and fill some pretty big paw prints. Even so, I would put down tracks for Taz in the backyard so she could do the work she loved. She had so much fun searching, there could have been a hundred sites to spread her ashes. I settled for scattering them among my rosebushes and lavender where she had chased Clara and rolled to her heart’s content.
While dogs have saved my life and sanity on more than one occasion, only one changed it completely—Tasmanian Devil. She led me to understand the road God had spent almost forty years preparing me to take. As long as a canine search and rescue unit exists, a little piece of Taz will always be around, working so others may live.