Posted September, 2002

Ordering up the Day

by Deb Coates (dcoates@iknowiknow.org)

Riley has always viewed newspaper delivery people with suspicion. They travel at night. They go to the front door of everyone’s house. In Riley’s opinion, they’re up to no good. Right now, though, it’s six o’clock on Sunday morning. The last thing I want is Riley barking her big, loud Rottweiler bark at newspaper people. So, here we are in the dark as she runs along the fence and I chase her to keep her from barking.

We survive. The newspaper people survive. As far as I know, we awaken no one. We go back inside. Everyone has breakfast. And still, it’s dark outside.

At a few minutes after 7:00 AM, Riley and I are in the car backing out of the driveway. We are driving to Humeston, IA, one hundred and thirty miles south. Our destination is a big open field where the Des Moines Obedience Training Club is holding their fall Tracking Test. We must be there by 9:30 AM for the draw. I have allowed a generous two and a half hours for the trip, much of it by Interstate highway. By the time I load the car and stop for coffee and wait at the drive-through at Hardee’s for twenty minutes, we only have two hours left.

At 7:45 AM, I’m driving through Des Moines, thinking that I’m late. If I miss the draw, someone else will get my slot. I’ll have gotten up at 5:00 AM on a Sunday, driven one hundred and thirty miles, worked toward this day for two and a half years, for nothing.

From the day she came home with me, Riley has been my adventure. I’d led a quiet retiring life before I owned her. With Riley, everything changed. She pounced on me, tugged at me, unraveled my rugs, and grabbed pens off my desk in the hope that I’d chase her. She was a working dog who demanded work. We did obedience, but we both lacked the confidence to really excel. Someone mentioned tracking--it will raise her confidence, they said. So, I went to the library and, surprisingly for a sport that no one has heard of and few people participate in, I found books.

Tracking involves a dog, a handler, a tracklayer and a track. Tracks are laid by a person walking at a normal pace in regular shoes and clothing across a field or woods or, in variable surface tracking, across a non-vegetative surface, like asphalt or concrete. The track is mapped and in most cases the tracklayer proceeds in a series of straight lines and right and left turns. Dogs can learn to distinguish the tracklayer’s scent and follow that scent exactly to retrieve articles that have been left along the track. Depending on the level at which the dog/handler team are working, tracks can be aged anywhere from a half-hour to five hours. Other people, dogs, and wild animals may walk across the track. Weather conditions can vary from bitter cold to hot and humid to pouring rain.

According to Bruce Fogle in his book, The Dog’s Mind, a dog’s ability to smell and particularly to distinguish origin and direction of a particular scent is so far beyond our human ability as to render meaningless any comparison. It is not ‘better’ than ours, this ability. It is, if anything, completely different in a way that we can’t even imagine. Riley has successfully followed a track across a softball field. The track had been laid an hour earlier. A softball game finished seconds before she began the track. Imagine if someone walked across that software field wearing sneakers with blue paint on the soles. Then, fifteen other people came along and ran and jumped and played softball on that field. They also had blue paint on the soles of their shoes, but it was a shade lighter than the original paint. Imagine trying to follow the original path. That’s what Riley can do with her nose.

Tracking begins at the TD level. TD for Tracking Dog. The test involves a track that’s a half hour to two hours old, 500 to 800 yards long, with two flags at the start and a glove at the end. Riley had passed her TD test a year earlier at the Medallion Rottweiler Club specialty. Since then, we’d been working on TDX level tracking. TDX for Tracking Dog Excellent. A TDX track is three to five hours old, 800 to 1,000 yards long, with four articles, two cross tracks (where two other people have walked across the track the dog is supposed to follow), changes of cover, and obstacles (like roadways, fences, and ravines). In the US, only ninety dogs a year pass TDX tests. Riley and I have already failed three times, once on a heartbreaking day when she did everything right except stay cool enough in the hot 85 degree sun. Today will be our fourth attempt to pass.

I do not lose time in Des Moines, something I worry about even though it’s 8:00 AM on a Sunday. I have an hour to get to Humeston and about sixty miles to go. It should be plenty of time, but the draw won’t wait for us so I drive on an empty highway and worry. In the spring, driving down to Humeston in the early morning to lay tracks for a test, I came within inches of hitting a deer, so close that mud from its hooves landed on my windshield. At seventy miles an hour on an open stretch of road a deer is tiny, then THERE, then gone, and there’s hardly time to react.

I drive through Leon, IA at 9:15 AM. I’m no later than I was when I left Ames, but I haven’t picked up any time either. If I drove all this way and I’m late, I’ll hate myself forever. And though I know that I will make it--I just don’t have the extra half hour cushion I wanted to have--I drive faster. At 9:20, I drive past the field on the main road where tracks are sometimes laid. I can see the cars and I know that they’re all out on a track (TD tracks are run first, then TDXs). I don’t stop there, but drive on to the staging area to wait for the draw.

Despite all my rushing, there is exactly one car there when I arrive. I park, get out, exercise Riley, visit the port-a-john. Sit in my car. Decide that I’ve done something wrong and walk over to tap on the window of the other car. No, she says, it’s okay. The judges haven’t come back yet. There has been no draw. I get back into my car and wait. The sky’s full of iron-grey clouds and the wind has come up, which is not a good thing for tracking--scent moves.

Tracking tests are non-competitive. On any given day, anyone can pass. Or anyone can fail. This is wonderful because trackers are supportive and helpful and want to see the other participants pass. But it’s also difficult because there is nothing in between. You pass. Or you fail. No partial credit. In tracking, it’s possible to do everything right, to follow every piece of the entire track, walk over the glove at the end and fail. A good tracker decides before going into the field what will make a good day.

I sit in my car and close my eyes and try to visualize the perfect track, as if visualizing it will make it possible to order up the day as I want to see it, as if this time, today, what we know and what we do will be enough. I picture not just Riley tracking perfectly, but me, the perfect handler. I see myself standing calmly, directly on a corner, letting the line run out through my hands, reeling it back in as Riley circles around behind and starts searching again. I scan the field, spotting markers and keeping my orientation so that I always know exactly where we’ve been and where we’re going. And Riley does what Riley does, she never stops, she never quits, she never fails.

Finally, forty-five minutes late, the judges come back for the draw. The weather is always bad for DMOTC tracking tests. In the spring I laid a TDX track in hail and snow and rain. The dog never started and I had to trek out across the field while the hail beat down and retrieve my sock and hat and glove. Today, the weather is rather better than that. It isn’t raining. It isn’t snowing. And it’s not terribly likely at this juncture that there will be hail. However, the sky is full of thick grey low-hanging clouds. The temperature is lower than it was at 7:00 AM when I left home. The wind has come up. It definitely feels like November. One of the judges shakes a hat containing small pieces of paper, each with a different number written on them, one number for each of the tracks that will be run. We draw in catalog order. I draw track number one.

Tracking is a sport where only the dogs know what they’re doing. The handler knows the rules and practicing tracking is partly teaching the rules to the dog, partly giving them experience in lots and lots of different situations, and partly learning what your dog is saying about what it’s doing in the field. A handler can’t pass a TDX test; the dog does that. But a handler can fail.

Today’s test takes place on a farm in southern Iowa. It’s a hilly place with a fair amount of brush, some trees, and, especially in the spring, lots and lots of mud. A year or so ago at a test a woman drove her brand-new four-wheel drive Ford Explorer down a muddy, hilly, deeply rutted road to the fields where several of the tracks had been laid and refused to drive it back out again. ‘You drive it,’ she told her friend. ‘I’m never going up that road again.’ At the same test, I drove my modestly-sized Subaru Legacy 4WD station wagon up out of those fields with four extra people and three big dogs because I was leaving there one time only and anyone who wanted a ride had to cram themselves in. On the way home from that test I had to stop and knock heaps of hardened mud off the underside of my car because when I tried to drive over fifty miles an hour on the Interstate the whole car shook like the vibrating beds at old motels.

Today, though, the roads are moderately muddy, but passable. The judges, the tracklayer for track one, the chief tracklayer, a few other people--my friends mostly--and I climb into cars and head away from the staging area to the site of the first track. The judges come in the day before, usually a Saturday, and spend the day plotting the tracks, trying to lay them out so that it’s possible to get in and out of the fields without crossing any other track, so that the cross-tracklayer can get in and out and so that the tests are all equal and fair. Each TDX track requires between fifteen and twenty acres to plot. For today’s test--6 TDs and 6 TDXs, the club will use close to 200 acres of land. Each track also requires two judges (who can, in a day judge up to 12 TDs or 6 TDXs), one tracklayer (who is actually responsible for laying the track that the dog follows) and two cross-tracklayers. Tracks are mapped and plotted the day before and flags are left at all the corners and at the places where the cross-tracklayers will actually cross the tracks. In the morning, when they lay the track for the test, the tracklayer will pick up the flags as she goes. The actual track will age at least three hours before the dog and handler get to the tracking site. The cross-tracklayers will cross the track an hour and a half after the tracklayer lays it.

Cross-tracks are difficult for most dogs because, for one thing, we don’t really know how scent works so we don’t really know (and there’s considerable discussion about this) whether the dog is following the tracker’s actual scent, the scent of crushed vegetation, some combination of the two, or something else entirely. Glen Johnson who wrote the book, Tracking Dog, set up experiments to try and figure out how dogs handled cross-tracks and it was his theory that dogs were basing their discrimination between the cross-tracks and the actual track on the weight of the trackers. For instance, if the tracklayer weighed 100 pounds and the cross-tracklayer weighed 200 pounds, the dog would have an easier time distinguishing the difference between the two tracks than if both the tracklayer and the cross-tracklayer weighed 100 pounds. It’s also possible that dogs tend to take the cross track when they get tired. Riley has failed a TDX test once already because she took the cross-track and was whistled off.

We park on the side of the muddy road. I get out Riley’s tracking harness and the forty-foot line that keeps us connected. It’s a flat red woven cotton line with knots at ten-foot intervals so I can tell as it passes through my hands how far I am from my dog and how far from the end of the line. I’ve tied two knots at the twenty yard mark with a piece of orange surveyor’s tape tied in between. According to the regulations, the judges have to be able to see the twenty-foot marker, the distance the handler is supposed to maintain from the dog unless you’re in a heavily wooded brushy area or if the dog comes back to you as it’s searching. I double-, or maybe that’s triple-check that I have no food in my pockets. Food is not allowed on a track during a test and last year I saw someone disqualified because she simply forgot to check and dog trainers routinely carry food with them wherever they go.

I let Riley out, snap the long lead on her collar, and slip the harness over my shoulder to put on when we get to the start flag. People wish us luck. The judges ask me if I have any questions, which I don’t. Everyone is very friendly. All the people here would like to see each of us succeed. The judges point out the starting flag and it begins.

In a TDX test there is one flag at the beginning of the track. This means that we (the dog and the handler) know where the track starts, but we don’t know what direction it goes. That’s something the dog has to figure out. Some people take their dog right up to the start flag to put the harness on. Some people put the harness on the minute they get out of the car, but only switch the lead from the collar to the harness when they get to the start flag. I stop about ten feet from the flag, make Riley sit, put my foot on the long lead, because she’s already excited and ready to go and she would take off right now if I’d let her, and put her harness on.

When I decided to try tracking the first thing I needed to do was to get a tracking harness. Most tracking harnesses are leather or nylon and are often called ‘non-restrictive’ harnesses. I ordered mine right away and when it came I remember being completely baffled as to how this would go on the dog. I had to get out the catalog, study the picture, turn it this way and that way and even try it on myself before I could figure it out. Once, when I was relatively experienced, when we’d already passed one TD test and were entered in our second TDX attempt, I actually strapped one of Riley’s legs inside the harness. I had to stop halfway down the first leg of the track and put it right.

Standing at the beginning of a tracking test is tremendously nerve-wracking. You’re entering the world of one-wrong-move, one-false-step. Pass. Or fail. I always try to take a moment to just set everything aside--the people behind me, the test coming up--and count off. Harness? Yes. Dog? Yes. Untangled lead? Yes. Ready? Ohmygod, no. But we’re going anyway.

Riley and I approach the start flag. She’s already pulling because, quite frankly, she loves this stuff. There’s an article at the start, in this case, a scarf. Riley sniffs it, shoves it around and then takes off. Different dogs have different tracking styles and Riley’s style confused me and made me terribly nervous until I finally understood it. She immediately indicates the direction of the track by following it for maybe three or four feet. From that moment, I know where the first leg of the track goes. Then, she backs off and checks all the other possibilities. She checks them carefully and she checks for my assurance that I know what she’s doing and that I’m still with her. After a couple of minutes of checking and rechecking, she comes back to the track, you can actually see the scent snag her nose, and we’re off.

There are subtle tricks to tracking that you learn as you go. None of them will tell you where the track is if your dog totally loses it, but they help a handler’s confidence and they can help to shatter the sometimes really odd ideas that a handler in the middle of a huge grassy field can get. The judges follow the tracking team at a distance of about fifty yards. If the dog starts off down the track, the judges move up. If the dog isn’t on the track they wait because you, the handler, might want to bring your dog back to the last point you know she was on the track, and if the judges happen to be standing on that spot, well, it kind of messes things up. So, they hold for a good reason, but a savvy handler can read that reason and there’s a certain confidence when the judges are moving at the same time you’re moving. So, it’s nice that when Riley starts down the track the judges fall in behind us.

It’s a windy day and the grass is short, both things that make tracking more difficult, but Riley tracks down the first leg confidently. And then, we reach the first corner. Just like the start, there’s a certain amount of panic for the handler when the first corner comes up because this is the moment that counts. There’s no friendly tracklayer behind you shouting helpful hints, there’s no comforting thought that at least no one can see you, there’s not even the feeling that comes later, after you’ve made three turns and found an article, that at least you’ve come this far. In TDX tests, twenty-five percent of the dogs entered in tests fail to start. Another twenty-five percent fail at the first turn. One of the regular admonitions of experienced trackers is, 'you have to read your dog.’ Most dogs will give you some kind of indicator that they’re on the track. For dogs with tails this indicator is often wagging their tail, carrying it straight up in the air, or lowering it. For dogs with no tail, like Riley, the indicators are more subtle.

When Riley’s on track, she moves quickly and her nose is right down. She generally overruns the corners by twenty feet. When we first started tracking this meant that by the time I noticed and stopped with her we were both usually at least twenty feet past the corner and it was difficult to get back. As I gained experience tracking with her, I learned that she lifted her head at exactly the moment she passed the corner then kept gong another twenty feet just to make sure. I can now fairly regularly stop right on the corner or about ten feet before it. Once Riley stops, she follows the same practice she does at the start, she comes back and indicates to me where the next leg of the track goes and then she goes back out and checks all the other possibilities. As I stand on the corner, she’ll trot out twenty yards with her head down, looking for all the world as if she’s right on the track. Then, I’ll tighten up on the lead, as if to say, ‘are you sure?’ If it’s not the right direction, she’ll come right back off and start searching again. Once all possibilities are exhausted, she returns to the corner and takes the next leg of the track. This time when she goes out, she leans into the harness and she does a little hop with her back legs as she settles into the track. And this time when I tighten up on the lead, she jerks it hard. ‘Yes,’ she is saying, ‘this is it. Come on!’

The first leg went southeast, slanting just a little down the slope. Leg two begins with a right angle turn so we’re now going northeast and more sharply down the slope. There are several places where rainwater has gouged small rivers, now dry. Scent collects in these places and occasionally Riley will stop and search a little way in either direction before settling back down to the track. I find out later that there was a cross track on this leg, but I would never have known it by the way Riley tracks, she just blows right on by it and keeps going. Right on the track, her nose right down, moving along at a pretty pace that lets me know that she knows what she’s doing. In this moment, all I have to do is follow her.

She comes to the second corner and takes that easily enough. This turn is a little more open than the last one and we’re heading more or less straight down the slope. On the third leg Riley finds the second article. On a TDX track there are a total of four articles: one at the start, two along the track, and one at the end. The trackers have to find every article to pass the test. The second article is a sneaker and I think, ‘ohmygod, where will I put this?’ I hold it up over my head so the judges can see it and I shove it down the front of my jacket. Riley has already continued on and so I have to do this quickly just to keep up with her.

We have now actually started, made two turns, and found an article. At moments like this I start thinking well, at least I won’t make a total fool of myself, then I think, don’t think like that, it’s bad luck, then I think, pay attention, watch your dog, you’re a long way from done yet. But it’s one of the things about tracking that there’s lots of time to think and some of it’s useful so you can’t just shut off your brain and go. The tricky part is that some of it is not at all useful and you have to be able to figure out which parts are which. I have watched people fail tests because they were absolutely convinced the track went a particular way and they refused to go with their dogs when the dog tried to tell them. You can’t help it. Out there in the middle of the field, just you and the dog, you start to think the track can’t possibly go to the right because there’s a huge mass of brush there, or it won’t turn back into the open field, or it won’t, absolutely, for sure, go past this one tree because the leg you’re on has already been really long.

And that idea, even though you can’t possibly know, takes hold in your mind and it’s nearly impossible to shake because the only one who’s going to tell you you’re wrong is your dog and sometimes you just plain forget to listen. The other thing that trackers say is, ‘Trust your dog.’ They say it all the time and over and over because it’s the most important thing and the easiest to forget in the middle of a field when everything is important.

The third leg goes straight down the hill and through an old steep-sided creekbed that is also chock-full of brush and volunteer trees. These are the times that it’s rather wonderful tracking with a big strong dog who pulls into the harness because Riley tracks to the edge of the brush, checks in either direction and plows on through. And when she reaches the other side, she pulls me through after her.

Of course, it is at precisely this moment that my boot comes untied. I don’t actually notice it for another hundred yards and at that point we’re doing so great that I’m not going to stop for anything. I’d have to trip over the shoelace and take a header down the hill before I’d interrupt the flow of the track.

At the top of the hill there’s another turn, approximately 90 degrees, that has us heading maybe north-northeast at an angle along the hill. There’s a fair amount of wind, the grass is still short and Riley at this point is probably starting to get tired. We’re maybe half-way through the test. In June, she tracked to within eighty yards of the finish of a TDX test on an 80+ degree day and she just couldn’t go any further. She works hard on the corners, she’s a black dog and it was a sunny day. Kind of a heartbreaker, but I had to feel proud of her too: she found all the turns, found all the articles, crossed all the cross-tracks; she just couldn’t quite make it home. Since then, we’ve worked lots of long tracks and I’m hoping that now she’ll have the stamina she needs to finish the test. She certainly has the nose and the drive and the brain for it.

She tracks down this fourth leg steadily enough. At one point she starts off to the southwest. Riley failed a TDX test just a month ago by taking a cross-track that I knew was a cross-track (based on the direction it went and how close another leg was) and she took it so quickly and so strongly that I had no way to stop her short of planting my feet and yanking, a maneuver the judges would have whistled us off for anyway. Since then, in my usual way, I’ve been obsessing about cross-tracks and what I might have done differently. Right now, I’m not completely sure Riley is on a cross-track, I just think she might be, so I ask her: ‘Riley,’ I say, ‘Let’s track,’ which is what I say to her when she’s gotten distracted. Like the perfect dog in the perfect place at the perfect time, she comes off the cross-track as if she never really intended to take it in the first place and trots back up the hill to the real track.

Now we’re cooking, I think. We might actually do this. This might, unbelievably, be the day we pass, the day I pictured in my head, sitting in the car waiting for the draw. Riley works on down the slope and stops at what’s probably a corner. We’re about a quarter of the way down the hill. Ahead of us to my left is a thick grove of scrub brush and thorn bushes and skinny trees all thick and close and difficult to get through. This might be our second obstacle, but first there’s the turn. And this is where Riley hits a wall.

One of the things that a handler needs, and one of the things that’s really difficult to learn (or, at least, it was really difficult for me to learn), is to know at all times where you are in the field and where the track is. This way, when the dog loses the track, you can back up to a point where you know she was on the track and help her get started again. It took me years to do this confidently. When Riley and I entered our first TD test, it was like a big black hole behind me. I couldn’t for the life of me, have described any portion of that track. Now, I can come back to a track a year later and go out in the field and rewalk it nearly perfectly. That said, though, it’s still difficult to look behind you and find the things that looked so clear when you walked by them the first time. A bush never looks quite the same from two different sides and sometimes it’s hard to tell which particular bush it was. Grass is grass and you have to learn to distinguish specific clusters of weeds or prairie grass or thistles. This is likely somewhat easier for people who know the species. To me they are ‘evergreens,’ ‘small trees,’ ‘big trees,’ ‘clumps of dark grass,’ or ‘clumps of thorns.’

For the next twenty minutes, Riley works this corner. We are still somewhat near the top of the hill in short grass with the wind blowing and the track is now about three and a half hours old. This means that the scent has already blown and spread and moved. Riley is tired, too, and it’s harder to scent when the nose passages dry out and when you’re trying to catch your breath. So, she works. She goes up the hill and stops. She goes down the hill and stops. She goes down almost to the big brushy area and stops. I work my way back and keep track of where the judges are and encourage her when she gets tired. There is no time limit in a tracking test. As long as the dog is on the track and actively working the judges will hold. Riley works. Eventually, she gets tired enough that she stands for a minute with her head raised. I say, ‘Come on, Riley, let’s track.’ She lowers her head and tries again.

Standing there watching her, feeding out the line, reeling it in, trying to help her as minute after minute after minute ticks by, I begin to hope that someone will just put us out of our misery. After ten minutes, I hope that she’ll just make a choice and go, though at that point I still kind of hope she’ll at least, by some miracle, pick the right direction. After fifteen minutes, I hope that the judges just blow their whistles because they feel sorry for us standing here trying and not getting anywhere in the middle of a field in the middle of November. After twenty minutes, I know that I’d willingly go anywhere, do anything, not question at all, as long as she just goes. I won’t hesitate. I won’t second guess. I won’t even tighten up on the lead and ask if she’s sure. I will go. If it takes us straight off the edge of the world, straight into the mouths of dragons. I will go, I will go, I will go.

After more than twenty minutes of working and working and endlessly working, Riley starts forward. She reaches the thick brushy area. She stops there and sniffs and starts going around it.

Every TDX test includes two obstacles, things like fences and dirt roads and ditches and woods. Riley’s first obstacle was the steep-sided creek bed filled with brush and trees. We have now arrived at the second. Generally, the track will go straight through the obstacle. However, there’s another way to plot tracks and that’s with an ‘obstacle denied.’ Scent will gather at the edge of a thick brushy spot or a steep slope or a change in cover. The wind will push it and spread it and the dog will have to work out carefully whether the actual track goes around the obstacle or through it. Under ordinary circumstances in an ordinary test, I’d have second-guessed this like crazy. ‘It must go through,’ I’d have thought. ‘She’s only trying to follow the scent that’s collected at the edges. I’ve got to convince her to go through it.’ And I’d have probably held when I should have gone. Because, although you hope that the dog knows what she knows, she also relies on you to trust that she knows and go with her. This is especially important when it’s a particularly hard part of the track and she’s not quite certain either. If you, the handler, hesitate, she may too. So, sometimes just going is the best thing you can do. And mostly, just knowing when to hold and when to go is the most difficult part of the handler’s job.

But, once Riley had worked that last corner for twenty minutes, I gave up everything. I gave up caring. I gave up worrying. I gave up hoping for brilliance or competence or anything else. I question nothing. I go where Riley goes.

Riley goes up to the brush. She checks one way and then the other. She starts around the brush. I’m going with her. I don’t care anymore. She keeps going. I keep going. After a moment, I realize the whistle hasn’t blown. And, if the whistle hasn’t blown, then could we...perhaps...by some miracle...actually be on the track?

We go further. Riley starts to dig into the harness, a good indication that she, at least, believes she’s on the track. And then, right where I least expect ever to see it, Riley indicates the third article. We are still in this test. We are still going. I’d thought it was all over, that we had nothing left. And now, here we are, on the track again. Because Riley never quits. I pick up the rolled ball of socks that is the third article and hold it up for the judges. Riley tracks steadily around the brush and back up to the rise of a second hill.

At the top of the hill the wind again becomes a factor. And, by now, the track is almost four hours old. Riley starts working again. It is clear she has lost the scent and I figure we’re at another corner, but she keeps working and working and not finding the track. Now, at this point I am convinced that the turn is at a small cedar tree sitting right in the middle of the field, right at the top of the hill. It’s important when laying a track that you look for and note down visual markers. For example, in order to be sure that you’re walking in a straight line you find two stationary objects on the horizon, line them up, one behind the other, and walk toward them, all the time keeping them lined up. That’s how you walk a straight line. It’s also important to know exactly where a corner is and people use fence posts and trees and bushes as places to make a turn so they can map it and return to it later. So, here is this three-foot cedar tree smack in the middle of a wide open field and I am convinced as I’ve never been convinced before that this is where the turn is.

But Riley doesn’t find it. She works. And she works. And I let the lead out and reel it back in. I pull out the scarf we’d picked up at the start and re-scent her. Re-scenting is allowed in tracking tests, though I’m not convinced it does any good. The dogs don’t seem to forget what scent they’re looking for; sometimes they just can’t find it. Riley works for maybe five minutes and the whole time I’m thinking ‘we got past the hard part, we can’t fail here.’ And then, like a bolt of lightning shattering my single-minded stupidity it occurs to me that maybe, just maybe, the corner isn’t at the cedar tree. That maybe, this being a TDX test designed for advanced trackers and all, that it’s a little more difficult than that. So, I do the thing I should have done in the first place, I back up to the last place I knew for certain Riley was on the track.

This is a little tricky since we’ve been off the track so long and things don’t look the same when you’re backing up as they do when you’re going forward. But I can see the judges and I more or less know. I back up about thirty feet and--bam!--like yet another gift, Riley finds it.

We’d been tracking northwest and this turn takes us south and mostly west and runs along the top of the hill most of the way. Riley handles this leg relatively easily and I know in my head where we’ve been and I know it’s almost certain that we’ve passed all the cross-tracks. We’ve crossed both the obstacles. We’ve found all the articles; there will only be one more at the end. Riley lifts her head. We are at another corner. And I know as sure as I’ve ever known anything that this will be the last one.

Riley works it out carefully. By now, 45 minutes have passed since we started the track. Most TDX tracks take fifteen to twenty minutes to run. We’ve been out more than twice that long. There are people waiting at the start of the next track, getting progressively more nervous and anxious. Riley takes the corner and starts heading down the hill into taller grass which will make tracking easier. My hiking boot, which came untied at least half an hour ago is loosening up. The sneaker that I’d tucked into my jacket so carefully thirty-five to forty minutes ago started to fall when I took out the scarf to re-scent Riley and I am trying to hold onto it by squeezing it between my right elbow and my abdomen. Riley tracks down the hill. The wind lessens. The grass gets taller. The track, finally, is easier that it has ever been. Riley goes faster.

My world at that moment, as we were almost finished, comes down to my fears. I swear that I will not trip over my shoelaces. I will not drop the articles. And Riley, but god, will not miss the final glove. We get deeper into the grass and I started looking for the glove. There is no guarantee that I’ll see it, it could easily be out of sight. And even if I see it, but Riley doesn’t find it, then we will fail anyway. Dogs have failed TDX tests by walking over the final glove or missing it by ten feet right at the end. We’ve worked so hard and taken so long I really don’t want that to happen. If there is anything that I can do to help her, I will do it.

We come further down the leg and suddenly, right there in front of her, I can see it. ‘Find it, Riley,’ I say. ‘Find it! Find it. Find it!’ I don’t know whether she listens to me or whether this is just her day to be perfect and wonderful and right on the money, but she pulls steadily down the track right up to the glove and noses it over like there’s never been any doubt anywhere that she could do it.

My arms go up. I shout with joy. I pick up the glove and Riley grabs it back. The two judges and the tracklayer, who have been behind us the whole way, cheer. I hug Riley and I come the closest to crying for joy that I’ve ever come in my life. Riley has the glove in her mouth and the stump of her tail wags back and forth for all that it’s worth. Her eyes are bright and she knows that she’s done something wonderful. This is the everything. We have done it.

The judges smile and congratulate us and leave rather quickly to get to track two where the next team has been waiting for a good long time. Friends of mine who have been watching from the first hill come down the slope and we laugh and we hug each other and we say ‘I can’t believe it!’ and Riley dances beside us with the glove in her mouth.

The rest of the day is wonderful and happy. I truly and wholeheartedly now want all the other dogs to pass. I want everyone to know how wonderful this feels. The second dog balks at crossing coyote tracks. The third dog misses a turn and goes off in the wrong direction. The fourth, fifth, and sixth dogs fail too for reasons that I now don’t remember.

Later, we all eat lunch together and talk about the tracks and the judges finish their official judging books which will be sent to the AKC so the passes can be recorded and official certificates sent out. The club gives each person who passes a plaque with the judge’s map on it and the glove that their dog found at the end of the track. One of the judges tells me that ours was one of the best tracks she’s ever seen. I’ve heard people talk about dogs who do TDX tracks in seven minutes, about dogs who’ve always passed the first test they were in, about dogs who were ready for TDX in six months or three months or two. I don’t care. There was never a track or a day or a place or a time as perfect as this one. And no matter how many tracks or dogs or places there are yet to come there will never be a day quite like this one again.

==DMC==

Deb Coates
dcoates@iknowiknow.org
Things I Know I Know