Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)
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Looking at older pictures, she says, "About eight years ago I had a dog named Murphy. He was border collie/Australian shepherd mix, an incredible dog, and I thought, 'Here's a good way to work obedience with him and maybe meet some people. I was working at Hewlett-Packard, in an office situation, so I needed a balance."
She says, "The more I did it, the more intrigued I was by the cases. It started out as this dog-focused obedience thing and evolved into something that I really had more of a passion for."
In the photos of Honduras, Michelle and Yogi work with fellow volunteer Harry Oakes, Jr., and his dog, Valorie, a mix of border collie, schipperke, and kelpie. Oakes and Valorie helped search the ruins of the Federal Courthouse after the Oklahoma City bombing.
"Valorie, when she smells a dead body-or what she's looking for-she'll start barking," says Michelle. "She's very vocal. Yogi, he'll wag and get very excited, but he barely says a word. If it's a deceased victim, he'll whine. His tail will go down and do the stress reaction."
She says, "Valorie will get hysterical and start crying. And she'll dig, if it's mud with someone underneath. Or if it's water, she'll jump in the water."
Looking at the photos of collapsed houses, she says, "When someone is either stressed or angry or anything, they let off epinephrine. And when violence or death happens, it's just a more intense release of those smells. Plus whatever gases and fluids belonged to the body when it died. You can imagine in the wild why that would be so important to a pack. To an animal that means, 'Something has been killed here. One of my pack members has been killed here. They get particularly upset over a human, because we're part of their pack."
She says, "About ninety percent of the training to do search and rescue is the human recognizing what the dog's doing naturally. Being able to read Yogi when he's stressed.
"Obedience sets the tone that you're in charge," she says. "Then you hide toys from them; I still do that. And they love it. They have a race to see who can find it first. The next thing you do is have someone hold the dog while you run away and hide. You just keep doing more and more complex situations. They're looking on a track. If they haven't seen where you're going, they can smell."
Looking at a photo of a group of men, she says, "This is the Venezuelan fire brigade. We said we were the Pan-American rescue team."
About another photo, she says, "This is the one area we called the 'car graveyard.»
About a vast, sliding hillside of mud, she says, "This is the soccer field that collapsed."
In another photo, inside a house filled with mud, she says, "Walking through this house that had been looted, there were handprints on the wall. All these mud prints where the looters had kept their balance."
In a wide band along all the walls are countless perfect handprints in brown mud.
In other photos are the rooms where Yogi found bodies buried under fallen walls, under mattresses.
One photo shows a neighborhood of houses tumbling down a steep cliff of mud.
"This is up on the hill where all these houses had collapsed," she says. "They had hundreds of stories why people wouldn't leave: they didn't want looters to get their stuff, a woman with kids said her husband had gone to a bar and told her to stay here. Just awful, tragic stories."
Another photo shows Valorie sleeping in the back of a pickup truck, dwarfed by a thick roll of dark plastic bags.
Michelle says, "That's Valorie with the body bags, exhausted."
She talks about her first search, saying, "It was up in Kelso, and it was a fellow whose wife had disappeared. There was word that she was fooling around with all types of different people who were coming up to the house. So we drive up to this immaculately manicured farm. There's horses and a pasture with a bull in it. The dogs did a huge death alert in the barn. Their tail goes down and they pee. They swallow a lot. The natural part is the defecating, that and the peeing and the whining and the crying. It's making them nauseated, I think. Yogi pulls away. He doesn't want to go near it. Valorie goes toward it and she digs and barks more and more, and she gets frantic because she's trying to communicate something. 'It's right here!
"These people's little boy, he was about four, said something to the grandmother about 'Daddy put mommy underwater, and they whisked him away and nobody was able to be alone with him after that."
In another picture from Tegucigalpa, a long slab of concrete lies on its side in the middle of a riverbed.
"That was a bridge," Michelle says.
In all the pictures are scattered little packages of rancid lard, left everywhere by the water.
"The most profound search that I'll still get choked up about was this autistic child," she says. "The little guy was four years old, and they'd locked him in, but he'd found a way to unlock the door while his mom was ironing upstairs. He'd take all his clothes off, too, as soon as he got out the door. So all these people had volunteered to go look. And that's not optimal, because every time one more person walks across the trail, they can track the scent somewhere else."
In these older photographs, Michelle is working with Rusty, another golden retriever. The photos show a heavy woods around a slow, dark slough of stagnant water.
"Within an hour of getting there, we got down to the slough. This is the primary spot because the little boy, he liked throwing a toy in repeatedly, and pulling it out. It was just a little bank above the slough with roots and trees around it."
She says, "By then Rust was real distraught and really sad. That was the first place where the kid went in, so there was a certain kind of scent there that wasn't as strong as when we followed the real slight current in the slough down to where it was getting stronger and stronger. That's when we called the divers in. There was a culvert between two parts of the slough."
Looking at the photos, she says, "What happened was the body had gotten wedged in this culvert, and it was under mud."
Petting Yogi, she says, "This is quite a large water area, and I'm going around, getting death alerts all around this huge marsh area. And I'm marking everywhere we get the hits. All that water that had touched the body had the smell of the death on it. Sometimes you can triangulate and determine where the body is by where the alerts are coming from.
"Putting a tag, and where the wind was coming from," she says. "What the temperature was. Who I was. What time it was. We put it all on a map. To figure out where the body had drifted to.