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Big Wet Nose

by Rena Sherwood

      Science will always save us. I’ve been told that all of my life. That’s why I named my dog Science. At least I resisted the temptation to name a dog God, unlike some trainers I could mention.

      Oh, I considered those genetically engineered dogs. And I thought long and hard about purebred clones. But I found Sci at the pound. There are still some things dogs can do that laboratories can’t duplicate, like how to purposefully breed a retriever like Sci. And I’ve got a feeling even the pound dogs won’t be able to make another Sci.

      In one sense, I’m glad of it. Sci waits for just the right moment to jam his freezing cold nose onto bare skin. Doesn’t matter if I’m clipping my toenails, just about to sip a scalding hot cuppa or bending over to clean up Sci’s poo. His patience is infinite. He waits longer than a starving cat at a mouse hole. Once a person’s attention is distracted for an instant—-BAM! I’ve got a feeling that’s why he ended up in the pound in the first place. I was told it was because of his hazardous farts, but I think it was really due to his habit of goosing everyone with that big freezing wet nose of his.

      But the same nose he used for play he also used for work. He’d hunt down a hypothesis faster than I go through a relationship. One mere whiff of a morphic field, and he’d pounce on that lost idea’s fading trail or die trying.

      I wish I could take the credit for discovering that dogs could smell ideas, but it wasn’t me. The recently knighted Sir Reynard Delancy figured it out. Trust an Englishman to be blind about how to treat his fellow human being, but crack the code of canine communication. I doubt I would’ve -— at least, that’s what he kept telling me. He injected himself with dog blood. I kid you not. I highly doubt that changed his brain any, but he thought it would, and this placebo effect gave us the world’s first idea retriever trainer. Absolute genius, total bastard to his lovers, but angelic to his dogs. I was unlucky to be his lover for about ten minutes. But I’ve been under his shadow for most of my life.

      I’ve been training idea retrievers for five years now. It’s not steady money, but it keeps you on your toes—-especially if a cold wet nose jams between them on a day you foolishly wear sandals.

      Idea retrievers are not a breed, but a job description. Any dog patient enough to put up with a trainer and dexterous with his forepaws can fetch ideas.

      I live with my family and our dogs in a converted Catholic church. There’s still some residual prejudice from other trainers at letting dogs eat at your table and sleep on your furniture, but how else can you keep an eye on valuable animals when you can’t afford to hire a security guard? Most of our dogs are from the pound, and all of them work, even if the job is official bed-warmer. Most of my family train bully drafters, rented out with a cart for the day. We’re able to keep track of the drafters through microchipping and the dogs’ ingrained habit of being fed dinner at precisely five o’clock. Bully drafters are just as strong as a pony, but easier to clean up after, and often the only means of transport for seniors or those with leg infirmaries. Sometimes we all miss the cars, but at least the roads are safer for dogs and the ambulances now.

      No one had a dog cart when I was a little girl. But when cars and motorcycles became illegal, suddenly anyone with a hyperactive mutt had a guaranteed trip at least to the shops and back. You try hauling groceries for a family of four on a bike or on the hydraulic trolley.

      Sci was too proud to haul a cart, even though most dogs think its good fun. He just lay down and refused to budge. As he was almost a hundred pounds, trying to move this canine Gibraltar was an exercise in abject futility.

      But he loved hunting ideas. That and making people jump by jabbing his nose on unsuspecting skin. He didn’t want to waste time pulling carts, catching Frisbees or prancing about a proxy ring when he could chase down impressions of thoughts lost to living man that hide in thick overlapping morphic fields. Bringing back a live one was Sci’s whole reason for being. He patiently waited while I exercised the drafters before I could put him to the hunt.

      Bats have radar. Dolphins have sonar. Dogs have smell. Smell can give a dog a mental image of the scent-maker as clear as any radar. Reynard’s bent genius was in figuring how to get his retrievers to show him what they smelled.

      The training isn’t too hard, but you have to be patient and persistent, which is difficult. Make it easy at first. Have a big photo of a cat, for example. Take it and the dog to that cat’s litter box while chilling a bottle of champagne. Have the dog sniff the litter and then touch the dog’s paw with the photo of the cat. Reward the dog for tapping the cat photo. Have a photo of another animal with the cat photo. Reward the dog when he taps only the cat photo. Then take a photo of the cat and another cat that does not use the litter box. When the dog is able to pick out the cat from a selection of other cat images, you’ve got the hardest part done. Then you have to teach your dog to scratch out a rough version of the cat image. It never will look anything like a cat, but it’ll wind up being a shorthand glyph between you and your dog for “cat”. Then you move on to more abstract images like letters.

      Once they get that they are able to let you know what they see through scent, pop the champagne. You’ve got yourself an idea retriever.

      Working with a particular dog long enough, you start getting the gist of what ideas he’s trying to describe to you. All dog owners have this bond to some degree. A whine could mean “I have to go out,” while the same whine done by another dog could mean something else.

      People still think it’s all a hoax. They think we trained the dogs to tap cards in certain patterns. There has to be a catch, they insist. But there’s no catch—-with scent, dogs can not only see in their heads what was there, but how big it was, and what it last ate.

      Then it was only a few steps sideways to discover that ideas have smells. Perhaps ideas pee. I’m not sure, but I’m also not sure how my camera works. Strong, repeated thoughts can be caught. A retriever can see them with his nose. A great retriever like Sci can draw it.

      Ideas are nothing but a series of charged chemicals, Reynard explained. They stick to morphic fields like spoor on a forest floor. Most scientists you’ll meet will roll their eyes at the mention of morphic fields, vast energy cells that grab and hold race memories and behaviors like images to photographic negatives, because they’re only a theory. I point out that evolution is still technically a theory, but they never seem impressed by that. So I ignore them and instead watch Sci bring ideas back to me.

      Sir Reynard’s legendary bitch, the aforementioned God, solved murders and kidnappings. She could recapture the crime at the scene. She never could draw a good likeness of a suspect, or of a human for that matter, but could pick out things like what was on the bottom of the shoes, what book was in his pocket, or what McDonald’s he’d just visited.

      Sci could find chapters from dead writers. He’s not a furry Ouiji board -— but if the deceased had thought about something long enough, the patterns impressed on the fields to create enough of a morphic resonance that Sci can sniff. But Sci could track down Jesus H Christ and that wouldn’t impress a “real” scientist.

      This made it all the more surprising when I got the call from the University of Penn, begging Sci to come out and hunt the office of their leading atmospheric chemical engineer, who’d died that morning.

      “C’mon, Sci!” I hollered. “Trolley ride!”

#

      “Stacy Jones?”

      “Yo,” I said. “And Science Jones.”

      Sergeant Maddox grinned at my huge, floppy eared, floppy coated retriever. Sci was a familiar visitor to the Philadelphia Police. “Hey, buddy, you’re on the list, too. Did you see the doc for blood and hair samples?”

      “Oh, he met us at the door.” I rolled up my sleeve to show the bandage to prove it.

      “Well, you two are free to do the voodoo that you two do.”

      “You really got to let me in on where you get your donuts.”

      “What? And lose our only advantage over the bad guys? They already get guns easily enough —- but us boys in blue will be damned if they get our Secret Formula Donuts, too.”

      He lifted the yellow police tape for us to enter the tiny office. If the body hadn’t already been taken away, there wouldn’t have been any room for Sci to turn around in. He sniffed at a bloodstain on the frayed carpet. It was such a relief not to deal with a homicide scene for a change. Poor bastard just got drunk, fell and snapped his neck.

      “A DOG? Harris, you mean to tell me the expert you called in is a DOG?” From the way the conceit echoed down the university hallway, I knew a Youngblood was coming. After losing their chemical factories in Delaware, most Youngbloods had been either jailed or forced to do community service. Heading the University of Penn Atmospheric Chemical Engineering department seemed to be the best community service his lawyer could get. “Which Youngblood is that?” I asked the Sergeant without turning around.

      “I dunno. They all smell alike to me.”

      “Its okay, Mr. Youngblood,” soothed the voice I’d talked to on the phone. “The dog’s an idea retriever. He’s the same one who caught the Pine Barren killer last year.”

      “Oh, PUH-lease, Harris!”

      “Ooo, looky, its break time,” snorted the Sergeant, and gave me a sympathetic look before ambling off. “Happy hunting.”

      “Harris, I’m not authorizing this esteemed University to pay for every nutcase with a mutt to poke about,” the Youngblood grumbled to the short, stoop-shouldered man next to him, who I assumed was Harris. I wondered how long it would be before Youngblood threatened to take his ball and go home to his private high rise in Wilmington. That, the judge let him keep.

      “This is the dog that also discovered the final chapters of Stephen King’s last thriller . . . months after King’s death.” Harris kindly saved me the trouble of bragging about Sci. Personally, I’d like to wear a huge neon sign pointing to Sci that he saved the climax of the last Stephen King, but Sci preferred that I get him a better brand of dog food, instead.

      The Youngblood held out his hand to me and smirked, “This is the first time I’ve met a ghostwriter.”

      I swallowed my nausea and shook the hand of the convicted eco-criminal and amateur book critic. “Thanks for the compliment about the King book. Tell you the truth, I can’t even write a shopping list.”

      Harris shook my hand while Youngblood grumbled. I much preferred Harris’ touch. “I’ve been a fan of Stephen King since the womb. Plums Deify was vintage King—all of it. You can’t tell what was written before he died and what came after. I was hoping you and your furry friend could do the same for us.”

      “So I’d gathered,” I replied. “This is the department that’s working on fixing that hole in the ozone layer,” (because of creeps like your boss putting a hole there I wanted to add but didn’t), “Nature reported that Professor Mitchell’s chemical cocktails sprayed from aerosol cans proved promising at strengthening the existing ozone.”

      “They were more than promising,” the Youngblood grated, “they were vital. All of the Youngblood factories that haven’t been stolen by the fascists in the EPA have been converted to make this cocktail. You have any idea how much that costs? Mitchell was last looking at best methods of dispersion before he tripped the light fantastic.”

      I tried to look sympathetically at Youngblood. He was, after all, a client. He was also part of a clan that was directly responsible for global warming. Part of his native Delaware had already dropped into the Atlantic. Wilmington was becoming an island. He was lucky not to have been sentenced to medical research. I suppose the rest of us who eagerly bought the crap made in his factories deserved the same fate, but we needed a scapegoat and the Youngbloods just fit the role so sweetly.

      He looked at his gold watch, and suddenly leaped so high his hair weave brushed the ceiling.

      “SCI!” I hissed, and Sci turned innocently back to the office, gently wagging his tail.

      “Damn BEAST!” Sci’s latest victim spluttered, “He put a hole in my sock!”

      “Sci is very glad to meet you, sir,” I said, knowing that Sci’s nose had found a previously existing hole in the sock. “May I take this opportunity to remind you that we’re donating our services today?”

      “What could it hurt to try, sir?” Harris piped up.

      “I’d best be off to the geek HQ to see if they found anything in Mitchell’s hard drive,” Youngblood said, wiping his ankle with a handkerchief. “That’s a better use of my time. I will call in precisely one hour, Harris.” He ended with a growl that would’ve set any pit bull scampering, and then stomped away.

      Harris peeked at me sheepishly over the rims of his glasses. “Sorry. It’s been a bad day.”

      “I’m sorry you have to work for him. Sci is glad to help. Aren’t you, mate?”

      Sci yawned and stretched, eager to get on with it.

      I lay down cards with letters and numbers, then handed a handful of blank ones to Harris. “I think I remember you saying you were Professor Mitchell’s assistant? If you could fill these cards in with any formulas or jargon you two used often, it might save us a heck of a lot of time.” I then lay a roll of white shelf lining paper down, then coated Sci’s right front paw with washable kids’ paint.

      “Is that his drawing paw?”

      “Yes. And before you ask, he’s right handed.”

      Harris filled the cards with engineering mumbo jumbo. He had a cute way of scrunching up his mouth as he concentrated. He caught me studying him and I think the both of us blushed. “Anything else I can do to help?”

      “I could murder a cup of tea.”

      “My pleasure. How long did you live in England?”

      “Long enough, mate.”

      Sci was already stalking the hypothesis before Harris and Sgt. Maddox returned with lukewarm, blindingly sweet caffeine. Sci kept circling where the chair was, tracking the idea through the resonating layers of morphic fields that I wish I could see.

      “Cool. I love it when he does this,” Sgt. Maddox grinned, a true Sci fan.

      “Why did Professor Mitchell have such a tiny office?” I wondered aloud.

      Harris replied, “It was easier for him to sneak a drink that way.”

      “Miss him?”

      “Him, no. His genius, yes.”

      Wow. We had something in common. I started to wonder what Harris looked like naked when Sci suddenly scampered to the contact paper. Oh yes —- the ozone layer solution. “Show Mummy, Sci,” I encouraged. He scratched an arrow, then some sort of blob above it. The tea went cold as I snapped Sci’s scratches with my camera phone, then bent to wipe the contact paper clean. My heart started to beat in time to Sci’s sniffs as he stood on his hind legs, his blunt, black head weaving back and forth in the air, flushing the theorem out.

      “This making any sense so far?” I asked.

      “Nope,” Harris admitted. “But Black Arrow was Mitchell’s preferred beer.”

      “Oh…great…”

      Sci hit a series of number cards—-6,2,1,0,0,3, then two letters—a P and an M. “These make any sense to you?”

      “Nope.”

      “What chemicals are a P and an M?”

      “P is phosphorous. But there is no chemical with an abbreviation of M.”

      “Maybe it’s not meant to be chemicals, then,” Sgt. Maddox suggested.

      Sci started scratching on the paper again. I had to stop him to repaint his paw. Sgt Maddox took over photography so I could concentrate on trying to decipher Sci’s glyph system. What Sci scratched out now looked like a box with the lid caved in, with a small triangle on top. From Sci’s past drawings, I knew that the triangle and the crushed box meant to occupy the same space. “Please tell me that this looks familiar to somebody,” I sighed.

      Harris shrugged and Sgt. Maddox kept clicking photos.

      Sci sat, indicating he was done with this drawing. While he waited for me to wipe the shelf lining paper clean, he wriggled, whined and repeatedly sneezed.

      “What’s the reason for your sneezin’?” I said automatically, as that’s what I always say to my dogs when they sneeze.

      “He hasn’t sneezed before, has he?” Sgt Maddox asked.

      “He sneezes nearly every day.”

      “No—I mean when he’s retrieving. I’ve seen many idea retrievers on a hunt and they usually don’t sneeze. Do you think that means anything?”

      “Dogs usually sneeze to try to clear their noses, even if it’s just a strong smell they’re trying to get rid of.”

      I said, still wondering when triangles and boxes occupy the same space. When Sci’s paw was repainted, I sent him off again.

      With frantic obsession, Sci quivered and panted while sniffing, staring and scratching a short line with a small dark circle on the top. Again, he sneezed. He kept sneezing. I reached out to check his nose for physical obstructions, but then Sci was off again, smacking cards.

      3, 6, 1, S, I, M, N, S, T

      Sci sneezed a final time and whined. He looked at what I couldn’t see and he cringed. It looked as if he was frightened of the air. How could I comfort him from what was invisible? I spoke soothing nonsense, but Sci wasn’t buying it. He slunk into the hall and before the nearest door to the outside, quivering. He’d had enough.

      “What the hell is wrong with him?” Harris laughed, and sounded too much like Reynard for me to ever wonder what he looked like naked ever again.

      “Yes, Einstein, he’s scared shitless!”

      “What about the rest of the retrieval?”

      “There is no more. That’s it,” I lied.

      Harris rolled his eyes. “It would be just like Mitchell—he’s pissed off that he’s dead, so he took his final discovery with him!”

      Sci quivered all the way home. I quivered, too, but in rage that I could not help my dog.

#

      I spent a sleepless night, worried sick about Sci. In contrast, he slept soundly on the floor in his usual spot. When he wanted breakfast, which just happened to coincide with me finally drifting off, he jammed his frigid nose into my bare feet. It was then I knew he was fully recovered.

      Going to the door, he wagged his tail at the day.

      I wondered what had unnerved him so. There was still so much a dog cannot communicate to his human. But that he could rebound from such a fright so quickly made me wish he could explain how I could be calm again, too.

#

      Sgt. Maddox took me out for lunch about a month later, when the time at the University had been shoved out of my head by the usual day to day concerns of running a family business. He brought up the topic so casually; I knew that this was the entire reason for the lunch treatment.

      “By the way, I did some background checks on that Penn Professor—-remember him? Well, turns out when the good Prof was five years old, his neighbor’s home burnt down, killing the kids napping inside. Definitely arson, but the case was never solved . . . until now.”

      The penny didn’t take long to drop. “The Professor--? But he was only five at the time! How can you be sure?”

      “The first set of numbers Sci pointed to turned out to be the date of the fire—June 21, 2000. It happened about three in the afternoon.”

      “The P and the M, of course.” And I’d rashly assumed a dying chemist would think about chemicals right until the end! “So the designs Sci drew . . . ”

      “. . . were most likely a burning house and a match. And the house was at the second set of numbers—361 Simon Street. The house was at the corner. The house burnt, but the sign was untouched. That’s a little too much detail for mere coincidence. Could be the reason the Professor started to drink in the first place. Also explains why Sci kept sneezing. You ever smell a burnt home with someone inside? Makes you gag.”

      “I’ll take your word for it,” I replied. “Um, all of this didn’t help with the ozone problem, did it?”

      “Stacey, haven’t you ever studied the history of science? They never discover what they set out to discover. Penicillin was accidental, remember. So there’s no magic solution to the hole in the sky. But Sci may have been able to repair somebody’s soul as it was looking the Great Unknown in the face. That’s gotta be worth something to the department. Who knows how many crimes we could solve? I know you won’t sell Sci, but you could teach us ignorant cops how to train more idea retrievers like Sci. Remember Harris, the Prof’s assistant? He wants to write a paper about Sci. And his boss Youngblood asked the Mayor to have you—-yes, YOU—to be funded by the City to teach at the University.”

      “Youngblood? Are you kidding?”

      “Do I look like I’m kidding?”

      “Wow. I guess I might start liking the guy. What a concept!”

      “Yeah, it sucks when people fail to act like their stereotypes, let me tell you. You are going to accept the Mayor’s proposal when he gives you a surprise visit tomorrow at noon, aren’t you?”

      “Of COURSE I will!” I replied, and suddenly I could not remember what Reynard looked like anymore. “You never know what that dog’s nose will get you into.”

Rena Sherwood has lived in both England and America.  She had poems published in two college literary magazines and in upcoming issues of T-zero and The Custer-Hawk Gazette.  She hopes to be a white horse when she grows up.

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