The Call

                I know my alpha dog, Finn, is getting old.  I see him slowing down.  I even have a young dog coming up quickly through the ranks to take his place.  In my mind though, he is immortal.  

Just two weeks prior to what I am about to describe, he’d spent several hours in the mountains near Lexingtion, Va on a cadaver search. And was sounder, both mentally and physically, at 11, than my younger cadaver dog was when the search was over.  This was all in the back of my mind when my search team, Blue and Gray Search and Rescue Dogs, were called out to assist in the search, rescue and recovery mission after the devastating tornadoes that flattened Glade Springs, Virginia at the end of April.  Finn is an old hand at disaster work.  He’s spent time in New Orleans after Katrina and knows how to navigate jungles, both the green ones and the steel ones.  So he was the first one I got out of the truck.

                He and I were walking down to the first rubble pile we were assigned, and he stumbled on smooth ground, doing a face plant.  That had me a little worried. Then when he didn’t want get on the pile; this from a dog that climbed 30’ piles hour after hour in the 9^th Ward, I wasn’t just worried, I knew there was something very wrong.

The following Monday, Finn got up on my picnic table, reluctantly let me hold off a vein and I got two tubes of blood to send into Antech.  I don’t remember what I was expecting to see, maybe elevated BUN and Creatinine.  Indicators of failing kidneys.  I certainly wasn’t expecting to see a blood calcium level of 17.3.  When the normal high is only 12.

Calcium is delicately held in balance by two pairs of parathyroid glands on either side of the thyroid glands in the neck: 

                Too high, cardiac arrhythmias occur.  Too low, seizures and tetany occur.  Both easily lead to death.  Low calcium is something most dog breeders are very aware of.  Bitches can develop low blood calcium when they are nursing a large litter and develop eclampsia.   However, there are very few things that cause the blood calcium to go high, all of them devastating.  In school I was taught when there is a high calcium level it is time to search for the tumor that is causing it. 

                I can deal with mayhem, destruction, broken bones, HBC’s and other assortments of catastrophes as long as it isn’t my dog.  When one of my dogs ends up with even the most minor of problems, I become the veterinary client from hell.  Irrational, illogical and very emotional.  However, a small rational part of my brain was still working and it pushed me to start researching how to figure out what was happening to my heart dog.

             As a veterinarian, I belong to a wonderful resource called Veterinary Information Network.  With the click of a button, I can get questions answered, research obscure clinical signs, and get help putting all the pieces together.  So that is where I started.  First, I had to determine if the elevated calcium was a true number and not lab error.  That required an ionized calcium level.  If that was elevated then it truly was an accurate number and I need to continue to find the source of the elevation.  This test requires a lot of special handling of the blood, the most important being the blood has to arrive at the lab frozen.  Luckily, I have a lot of ice packs to use for my vaccine cooler and several were sacrificed to the cause.  It only took a day to get those results back, and unfortunately it confirmed the levels as being a real number and not lab error.

 

                Back to VIN I went.  The next step is determining if the elevation is due to the parathyroids having a fit or if there was a tumor inducing the calcium levels to elevate.  There is an interesting test from Michigan State University vet lab called the hypercalcemia of Malignancy Profile.  It measures two specific hormones, the Parathyroid Hormone (PTH) and the Parathyroid Hormone related protein (PTHrP).  PTH is the hormone that keeps the calcium levels, well, level. PTHrP mimics PTH causing the calcium levels to elevate.  If the PTH is elevated, then the parathyroid glands are working over time.  If the PTHrP is elevated that means a tumor is producing it making the calcium to go up.

 

Finn’s results were difficult to understand because not only was his PTH zero, so was his PTHrP.  His parathyroids weren’t working and the tumor wasn’t producing PTHrP so what was making his calcium go so high?  I’ll probably never know for sure, but all the specialists said to continue looking for a tumor.

                In intact male dogs there are two places malignant tumors are most commonly found:  in the prostate and in anal sacs.  I couldn’t palpate a mass in either one of these places.  And none of his external lymph nodes were enlarged (the first place lymphoma likes to pop up).  But there are lymph nodes internally that aren’t readily palpable.  The next step in this dance was chest radiographs and an abdominal ultrasound.

 

                While I was doing office calls, my two technicians were able to get 3 views of his chest (which is standard when looking for tumors in the thorax).  My heart almost literally stopped when I looked at the first radiograph.  Sitting right in front of his heart was the tumor.  An ugly malevolent  mass taking up the first 1/3 of his chest.  The first thought that went through my head was he had lymphoma and I only had my boy for another 2-3 months.  The next thought was how in the hell can he still feel good enough to continue working?  I mean he was just on a difficult mountain search not 2-3 weeks prior to this. 

He still needed the abdominal ultrasound done, but I couldn’t stand to be around when it was done.  I don’t think I could have held it together in front of all my co-workers if nastiness was found in Finn’s abdomen.  So I left.

                While Finn had his ultrasound done, I took his rads to the internal medicine DVM at Veterinary Internal Medicine Practice of Northern Virginia for an unbiased evaluation of what was in his chest.  By the time I got back to the clinic the u/s was done.  I asked them to just fax the results to me, because I was sure all his abdominal lymph nodes were enlarged and I wanted a few more hours of ignorance.  Finn snored in the back of the truck on the way home, oblivious.

                I got a call from the wonderful Dr. Deppe at VIMP before I even got home.  He confirmed that it was a mass.  But he gave me some hope when I told him that none of his external lymph nodes were enlarged, that we need to consider a thymoma.  A benign tumor of the thymus.  He opened up an appointment for my boy the next afternoon to try and get a fine needle aspirate of the mass.  There was even better news sitting on the fax machine at home:  his abdominal ultrasound was clean, even his spleen looked normal.

                Turns out Finn is a grumpy drunk!  He needed to be sedated for the ultrasound guided fine needle aspirate of the mass.  Not that I am complaining, though.  I didn’t want him moving while they were sticking a needle into his chest so close to his heart.  But boy was he rumbly grumbly when I picked him up.  I soon had the samples winging their way via FedEx air to Colorado State University lab for cytology and also to have a PARR test done.  PARR is a test that helps to determine if the lymphocytes are reactive and come from many different lines or if they are neoplastic and all come from the clone of one lymph cell.  It’s not cheap but helps with treatment options.

                More good news when the cytology and PARR results came back.  Cytology was suggestive of a thymoma and the PARR results also pointed in the direction of a thymoma. If you want an explaination of the PARR test click here: CSU PARR test

. 

I was ecstatic, Finn just wanted breakfast.  

The results showed up on Monday morning.  By Monday evening, Finn was scheduled for surgery Wednesday morning with Dr. Bradley at Veterinary Surgical Referral Practice of Northern Virginia. His clinic is in the same building as Dr. Deppe’s clinic, and I’ve referred many of my own clients to him.  He is a surgeon with an unbelievable work ethic and astounding talent. 

  

I was 95% sure I wanted to do this.  But there was a small part of me that questioned my motives for doing such a massive, invasive surgery on an elderly dog. But he was healthy otherwise and there was an excellent chance that the tumor was benign.  Combine all that with the fact that Finn has given me his all every time I asked him, quieted those doubts.

I had to be at Dr. Bradley’s by 7AM, so in the pre dawn light of Wednesday morning I loaded up Finn in the truck for the 2 hour drive to the clinic.  I won’t lie and say I didn’t shed any tears on the way up there.  My mind going to the worst case scenarios, all ending in death.  And the little doubts that I thought I’d come to grips with were rising up and throwing themselves at me, making me so very conflicted.  He just looked so healthy that the irrational part of my brain made me doubt there was really anything wrong with him.  I couldn’t stop from trying to touch him the entire way up there.  Finn on the other hand, got impatient with me, hurmphed at me and moved to the back of the truck to continue his snooze like he normal does when we are on a road trip.

Dr. Bradley explained how the surgery was going to go.  He does his thorocotomies from the left side, and not through the sternum, because he feels they recover more quickly.  The difficulty of this surgery was the mass was so far forward, he was going to need to make the incision farther forward than he normally does.  That meant that the muscles of his shoulder were going to be involved, not just the intercostals muscles.  But, I trusted him when he said that he’d get better exposure to the tumor and was more likely to get it all.  As I was walking Finn back to his surgery cage, in the cage next to his was a dog that was going home that morning after her own thorocotomy for a lung lobe abscess.  Seeing her made me more comfortable with my own decision to go ahead with Finn’s surgery.

His surgery was scheduled for 10AM and was supposed to be done by 12 noon.  Dr. Bradley called me at 12:05 to tell me that it was a text book surgery and Finn was in recovery.  I start letting everyone know my boy is doing well, and I am over the moon!  My heart heads back to where it is supposed to be and not in my throat. 

Everything comes to a crashing halt when I get another call from Dr. Bradley too soon after the first call.  And the nightmare begins.  Dr. Bradley is very specific when he says he’s going to call, and is never more than a couple of minutes off.  If he calls at another time, he really doesn’t need say much, I already know Finn is either dead or dying.

He’d gone into respiratory arrest.

For some reason his lung stopped working and started filling with fluid.  He couldn’t breathe, his lungs were so filled with fluid no oxygen could pass.  They tried to pull off some of the fluid with Lasix, but it didn’t work well or quickly enough.  So they put him on a ventilator.  Later, both he and Dr. Deppe came up with a few reasons why it happened:  re-expansion injury or neurogenic pulmonary edema.  His radiographs really didn’t match up with either one, but there is not a lot of data on those conditions in dogs because they usually die.  All we could hope for was that it was a solitary event and that the ventilator would keep him alive long enough for his lungs to repair themselves.

I called back shortly after Dr. Bradley's first call because I really couldn’t process what he told me during that phone call.  Not surprising, after going from a high of him coming through surgery to having him put on a ventilator. Dr. Bradley didn’t give much different information from the first call, but at least now my brain had a better chance of trying to understand what was happening.  Didn’t make it any easier though.  My precious Finn, my heart dog, my partner, was dying and there wasn’t anything anyone could do about it.

I went around to the rest of my house calls, but I am not quite sure how much sense I made.  I think I helped the vomiting dog and the diabetic cat, but I don’t remember.  I was just waiting for the call.  “The call”.  I never wanted that call.  I’ve had to make that call to my own clients, but it was shear torture being on the other side.  My phone was now enemy number one, but also a life line.  I didn’t know whether I should just throw it out the window or just sit and stare at it.
 
I finished my housecalls around 5PM, but I couldn't go home.  He wasn’t there, might never be back there and I wasn’t prepared for empty hole that was there in his place.  I tried distracting myself at Barnes and Noble, but kept getting strange looks as I wandered aimlessly around, picking up books, putting them down and the occasional tear.  I finally left.  There were 4 hungry dogs at home that needed to pee.

I almost made it home before I broke down.  Driving and texting can’t hold a candle to how dangerous it is to drive when you can’t see the road for the tears.  I don’t recommend it.  Dr. Bradley had asked me earlier if I wanted to come up and visit with him.  I just couldn’t do it.  I wanted to remember him as I walked him back to his cage, tail wagging, talking smack to the dogs in the cages as he walked by (he’s good at that), not with tubes in him.  That wasn’t him, just a facsimile of him.

Thunderstorms start rolling through as I was sitting at the computer in my office, aimlessly wandering around the internet, when Dr. Bradley’s number pops up on my phone.  He was not supposed to call until 10PM when he went into check on Finn, and it is only 9:15PM.  I didn’t want to pick it up, just stared at it and it wouldn't stop ringing.  Surprisingly, my voice was actually half way normal when I finally answered the ring, when all I wanted to do is throw up.  Nor did I drop the phone.

The thunderstorms that had rolled through my town, ended up in Manassass, where the clinic is located, knocking out power to the clinic.  Two very quick thinking LVTs ran a power converter from a pick up truck in the parking lot into the clinic, plugged in an extension cord to it and attached the ventilator to the extension cord.  Good Lord! A power failure, just makes the whole thing so much easier. Dr. Bradley was just calling after the fact to let me know what happened.  His blood oxygen saturation never went below 85% and one of the LVTs hand bagged him until they got the extension cord set up.  Ironically, the week before the clinics started a search for a generator large enough to power both clinics in case something like this happened. 

I was told not to call before 7:30AM on Thursday.  The fact that I got no further calls from Dr. Bradley was a little comforting.  Again, I was surprised that I could hold the phone when I called, my hands were sweating and shaking so much.  An interesting sensation, to be sitting a chair and feel like you've run a hundred yard sprint there is so much damned adrenaline pumping your body.  My heart felt like it was about to explode. 
Dr. Bradley calmly told me he’d taken Finn off the ventilator at 6:15 that morning and continued to breathe on his own, maintaining normal blood oxygen levels on room air. And that he continues to recover normally from anesthesia. Normally!

When I went to visit him on Thursday evening, he was weak and unsteady, but who wouldn’t be?  He ate like the Lab he is when I was there.  While laying on the floor next to him, the LVTs and I talked a little about what happened.  More light was shed on what happened, especially the detail about the power converter and the extra tidbit that Finn had turned an ugly shade of purple before he got on the ventilator.   No one there really expected him to make it, including Dr. Bradley.  Me either.  Of all the dogs I know of that ended up on a ventilator, Finn is the only one that lived.

He never looked back.  He came home on Saturday with an OMG huge incision on the left side of his chest. And other than a too fast drop in his blood calcium that I am supplementing right now, the biggest issue he’s got is pain from the cut muscles.  The anti-climactic news was the biopsy confirmed it was a benign thymoma.

He is sleeping at my feet right now, and nothing is better than that.

My team mate Misty Sampson made this video of Finn working the 9th Ward after Katrina.  It is one of my favorites:

Reduce Reuse Recycle

I’ve been off pretending to be a writer and was participating in NaNowrimo, however, I didn’t make the 50,000 word count in 30 days goal.  When I first started I didn’t have any concept of how difficult it would be to pull close to 2,000 words a day out of my imagination that actually made sense when read all in a row.  After reading the last thing I wrote one evening, the next morning, I had to wonder who actually wrote it, because I certainly didn’t remember ever striking those keys. And, no, they didn’t make any sense.

But that doesn’t mean I and my horde hasn’t been active.  Finn, the old man, is still able to put in a four hour middle of the night search on Massanutten Mountain, or as I like to call it, Mass-a-rock Mountain.  We were looking for a mentally handicapped person that decided that he really wanted to go for a hike, forgetting that he couldn’t remember how to get home.  A lot of people and dogs put in quite a few hours and covered many miles looking for him and the three dogs that went with him. 

I like searching at night, because if I could see what I was actually trying to search through, I’d probably turn around and go home.  Much of what was in my search sector that night consisted of rock.  Big rocks, little rocks, boulders, rocks that like to rock, rocks that hide under leaves, slippery rocks, moss covered rocks and holes that hide. All of them just waiting to break an ankle.

That looks like a field of ferns, but the ferns are covering field of rocks

The beginning of a laurel thicket

One of many rock slides Finn and I encounter on our searches

And then down at the bottom of the rock slide Finn and I were searching was the mountain laurel.  After walking across rocks, the thing I hate the most is trying to find a decent path through the woven branches that make up a mountain laurel thicket. 

But, if everyone got lost in a city park with walk ways, they wouldn’t need us.

The gentleman was eventually found safe after he set the forest on fire.  Literally.  He set a fire that ended up eating 10 acres of forest.  But he was found and so were his dogs.

However, Teagan and Deacon where feeling a little neglected and hatched a plan to make me pay more attention to them.  It consisted of some tag team vomiting and eating of said residue. 

Deacon is a dog with a severe sock fetish.  The first hint that this was going to be a lifelong problem and that maybe he needs some therapy for this mental illness, was Christmas 2009.  He stole the nearly naked carcass of the Christmas turkey from the counter at Mom’s house.  Pissed off was the least of what I felt, because I had warned Mom what a counter surfer he was.  I thought she knew what I was talking about, but obviously didn’t because she wasn’t watching him while he was in the kitchen with her and I was out with the other dogs.  My dad, who is normally very unflappable, comes rushing out the house with an extremely worried look on his face, to tell me that Deacon had inhaled the ENTIRE carcass in about two bites.  Fortunately, hydrogen peroxide works well on him, and urrppp up comes the carcass in its entirety. 

Then 20 minutes later, a sock.  A beautiful yellow tinged, sewer smelling athletic sock.   As of this writing, he’s puked up close to 5 socks.  Several in my truck coming home from hunt tests and SAR training.  I know when he’s got a sock percolating in that stomach of his.  He gets tucked up, his ribs start to show a little and he has a couple of days of throwing up small amounts of food.  And then it appears, always yellow stained, stinking like something dead that’s been rotting in the sun for a couple of days.

I do nightly patrols to pick up socks, make sure the door is closed to the room that has my socks in it, and make sure the laundry is put away as it is done.  All for naught…  Because he is a mission driven, sock seeking machine.  Nothing and nobody will stand in his eternal quest to find that holy grail of his life, THE PERFECT SOCK. 

A couple of weeks ago, while I was upstairs plunking away on the computer, he disappears for a few minutes taking Teagan with him.  I get down stairs just in time to see him licking his lips and a large area of fluid on the laundry room floor.  My suspicion, that he’d just re-eaten what he’d just regurgitated (canines-giving real meaning to reduce/reuse/recycle).  I didn’t think much of it and left to go do my morning rounds.  However, when I got back home for lunch, he’d continued to vomit in his crate.  So I called the clinic I worked for, in only a mildly panicked state, and advised them to prepare for what is probably going to be the first of many surgical sock retrievals I foresee in Deacon’s life. 

So I get to the clinic early the next morning and get started on his radiographs.  I make all the other veterinarians at the practice look at them and tell me there is nothing stuck.  And had to be persuaded not to send the rads off for a radiologist to put their mark on them signifying that there wasn’t a foreign body trapped in his small intestine.  But, both of them did feel a mass in there.  As I was leaving, one of the docs made me promise to call her and tell her what he craps out.  In my crazed Munchausen by Proxy fugue state, I was still trying to figure out how I was going to get him back up there for the surgery I sure he needed.

We get home safely and when I open the door to the laundry room, I nearly pass out from the stench that greets me.  It appears that Teagan had pushed Deacon away from the magnificent mass of vomit that he regurgitated for her and ate it, sock and all.  For in her crate was a beautiful yellow sewer smelling athletic sock, that she’d very carefully re-eaten everything around it but left that splendid sock for me to see.

In the middle of that night, Deacon leaves me a present of a sock on the dining room floor.  Wrapped very prettily in poop.

Training tips for search and rescue dogs

Training Tip #39:  when leaving the house to set up your evenings training, make sure you put the puppy in her crate.

Addendum to Training Tip #39:  latch the crate door.

Paths Unkown

A couple of weeks ago a beautiful silver balloon drifted into my yard, having lost all its helium.  Made me wonder who lost it.  Was there a child somewhere that cried when it floated off?  Whose birthday party did it drift away from?  Did a young man give it to his first love, and she lost it?

It also made me think of other things that wander into my life that I wasn’t aware I was looking for.  Those things that make us travel a path we weren’t expecting or planning on.  There is only one thing that wandered into my life I can remember that definitely pointed me down a trail that I had never planned on, and that would be my first search dog, Ben. 

Ben

I’d been with my search group, Blue and Gray, for about 6 months.  I’d come to realize the time commitment needed and the monetary commitment as well, so it was time for me to look for a dog.  I was in love with my college dog, Jack and wanted another one just like him.  He was a big dog, with long luxurious golden hair that paid homage to his mixed heritage; he was ¾ Golden Retriever and ¼ Great Pyrenees.  He was as beautiful as he was tough.  So I went looking at Bernese Mountain Dogs.  They are stunning to look at, and in my neophyte enthusiasm, thought they were working dogs.   All the dogs I saw were beautiful and exactly what I thought I was looking for, but something kept holding me back from committing to a puppy.

At this time in my life I was boarding my horse at my friend’s farm, Mountain Run Farm, where she also had a small boarding kennel.  I was out finishing up a ride, when Kari comes rushing down to the barn to tell me that I needed to stick around. She has the perfect search dog for me.

Some clients of hers were boarding their dog at her kennel until their house was finished being built as the place they were renting didn’t allow pets.  They frantically called Kari one afternoon, they had just picked up a Labrador on the road near their apartment building that they thought had been hit by a car.  Could she help them take care of it?  Why they didn’t call the emergency clinic, I’ll never know, but in karma of the universe, they weren’t supposed to.  Kari actually told them to go directly to the emergency clinic, but they wanted her to look at him first.

I was expecting what I call a cur Lab, to step out of their car.  A cur lab is a dog that nobody can tell what breed it really is but kind of looks like a Lab so that is what they call it.  They usually are whippet thin, with a whip like tail and a pointy snout, with a vague wave to a distant relative that may have been a Labrador.  The SPCA is notorious for calling everything a Lab, because that is the easiest to adopt out.  Especially if they are a black dog.

But, from this tiny car, out steps this big beautiful yellow Lab, with a gorgeous block head.

It was love at first sight, both ways.  I was completely and absolutely in love, the kind where music should be playing and little hearts floating around.  And all that was wrong with him was a raging ear infection. 

He was not the most gifted of search dogs, but he was patience personified.  Patience to deal with my mistakes as a novice trainer and the patience to not get frustrated with me when he couldn’t understand what I wanted from him.  He was a teacher, that was his gift.  I was lucky to have such a dog such as him, it made training the rest of my dogs that much easier.

Most SAR dogs are trained using toys, and for months I tried to get him to play tug, but it was beneath him.  I spent 6 frustrating months trying to get him to work for a toy, because that’s what everybody said I had to do.  This dog, though, was incredibly motivated by food.  One day he got out of my house when my pet sitter came to let them out to do his business.  She called me frantically, knowing how much he meant to me.  I remembered it was trash day and told her to just follow the trail of turned over trash cans.  Sure enough, she found him at the fourth trash can happily munching on what, I don’t know, but content. 

So I switched to training him with hot dogs.  He was certified in 6 months.

His only find was a suicide in the Blue Ridge Mountains, before he suffered a career ending injury to a suspensory ligament in his rear leg.  He led me down this path I am on right now and he was the first step.  The second step of which was getting Finn, my current search dog.  Then my second HRD dog Cora, and have bred two litters of Labs.  I am training director for my team.  And with Finn, I’ve been deployed to New Orleans after Katrina and to the jungles of Guyana, South America on HRD missions as well as numerous local missions. 

In 2005, I lost him to cancer and still think about him almost every day.  I saw his ghost in my bedroom doorway, right after I put him to sleep.  He didn’t want to leave me, but I told him I’d be ok.  He did good with me and it was time for him to go and help someone else.

Little did I know what was in front of me that first day I saw him step out of that car.

Princess Prissy versus the Tomboy

When Cora was younger, I never knew which one was going to come out and play.  During training it was ok if Princess Prissy was out.  Not so good when we are on an actual task.  In the past, when we were at a cadaver search, I always brought out Finn first, because the Prissy vs Tomboy issue with Cora.  Even though, strictly speaking, Finn is cross trained for live and deceased and Cora is HRD only.

A couple of years ago I made the conscious decision to use Cora first on a mission in Charlotte, NC.  In this particular situation, we were surrounded by multiple news trucks and two news helicopters were hovering over head.  We (me and another canine handler), talked over how we wanted to attack the site.  Then we had to review it with representatives from the local LE and a couple of agents from the Justice Department.  And this was the time I decided it was Cora’s turn to go first.   No pressure!   The plan was for Cora and me to take the grounds with its accompanying construction site hazards:  equipment, debris, and pits dug for no reason that I could tell.  And the other dog team took the half built apartment complexes, with the idea the subject may have been buried and the murderer hoping to have the grave site covered in concrete.

I get Cora out, hoping and praying Tomboy is here and not Princess Prissy.  I break her (“hurry up”, her cue to pee), get her costume on (collar with the bells on it) and tell her to “go find”.  And boom, she’s off like a shot.    She’s ranging around, nose stuck to the ground.  I figure she’s getting her ya ya’s out and turn to say something to my walker.   I don’t think I get more than a couple of words out when my walker points to something over my shoulder.  I turn around, and there is Cora the TOMBOY, sitting, just barely, with her butt doing a wiggle dance and tail slapping the ground madly.  She opens her mouth to bark and I throw the ball to her to fill it.  I don’t want her barking to bring every single camera pointing at her and broadcasting that we found something until I figure out what she’s trying to tell me.

It turns out that what she found wasn’t what we were looking for.  She marked the area where 3 weeks previously a homeless man had been attacked and bled out.  From that point on I trusted her, and her confidence in herself because I believed in her skyrocketed.

So over the past couple of years I saw Princess Prissy less and less and Tomboy became the norm. 

Until this weekend.

I also do hunt test competition with my dogs.  It is a great way for the dogs to have fun and I don’t have to be in charge of training. So I get up at 5 AM on Sunday morning to be able to leave for field training by 6AM, since we have to on the field early to beat the heat.  I work her son, Deacon, first.  He’s a monster in the field and he had a great time picking up the bumpers.  Go to get Cora out of the truck, warm her up and then walk to the line to send her for a bird. 

“whaaa???? You want ME to RUN across thistle, and briar's and cut cedars to pick up a stinkin’ bumper??  I believe you didn’t talk that over with me, Princess Prissy, ruler of all things prissy.

“Talk to the paw.”

I had to handle her to on a stinking single.  Arrrghhh!  I made her do it and then do it again.  And then a blind through the same crap. She looked like haven’t trained her in a year. Then we had the walk of shame back to the truck.  I should say, I had the walk of shame.  Cora could have cared less.

That evening, I took her out to do some HRD (cadaver) work.  I had the problem set up from the evening before, so the area was saturated with scent and made for a little bit of difficulty.  But nothing she couldn’t handle, and has handled before.

Finn got to work first because he had been left at home a lot.  He did well.  Got Cora dressed in her costume, a pretty collar with Buddhist prayer bells that tinkle with a pleasing sound.  Got her to “hurry up” and then sent her to work.

She promptly peed near the source to show her displeasure (at what, only she knows), so back into the truck she went.

Princess Prissy showed herself to remind me that Cora does not like being second fiddle to anyone or anything.

I planned her next training with Princess Prissy in mind, to remind her that even though PP doesn’t like to work in tough terrain, that makes no never mind to me, Head Alpha Bitch, ruler of ALL THINGS DOG.

So I set up her problems is a field of this:

And then made Princess Prissy work through it all:

And she was perfect, even if she did dance the dance of sissy feet through this ground cover:

Even better, on our search today in Giles County near Blacksburg VA, in the rain and the acres of impassable thickets of mountain laurel, she did her work well and with enthusiasm.  While I shivered in the rain and thanked which ever deity in charge of dogs for giving me back my Tomboy. 

Nature's Lullabye

At dusk, the drum roll of a soft summer rain, added to the sharp call of the cicada mixed with the chorus of crickets.

And I am lucky enough to be sung to sleep every night this way.

If I got lost in the woods, would anyone care?

Probably not.  I am usually the one finding those lost people, not the findee.  Well, actually my dog is the finder; I just tag along for the ride.

But I have a young dog coming up, Darcy, that is due to start her wilderness certification this fall and winter.  And the main thing I am terrified of failing is my land navigation.  I’ve been doing this search stuff for close to 15 years and the last time I was tested on my navigation was eight years ago when Finn got his certification.  Since then, I’ve been the one who’s been teaching and testing people on their ability to navigate.  Nothing like the evaluator being evaluated.  I think it’s going to be more stressful testing Darcy than when I tested Finn the first time. Yep, you read that right, the first time.  I failed my first 160 acre test with Finn and had to make it up 3 months later.

This past weekend, my search team hosted a seminar taught by Rob Speiden of Natural Awareness Tracking School .  So there I was, Saturday morning, sitting and listening with rapt attention to Rob going over the basics of land navigation, like I’d never been shown a map or compass or spent the past 15 years navigating safely in the woods.  I like to say I’ve never been lost, just momentarily disoriented.  Then I bought a GPS, and whoosh, there went my ability to rely on my own sense of direction.   We reviewed Mr. Mercator, how to shoot a bearing and, in our first outdoor class of the weekend, we determined what our pace count is (mine’s 62).  That means it takes me 62 paces to cover 100 yards.  But that’s on flat ground with no obstacles.  I am going to find out how accurate that is in the afternoon when we are out in the woods.  I've never navigated using a pace count, always used terrain features.  Here's how I do it:  hmm, that looks like the mountain I am looking for on the map, there's the drainage I've been looking for, wait a minute, how many drainages was I supposed to pass before I got to the one I need to search, crap, I think I need to turn around and count them again, but I really don't want to climb all the way back down the mountain, I think I can make the terrain features I was looking for fit what's supposed to be on the map....Search to the top of the drainage, wait I was one drainage too far, head back to base by searching down the drainage I was supposed to go up. As you can see, I need to fine tune my navigation a little.

I am confident in my abilities, especially since I’ve been doing this for 15 years.  And you know what, confidence means jack, when you are learning something new and trying it for the first time.  Which I was with pace counting.  I was 50 yards south of the first point I was supposed to find.  At least my pace count was right on.  The next few points I did well with, but then again, following the whole group makes it much easier too. 

We did night nav as well… again I was glad the group was there.  Oh lordy, do I need to practice before I get evaluated this winter!  At least when I am on a real search I can use my GPS.

The fun part of the whole night was having a short search after everyone, well almost everyone, got back to the parking area.  Yep, one of the team got lost on her way back to her car.  However, it was a status one and we all went home to rest up for Sunday’s training.

Sunday’s training was about clue awareness and tracking.  I did pretty good with the tracking.  My team and I were able to follow two tracks to the end of them. 

Not so good with clue awareness.  Before we got to class, Rob had set up a clue awareness scenerio.  A missing 10 year old boy that liked to play cards and pick up golf balls when his dad was out on the golf course.  He had set out 10 clues.  I found exactly:  zero clues.

But this is all that I found:

And I tracked them for a short distance, although Rob said it was too easy because their foot prints where too distinctive.

It’s a good thing I have my dog along to help me, or I’d be totally useless out there.