Aaron Elkins - Unnatural Selection

“I just thought of something, Trus,” Clapper said. “The fog’s supposed to be worse tomorrow. Fog season, you know. Is that going to be a problem?”

“Dear me, no. For you and me, perhaps, but not for a dog. It’s smell they depend on, not sight. It might even make it easier, because moist conditions enhance scent. And then the dogs are happier when it’s cool.”

The three men walked through the kitchen and out the back door of the house, into an acre of grassy moorland that included an inviting pond and a couple of shady clumps of small elm and sycamore trees, all safely enclosed by a wire fence. Valhalla for dog heroes, Gideon thought.

There were four of them: a Doberman pinscher, two German shepherds, and a Border collie, and all of them came bounding over gracefully when Hicks made a clucking sound with his tongue. These were not like the yappers and yippers indoors, who had clamored for the attention of strangers. Three of the four had eyes only for Hicks. With their shapely heads turned adoringly up to him, they weren’t begging for food or even pleading for attention. All they wanted was the joy of his presence. The fourth, the Border collie, pranced around them, snapping gently at their feet to herd them together, as its genes demanded.

“This one’s Heidi, am I right?” Clapper said, bending to rub the ears of one of the German shepherds, which permitted the attention with the abstracted air of a pasha tolerating the devotion of a supplicant. “Hello, there, love,” Clapper said affectionately, and to Gideon: “It’s Heidi here that put an end to the biggest arson racket that Plymouth ever saw. What a nose on this old girl.”

“She did that, all right,” Hicks agreed. “It was Heidi that put us onto the lean-to where they’d stored their petrol-for setting their fires, you see, even though there’d been no petrol there for more than five months and it was completely open to the elements. Did it entirely on what vestiges of scent remained.”

“Amazing,” Gideon said. “Will we be using her tomorrow?”

Hicks stared at him. “What an idea. No, Heidi is an accelerant-detecting canine. No, no, we need a cadaver dog, or as we prefer to call it in these politically correct times, a human remains detection dog.”

“I didn’t realize they specialized to that extent.”

“Well, of course they specialize. How could a-” He was obviously shocked at Gideon’s ignorance, but polite-ness stopped him from expressing it. “For example, Kaiser here”-he kneaded the scruff of the other shepherd’s neck-“is strictly a water search dog. Keenest nose in existence for locating a body at the bottom of a pond, but wouldn’t know a cadaver in the open if he stumbled over it. And Trixie there-” At the mention of her name the Doberman shivered with pleasure and pushed her sleek muzzle into Hicks’s hand. “-well, this beauty has been known to hunt down an automobile with explosives in its boot after it had driven two miles through dense Torquay traffic.”

“Amazing,” Gideon murmured again.

“No, our expert tomorrow will be Tess.” He pointed at the midsized brown-and-white Border collie, which continued politely mock-nipping at their heels, presumably to keep them from wandering off and getting lost and thereby getting her in trouble. “Tess is a tried-and-true cadaver dog-pardon me, a human remains detection dog-inasmuch as she’s trained to find skeletons, and even single bones, as well as decomposing corpses. But she couldn’t track a lost hiker-a lost live hiker-to save her soul. Not her fault, of course; it’s the way she’s been schooled. She’s been taught to alert to nothing but human remains. She’ll even ignore animal remains.”

Gideon only barely caught himself before saying “Amazing” again. “Huh,” he said, “and I thought they were all just general-purpose tracking dogs, search-and-rescue dogs, with some specific training tacked on.”

“Good heavens, no,” Hicks exclaimed. “They’re not tracking dogs at all, never were. Tracking dogs require tracks, don’t you see. Either literal tracks or some specific scent article belonging to the person. And they generally require some specific starting point. But these ”-he used the stem of his pipe to jab at the animals-“are air-scent canines. They don’t look for an individual person or object but for a specific type of smell. They can start from anywhere, they don’t need scent articles, they-” His rosy cheeks turned a little redder. “Gentlemen, I beg your pardon. I’m boring you, I’m sure. It’s only that I don’t get a chance to talk about it very much anymore.”

“Ah, well, we’re bearing up,” Clapper said stoically.

“It’s extremely interesting,” Gideon said. “There’s a lot more to it than I thought.”

“Oh, that’s only the start,” Hicks said, recognizing Gideon as the curious scientist he was. “There’s a remarkable field of knowledge here. Come into the house for another cup of tea, or something stronger, if you like, and I will astound and edify you.”

“We’re for it now,” Clapper muttered crossly on the way back in.

Hicks began simply enough. What a dog had that a person didn’t was not only the ability to discriminate between extremely similar scents, but to locate the source of smells much more precisely than any human being could possibly hope to. It came naturally. What the dog was doing when he located a buried human bone was no different than what he did when he dug up a beef bone that he’d buried in the backyard months before. He doesn’t “know” where he buried it, he simply picks up the scent of a decaying bone on the air. Other animals, such as cats, actually have more scent receptors than dogs-was Gideon aware of that?-but of course the dog’s emotional and behavioral characteristics made it infinitely more amenable to training and working in the field.

Interesting enough, and so far so good, but when Hicks got into the chemistry of putrefactive olfaction (chemistry had never been Gideon’s strong suit) he rapidly left Gideon behind. (“Some say that the dog responds to the outgassing of volatile fatty acids and ionic compounds, but I maintain- have always maintained-that it is at the level of the major histocompatability complex, where unique protein markers form, that differentiation between these markers results in recognition.”)

“Ah,” said Gideon dully, while Clapper dozed peacefully, “amazing.”

Once Hicks had a full head of steam going, he was unstoppable, so it wasn’t until five-fifteen that Clapper and Gideon, dazed with canine lore, were let loose, and five forty-five by the time Gideon climbed Garrison Hill in the gathering mist and got back to Star Castle. In his room, on the table by the casement window, was a note from Julie:

Hi, Prof,

Hope your session with the sergeant-major went better than yesterday’s. Having put in a hard day’s work furthering human knowledge, a few of us have headed for the Bishop and Wolf for a relaxing pre-dinner pint or two.

Dinner’s not till seven, so come join us!

XXX, J

The Bishop and Wolf had been the consortium’s pub of choice during its first convening two years earlier, and Julie had pointed it out on their walk through Hugh Town when they’d arrived. The oldest building in the village, an attractive, mid-seventeenth-century stone inn with pansy-filled window boxes that added a whimsical and unlikely Bavarian air to the facade, and a hanging sign that showed a gigantic, slavering wolf crouching over a bishop’s mitre-topped light-house (the pub had been named for the Bishop and the Wolf, two of St. Mary’s earliest lighthouses). Situated in the center of the village, on the little square where the Strand and the Parade angled together, it was only a five-minute walk from Garrison Hill, so that it was a few minutes before six when Gideon pulled open the door and entered an old English pub, traditional in the extreme: cozy and plain, with nets, glass globes, and odds and ends on the walls; dark, old wooden tables; and a fitting, not-really-unpleasant fug of beer, wine, and cigarette smoke in the air.