Dead in the water

FINGER LAKE — The aluminum boat with its electric motor made multiple passes Friday in front of a dock a couple houses down from the Elk’s Lodge. Onboard were two members of Alaska Search and Rescue Dogs and their trainee, a young German shepherd named Kip.

“That’s biting there, that’s not drinking,” Kip’s owner Donna Cramer announced while watching her dog dunk her muzzle in the water over the gunwale.

Cramer watched for a few minutes more as Kip whined, looked over the gunwale, walked back and forth in the boat and pawed at its aluminum floor.

“I’d say we have it narrowed down to between here and the dock and within 30 to 40 feet of the shore,” Cramer said.

“She’s painting the picture perfectly,” said Stacie Burkhardt, who is helping Cramer and Kip learn the ropes of water searching.

A few more passes and Burkhardt judged Kip to have passed the test. She fished a canister scented to resemble a dead body out of the lake. For finding the canister Kip was rewarded handsomely with doggie treats.

“Good girl,” Cramer cooed.

Trying to catch the scent of something that’s underwater might seem like a fool’s errand to a human. But Vikki Gross, who is training her second search dog and has been doing search operations for 10 years, said that a drowning victim gives off quite a bit of scent. It bubbles to the surface in gasses released as the body decomposes. The tricky thing is watching the weather. And the currents. And the water temperature. And the dog’s behavioral cues.

“It’s a big puzzle,” Burkhardt said.

Burkhardt has been training water search dogs for years and got into it in Washington state where, she said, there would be 60 to 70 searches a year. She calls this kind of dog training her unpaid obsession. To call it an unpaid profession, she said, would be an oxymoron. In a way, the trainer has as much to learn from the dog as the dog does from the trainer. Burkhardt said the biggest piece of that is learning how to read a dog’s cues.

“We try to take what the dog does naturally to tell us when they’ve found a scent and work it into something more definite,” she said.

Kip’s whining, sniffing, barking and pawing at the bottom of the boat were all signs she smelled something, signs Cramer is learning to read.

Cramer said any dog can find the scent. The trick is to get the dog to tell they’ve found it. You have to be sure to reward them for that so they’ll tell you next time they find that scent.

But, short of homicide, how does one get the scent of a decaying human body for the dog to find?

Gross said there are a few sources. Trainers have blood drawn to use in a search. They use human hair. Now and then law enforcement will donate clothing collected at a crime scene or suicide. They can collect placentas from local midwives.

“We use bones, which, believe it or not, you can buy online,” Gross said. The website is on the up-and-up, sanctioned to sell bones for these types of exercises.

Having found the canister and completed what everyone running the exercise called the “water problem,” Cramer moved onto an island across from the Elk’s Lodge to search for scented items stashed on land and in the water near the shore. As the boat approached the island, Kip got up on the gunwale and started whining. Burkhardt couldn’t give up the secret in front of Cramer, but once she and Kip had disembarked, Burkhardt pointed out what had gotten Kip excited — a bag of bones tied up in a tree branch.

This sort of thing can get a little messy, a bit gory, but that’s not what it’s about, Cramer said. Not for her at least, and not for her colleagues, as far as she knows. It’s about bringing people home. Providing closure to families.

“Everybody deserves to come home. That’s what it’s about,” Cramer said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.