Sheepdogs: Keeping the Wolves at Bay by Gordon Carroll (tools of titans ebook .TXT) 📗

22

Gil

I woke up at four-thirty, the sun still hiding beneath the eastern plains. The sky was purpling over the mountains but still dark. I made myself a cottage cheese, flaxseed-oil shake, thinking back to how I had awoken with Max standing over me. For a second I thought he was going to rip out my throat. A part of me wanted him to. The dreams sometimes affect me like that. The department shrink told me suicidal ideations are common in surviving spouses. That doesn’t really help much.

When I first opened my eyes and saw how close Max was I knew instantly there was nothing I could do. If he was going to kill me I was a goner. Instead he just looked me in the eye and hopped off the bed. Strange dog. He was a hard one to figure out.

I threw in two chunks of frozen banana, three frozen strawberries, a spoonful of honey, some milk, and a tablespoon of coconut oil. Delicious. And so good for you. After the shake, I took my five teaspoons of colloidal silver and let it absorb under my tongue. I’ve been hooked on shakes and silver for seven years and haven’t been sick once. Hurt — yes — shot — stabbed — punched — nearly blown up — but never sick. Jolene made the recipe, which brought back my dream.

I lifted weights for forty minutes, chopped and split firewood for thirty more, ran four, consecutive, six minute miles, and finished it off with a brisk jog through the obstacle course. I stood, bent at the waist, hands on knees, breathing heavy, getting my wind back. The sun was a bright yellow ball low in the sky, sneaking up on the tall buildings of Denver. Wiping a line of sweat from my brow I saw the house was in need of a new paint job. The Law of Entropy never rests. I pulled off my sopping shirt and walked around another five minutes to cool down.

After that I went to the kitchen, took a couple of hot dogs from the fridge, sliced them into thin discs, plopped ‘em into a sandwich bag and went back outside.

Training time.

The breeze was coming in lightly from the northwest. In order to make the track more difficult I decided to start downwind. I faced southeast and tamped down the grass in a triangular pattern about two feet wide on each of the three sides. I dropped pieces of hotdog on the points of the triangle and started off at a good stride. I ran hard for a hundred yards, slowed to a jog, and dropped a slice of meat as I curved gently to the west. I jogged another fifty yards, turned sharply to the south and slowed to a walk. I like to mix up the turns as well as the pace so I can simulate different patterns that could be seen on a real track of a suspect. I continued south about sixty yards, dropped another disc of the hotdog, headed west again for fifty or so yards, then turned northeast back toward the house. When I was about thirty yards out, I dropped the rest of the hotdogs on the grass under my right heel — jumped as far as I could to the left — to show the track was ended, and then went to the house.

I was sweating again and the gentle wind felt vibrant on my skin. The scent of pine and Aspen Daisy washed past me like perfume. I opened the side door to my garage, leaned in and called for Max. I have a large doggy door set in the lower half of the door that leads from the garage into the house. I waited for Max to come out.

He didn’t.

I called again.

Nothing.

I was about to call a third time when I felt that old familiar chill sweep through me. Of course it could have been the wind, but it didn’t feel like it. It felt the way it did when I was in Afghanistan during the war. The Taliban had set an ambush between two hills my unit had to pass through. We lost two dogs and three good men that day. The Taliban lost a lot more.

I slowly turned my head and saw Max sitting behind me. He hadn’t made a sound.

“You’ve got to stop doing that,” I said.

He just looked at me.

I shook my head, did a few shoulder rolls to loosen the tension in my neck and said, “Fooss.”

He fell in beside me as quiet as a panther. We stopped twenty feet from the triangle. I put him in a down with the platz command and knelt beside him.

With some dogs I use a fifteen or a thirty-foot lead when tracking, to help keep the dog right on scent, but Max was a natural and worked much better with little restraint. So I utilized the Canadian system when I trained him.

No leash.

In the Canadian system, the dogs tend to trail more than track, which is faster but less sure. The difference between trailing and tracking is that when a dog tracks it sticks its nose into each step, smelling from footprint to footprint. This is the surest way of staying on the track of prey. When a dog trails it smells the path of the prey, moving along at a much faster pace. As long as the scent is strong enough, this works very well.

In Canada, where there are great stretches of rural area to search, trailing is ideal. In Colorado, trailing works well in some areas, but not so well in others. Scent dissipates far more quickly on asphalt and cement than it does on dirt or grass, and there is far less ground disturbance kicked up for a dog to smell in the first place. So, in the concrete jungle of downtown Denver, tracking would be very difficult, and trailing nearly impossible. In the city, area searches work best. But as soon as