PET TRACKER
Chapter 8, Part 1: A Tale of Two Trails (Part 3 of 3)
NOTE FOR THE VISUALLY IMPAIRED: This story is also available as an audio recording, read by Kat, the author.
This is part 3 of the 3 part story of how my Weimaraner search dog, Rachel, and I tracked two missing cats—Pippi and Muffin, after I gave up on trying to find a cute man to date. If you missed part 1 & 2, follow the instructions that follow to find each post I’ve made from the PET TRACKER memoir.
To read the Substack (free!) version of my memoir PET TRACKER from the very start, go to this link, scroll down until you see the Scroll Down > icon-thingy and click on it. Then, scroll all of the way to the very bottom and you can start reading the beginning of the book with the “Dedication & Introduction.”
“Take scent!” I commanded as Rachel’s wet nose wiggled from side to side. She immediately began to cast about the front yard, sniffing the same bushes she had checked when she had searched for Pippi. Rachel bypassed the houses on the west side, though, and began to work through the front yard to the east. We continued past the neighbors’ houses she had searched when working the bloodstain scent and beelined north toward the entrance to the cul-de-sac.
This was clearly a different scent from the trail she had worked just ten minutes earlier. We worked at a faster pace, moving at a brisk jog. Rachel was pulling hard in the harness, a sign that she was working a fresh scent trail.
At the opening of the cul-de-sac, Rachel had three directions to choose from: the crossroad heading either east or west, or the entrance to another subdivision that was straight ahead. We worked west first. Rachel pulled me about 20 yards before she slowed down, turned her head, and made eye contact with me. Eye contact meant no scent. I felt the familiar warmth of pride that my dog was so astute at her work. There was no chasing of ghost trails on this case. Rachel was hot on Muffin’s scent. I knew I could trust her instincts.
And her instincts said Muffin had not traveled west. We turned around and headed east. We jogged past a woman walking with her two children and a golden retriever.
“Look at that dog, Mommy!” one of the children squealed as we ran past. “Yes, honey,” the mother said as she read Rachel’s vest, “That’s a search dog.” Under normal circumstances, Rachel would have gone to pieces at the attention—wiggling her way over to the children to see if they might pet her and doing her best to make friends with the new dog. But on this day, she didn’t even glance in their direction. She was on a fresh trail, and even a parade of golden retrievers rolling down the street wouldn’t have broken her concentration!
We continued heading east at a fast pace. Clay was able to keep up with me, but Marilyn began to fall behind. We worked about a block, continuing toward the steep, mountainous terrain of the state park—the likely home of the predators.
Suddenly, Rachel lifted her nose as she picked up an airborne scent. She cut north from the roadway and started to drag me up a steep embankment toward an open field. As I scrambled through an area littered with gravel, I slipped and dropped the lead to break the fall with my hands. I hit the ground hard and felt sharp pieces of gravel cut into my unprotected elbows. Rachel raced ahead without me, even faster with no pull on the leash from me to slow her down. She ran ahead into the field above me, casting back and forth in a bird-dog-like fashion, tail wiggling with excitement, clearly narrowing in on a scent.
And then, to everyone’s shock except Rachel’s, a flash of black and orange calico came zipping out of the field. “Did you see her!?” Marilyn shouted.
“See who?” Clay asked, having missed seeing the cat make her hasty get away from my dog.
“Muffin!” Marilyn exclaimed. “Rachel just flushed her out of that field, right where she is sniffing right now. She must have been hiding up here.”
“Gooood girrrl,” I gushed as I turned to praise Rachel, who was still above me. But Rachel was too busy to accept my praise and wasn’t even thinking about cheddar cheese. She was sniffing something new in the field. Her excited bird-dog behavior suddenly shifted to a more serious search mode. The animated attitude she’d had as she raced along on the airborne live cat scent was gone. Rachel was now moving slowly, intently investigating something stationary on the ground. She sniffed, squatted, and peed. Something was decomposing in the field.
I climbed up to where Rachel was to see what she had found, with a certain sense of dread that I already knew what it was. Knowing how fragile Marilyn was, I instructed her to wait on the road and asked Clay to come to where Rachel was sniffing. Rachel was alerting on a small tuft of gray animal fur—it could have been gray tabby fur, it could have been Pippi’s, but I couldn’t tell. Clay also examined it and couldn’t tell either.
The use of a forensic hair examination or a DNA test was still many searches away and did not occur to me. Instead, I relied on my investigative skills and my growing knowledge of lost-cat investigations to come up with the most likely scenario of what had happened to the gray cat. I surmised that a coyote had killed Pippi and carried her from the cul-de-sac in front of Marilyn’s house to the field, a safe distance in the predator’s mind from the hub of human activity below. Chances are, Muffin had done a bit of her own sleuthing to end up in the same location. Missing her friend and relying on her own keen sense of smell, Muffin had probably followed her companion’s scent to the field. Muffin would certainly not have been the first cat to do so. I had heard of several cases where one cat was missing from a household and a second cat had led a family member to it. (This case was twenty years before one of my students, Kim Freeman, actually trained her cat Henry to track the scent of lost cats!)
By the time Rachel and I got back to my truck, Muffin had reappeared at home and was slinking up the driveway, obviously wary of the dog in her territory. I gave Rachel a fistful of cubed cheddar cheese, followed by a drink of water, and loaded her into her crate. She curled around in a circle, settled into the coolness of the sheet-covered dog mattress and the small fan I had blowing on her to keep her cool, and let out a big sigh. She would be dozing within minutes.
With the threat of a strange dog out of the way, Muffin hustled to Marilyn, who picked her up, nuzzled her face in the cat’s fur, and burst into tears.
“You saved Muffin’s life,” she said. My thoughts swung abruptly from unadulterated pride in Rachel’s excellent trailing work to empathy for Marilyn’s emotions. As we talked, Marilyn wept and I put my arm around her. Then, something happened that I had not expected. I found myself crying with Marilyn. In all my years as a 9-1-1 dispatcher, police officer, police detective, search-and-rescue dog handler, and cadaver dog handler, I had been exposed to many heart-wrenching, tragic situations. Yet, with the exception of the Polly Klaas search, I had never once shed a tear. The fact that I was crying with a woman whose cat had died struck me as odd, yet I sensed that God was doing something in my heart.
It suddenly occurred to me that my pet detective work was no longer an idea, an experiment, a side business, or even an important cause. The deep love for animals that God wove into my DNA was something He wanted to use to bless and comfort other people. From that moment forward, I realized my pet detective work was no longer just a cool side career; it was my ministry.
Many people who hear about my pet detective saga want to know the same thing about these searches. Why would you keep going out to search for lost pets that you don’t find, or worse yet, for pets you find dead? My feelings about it then and now go back to a very simple principle that struck me again and again as I worked cases of missing persons and cases of missing pets. Life does not always provide a storybook ending. And in police work, especially, I often saw a seedy and sad side of life that the average citizen does not see. In search-and-rescue work, I was accustomed to working lost-person cases where the person was never found or was found deceased. I began to notice that my lost-pet investigations were all too like my lost-person searches.
But the biggest similarity of all was that in the most basic sense, love is love. Whether you feel it toward your 80-year-old grandmother, your naughty 12-year-old son, the cocker spaniel who trots up and presents you with your chewed-to-the-sole leather loafers, or the kitten who curls on your lap and purrs the evening away, it is the same emotion. People who lose the companion animal that they love need to have the best possible shot at getting their loved one back safe and sound. And if, God forbid, that lost pet is deceased, then the people who love that animal should be able to know the truth so that they can accept it and mourn. They need closure, and I always believed that if I could offer that with my services, then I was still doing something to help.
I wish I could report that every lost pet investigation I worked on ended with a joyful reunion, but that was just not the case. I worked on countless investigations where people were tormented by grief when they could not find the missing pet that they loved. There was the woman who sold two guitars and her ’65 Mustang in order to have enough money to launch a media campaign to find her lost dog, the elderly man who fixed an extra bowl of dog food every night for six months “just in case” his lost dog were to wander back home, and the man who wanted to divorce his wife because he wasn’t sure he could ever forgive her for accidentally letting their indoor-only cat outside, a cat that was never found again.
I took my happy endings where I could find them, but in the meantime, Rachel and I worked steadfastly to get to the bottom of our cases and always be mindful of the love our clients felt for their missing pets. Even after all the cases that ended badly, it was enough to make me want to keep searching.
Yes. Even if the pet is deceased, people need closure.
We once lived in a gulch in the Rockies that had a lot of cougars. A LOT. Our Norwegian Forest Cat went missing one Saturday, and our other cat, more astute than he was, took over his indoor territory the same day.
We knew he was gone. Yet, my now-ex went through an entire winter of torment, once sending me up the hill to investigate a group of magpies who, it turns out, were only raiding the neighbor's overturned garbage can
She found a piece of him in the garden the next spring. Only one foreleg, but enough for positive ID. It was rough, very rough. But finally, we had closure.
Folks, closure is important. Finally, she was able to move on with her life.