FINDING THE LOST, Jeanne Tody Beroza [reading tree txt] 📗

giving off a weak light. Better than nothing he’d thought and started back along the trail, this time calling Davie’s name as he scoured the area for a fallen body. The snow had already almost completely covered his deer-drag trail.

Prayin’ wasn’t something he did often but he prayed as he backtracked, “Lord, he’s just a little boy, never hurt no-one. Please keep him safe. Help me find ‘em, Lord.”

At 2300 hours he drove home, got Lisa and the baby out of bed, and took her to a neighbor’s to place a 211 call. Once done, he drove them back home to wait for the Sheriff, got Davie’s dog and a lantern and went back out to search for his son.


CHAPTER FOUR:

“We’ve got two persons out there with guns,” the Incident Commander, one of the most experienced SAR volunteers, told his search teams before deploying the canine unit. “We don’t know where either of them are right now. The boy left the area of the deer kill, heading back here, and is assumed lost. The father is probably hunting for his son in the same area you will be searching. It’s still dark so they won’t be able to see you until you’re right on top of them and vice versa.

Jana and Tahoe have the best chance of finding them since the dog can use his nose. He can also warn Jana someone’s out there before she runs into him. Mike you flank her. Its going to be hard to see the dog in the dark so help her watch for any indication that he has scent, that he’s found a track, found gear belonging to one of them, anything.

Give us a direction of travel if possible so we can deploy other teams. We’ll wait here with the Stokes stretcher and bring it as close to you as possible with ATV’s once you find someone. Custer Ambulance has been called. They’re staging on Highway 16.”

Jana and Mike donned headlamps and their backpacks, Jana’s full of medical gear since she was a licensed Wilderness Emergency Medical Technician in addition to being a search dog handler. Mike, thiry-five, tall, strong and trained as a flanker, carried the rest of the team’s gear. The type of search, time of year, terrain being traversed and other variables dictated the kind and amount of gear needed. Today he was carrying water, maps, a GPS unit, flagging materials, a radio, a space blanket and a wool blanket, climbing gear, flares, and extra batteries.

Mike and Jana both possessed concealed weapon permits and sometimes they carried handguns, but not for this search. Guns were mainly to protect them from wild animals. Today their big search dog would also serve that purpose. Tahoe wore his day-glow orange SAR vest and two battery-Pac lights, one hanging off his vest and one attached to his collar. It was always hoped a victim or others in the area would see the big, dark-colored, big-coated, wolfie-looking-dog and realize because he wore a vest that he was there to help - not eat them.

Tahoe didn’t normally track animals. In fact he had been trained to not ‘critter’ or be distracted by rabbits, squirrels or spooked deer. In spite of this, Jana knew he would search for whatever scent she asked him to find. She needed to get him to where Duane had killed the buck before they could begin searching for the boy so she cut a bit of fleshy hide from the deer’s belly-slit, held it out for Tahoe to smell, pointed to the ground and said, “Find the trail, Tahoe.”

Tahoe sniffed the piece of deer hide, walked to the back of the truck and while standing on his hind legs, put his forefeet on the tailgate and nosed the deer’s body. Jana tried again, taking him farther away from the vehicle in the direction they thought Duane might have traveled. This time when asked to find the trail, Tahoe sniffed the ground and then pawed at it, digging snow away until he uncovered blood and bits of deer flesh and hair.

“We’ve got the drag trail,” Mike hollered. “We’ll follow this out to the kill site. I’ll flag it as we go.” Mike set his GPS unit to log their track. A mile later Tahoe stopped at the edge of a small clearing and pawed. Shining a flashlight at the ground near Tahoe’s feet Mike called to Janna, “Gut pile” then radioed in a GPS reading. If others needed to reach this spot, they could plug the GPS coordinates into their units, perform a Go To command and each unit would display a little map and trail to follow.

“Now what?” Mike asked Jana once he’d pushed a metal wire with a plastic flag attached to it’s top into the frozen pile of innards.

“Now comes the hard part. We look for the needle in the haystack.” She told Tahoe how good he was for having found the hunting spot and re-scented him with the boy’s shirt. “Find Davie, Tahoe,” she told him, “find em’ boy.”

She started walking back the way they had come trying to see the landscape through the boy’s eyes. It would have been getting dark when he started back to the truck. He had been very cold. His nose had probably been running. His feet were probably numb. Had he stumbled? Had he lost his way as he kept his head down and wiped his nose often, trying to keep his face warm and away from the blowing snow? What would have been the easiest path for him to follow? Would the terrain have pushed him in a certain direction?

Would he have possibly made it just so far back along the trail until the snow obliterated it and it got too dark to see where he was going? She explained her line of thinking to Mike and both of them searched the landscape for any sign the boy had passed that way.

Tahoe ranged, looping first one way and then another, nose to the air, searching first for wind and then for the boy’s scent on the wind. He never went so far that Jana couldn’t see the flashing light on his harness. About halfway back to the truck they entered an area where young pines grew thick among large outcroppings of rock on both sides of the trail. “This would be tough in the dark,” Mike said. “Even staying on this deer trail, he would have had to push his way through these small trees. He could have gotten turned around.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Jana turned in a circle, studying the terrain around her as her headlamp illuminated it. “Look, here’s a depression, like a water drainage that runs off to the south. If he’d tripped in this low spot or if the trees closed in around him and he got disoriented, he might have followed it. The trees aren’t actually growing in it and it’s not full of big rocks like the rest of this area, so it would have been easier to walk this direction.”

“Good thinking,” Mike said and looking up noticed Tahoe had moved off ahead of them, down the depression. He was sniffing in and around the young thick-growing pines, called ‘dog hair trees’ because they stood up from the ground, straight, close and stiff, like a dog’s coat. “Dog hair trees hold scent don’t they? Haven’t you told me that over and over again? If I remember right you’ve said they can confuse the dog because they concentrate the scent in the area instead of letting it flow like it does over open ground. Is that maybe why Tahoe has his nose down and is sniffing around each little tree?”

“Could be,” Jana said. “His behavior tells me he has something. Let’s get a little closer to where he is. Maybe we’ll see something.” Tahoe kept working the stand of ‘dog hair’, going back and forth on both sides of the depression, circling in and among the trees. Suddenly he came to a spot where a good-sized pine had fallen across the little ditch. He leapt the log, put nose to ground, turned back around, put his front feet up onto the log and stared straight at Jana. “He’s got something,” she said. “Stay Tahoe!”

She and Mike jogged to the tree, climbed over it and looked at the ground where Tahoe was now sitting. His pawing had unearthed a rifle. Kneeling by the gun, Mike said, “It’s the model listed on the fact sheet. It’s the boy’s gun. I’ll call it in.”

“Good boy, Tahoe,” Jana told her dog and while hugging him reached into her pocket for a treat. “Good find, boy.”

“Let’s go Mike,” she said once he’d taken his GPS reading, flagged the spot and called the info in to IC. “We’ve got to find this boy. If he dropped the rifle here, he had to be cold and disoriented. He may not have made it a lot farther. Let’s go Tahoe, let’s find Davie.” She was gratified to see Tahoe put his nose to the ground and move down the depression.
“I think he’s got a trail. I think because the depression forms a little ‘V’ it’s holding some of the boy’s scent. We might just be getting lucky.”


CHAPTER FIVE:

Tahoe traveled the depression for another quarter of a mile and then lifting his head he turned to the west, into the breeze and sniffed. He appeared to be studying an area of broken ground where huge granite spires shot up out of the pine trees and grass creating a swirling effect of wind currents and eddies. “Tahoe’s working too far away for me to always see him for alerts,” Jana said to Mike. “I think he’s got a scent pool but it’s going to be tricky, the ground is so broken-up with so many huge outcroppings of rock, crevices and little caves. The scent will be hanging in every depression and gone from every wind-blown spot. He has to find this boy with the wind-blown scent only. He seems to be working from here to the north and back. You go closer to where he’s turning back each loop and I’ll stay at this end. That way, we can both see half the ground he covers and not miss anything.”

“Got it,” Mike said, “Jana, tune your radio to the SAR channel so we can talk to each other without screaming over the wind. We’re getting close so it’ll be good for those back at base camp to hear what we’re seeing, too.”

“Ok, what’s your number Mike?”

“Rescue 27.”

“I’m Rescue 30.” Jana stood watching Tahoe work as Mike headed off to her right, disappearing into the pines. “SAR IC, Rescue 30,” she keyed the mike. “Go ahead 30,” came the response.

“We’ve got a scent pool. I’m working one side of Tahoe’s loop; Rescue 27’s got the other side. We can’t see each other but we can both see Tahoe.”

“Roger that. What’s your GPS reading, Rescue 30? We’ve been studying the map and think we can follow a drainage to get close to you with ATV’s and the Stokes.”

“I don’t have my GPS Unit on, my attention is on Tahoe, Rescue 27, have you got the reading?”

“Rescue 27 here, the reading is . . . Jana, call Tahoe quick, I see a man up ahead, in the trees, pointing a rifle at him.”

A shrill double blast of a whistle sounded over all the radios and Tahoe turned to respond to Jana’s call, then leapt into