GREAT DOGS!

Scent of the Missing
Love and Partnership with a Search-and-Rescue Dog

by

Susannah Charleson

Are you kidding me? I was a quarter of the way through when I wrote that note. By then the author had been on multiple search-and-rescues--Alzheimer's patient wandered off, teenage boy ran out of the house and didn't return, report of captives held in a remote farmhouse--and they never find the subject!  It's like she's trying to overcompensate for people's fantasies about heroic rescues against all odds by describing what it's really like.  You won't find that here--no heroic rescues, no tracking of criminals fleeing crime scenes, no mysterious "sign" that leads to a decades old murder.

Actually, they do eventually find that last one.  But I was beginning to think she was putting us on with her fascinating details of seemingly hopeless searches that, more often than not, concluded in "not here."

But "not here" can be very important!  If faced with a street of wreckage and rubble, a dog needs to be able to quickly tell the search team which houses to excavate--human scent "here"--and which to pass by. A negative is as important as a positive sometimes.

After working as the communications guide/observer/aide with many dog teams, she determines to become a handler and starts her search for a puppy with aptitude. It wasn't easy, but finally Puzzle comes along. Beautiful, golden, dark-eyed Puzzle. I'm in love with her.  And in love with this book. It's instructive, entertaining, edge-of-the-seat suspenseful, and sometimes so very, very sad.

And it's all about dogs!