Conversations With Otis

As Karin & I talk about what it was like to follow Otis throughout the grounds of a large lakeside park on a searching odyssey that began in the parking lot and lasted for what felt like an eternity, Otis calmly observes us from his crate in the back of Karin’s 4 Runner, his brown eyes signaling his agreement with the content of our discussion. Over a year prior, the three of us could have been arranged just the same, maybe in the parking lot outside the Shady Oak Vet training space, with one crucial difference: Otis would have been whining, restless, unsatisfied, his brown eyes demanding our attention through the bars of his crate. Otis wanted a conversation with us. He needed us to listen to him. To learn from him. Today, we listened, and Otis spoke to us in the language of the search, the language of movement and stillness, of energy and connection. We all wanted more.

The Oracle of Odor

Around the start of the pandemic I began coaching teams in private sessions, outdoors and away from heavily used dog training facilities. This worked great for many dogs, including Otis. Being a Doberman, he’d much rather set his own boundaries than be walled in. It worked great for me and Karin, too. It gave us time to get into conversation with Otis.

A theme we’d been exploring for several years was Otis’ relationship to complexity. I believed there had to be something we could do for Otis to help him more confidently and directly engage complex odor problems. Ever the patient partner, Otis entertained my beliefs while waiting for me to have a realization about the human relationship to complex communication from dogs.

One day, I arranged a two hide search for Karin & Otis in a huge mowed field adjacent to a high school parking lot. I believed one of the hides – high up on some netting strung across several steel posts – would be extremely difficult to source given the sun, heat and wind conditions at the time. Otis took Karin to the first hide immediately, then dabbled with the odor of the second hide, came upon some petrified dog poop (Karin reacted by pulling him away), and then took Karin on a fascinating journey to the far corners of the field, throughout a playground, around a building and under the shade of some pine trees. There was no doubt Otis was driven by a purpose, even though he went far far away from where I knew the hides were. There was no doubt Otis was working, even though he’d sometimes pause to pee. There was no doubt Otis wanted us to listen to him. To learn from him. To connect with him.

After a while I suggested to Karin that we take a break in the shade. In past searches, we had sometimes decided to end a search and head back to the car, only to be dragged back into odor by Otis, so we were talking, but watching him in case he decided to resume the search. The talk was mostly of a “what the hell was that!” nature. Both of us knew Otis was energized by the opportunity to freely communicate with us, but we couldn’t quite understand what he wanted us to hear. The next move Otis made was like lightning bursting forth from a bottle. He launched us from the shade of the trees back into the open field, where he began to describe the edge of odor, bracketing the odor cone with explosive changes in direction and pace.

Otis did find that hide up in the netting, but that wasn’t what Karin & I took away from the experience. We turned over every moment of the search in our minds and through our conversation, the way you search a river stone with your hand to understand what it’s been through. Why had Otis taken us to the ends of the universe to show us where this hide was located? We didn’t have a perfect answer; what we had was a genuine question: what can we learn from letting Otis take us to the ends of the universe?

Our searches with Otis began to get longer and become more freeform. They also began to reveal patterns. These patterns belonged to Otis’ language. With enough attention given to anything and everything Otis chose to do during a search, we discovered that Otis was eager to share his language with us. Finding a hide was no longer as exciting as finding another word in Otis’ language. At the height of their journey, Otis & Karin could work out the location of a hide without Otis physically closing in on the source. To human observers, Karin was doing something without explanation. How could she know the location of hides without Otis indicating them? Otis and Karin were beginning to share a language. The same way two friends can finish each other’s sentences, Karin was able to see the finish to Otis’ search and find sentences.

Say It Again

Otis enjoyed repeating behavior when he knew Karin was genuinely invested in understanding him. Often, his behavior would entail painting an outline around an area of importance, and describing an edge of odor or a key collection point. Other times, the behaviors would be so subtle – the softness in his eyes, the place he chose to stand in stillness, a brief glance off to one side as he wove his way through a playground. Otis relished his role as native speaker, repeating his communication, slowing it down, sometimes full of emotion an energy like a slam poet, all for the benefit of Karin’s learning. Karin always knew that if Otis was no longer interested in communicating the odor picture and working with her to solve it, he would stop. He rarely stopped sharing information with her, even when the odor picture was – to humans – highly complex.

Deeper Understanding

I remember a hide I placed at the top of a 4ft tall green sign post with no sign attached. The post was stuck in the ground in a grassy rainwater runoff channel with a berm running along one side of the channel and fenced in tennis courts along the other side. Otis worked the grass at the lowest point in the channel, looking to an outside observer like he was “off task”. Karin, fully committed to understanding him, wholeheartedly joined Otis in his slow and pensive nose-crawl through this channel. If you need to know, Otis did pick his head up and show us the location of the hide. We were more interested in the behavior he chose to share with us revealing something about his perspective – his experience of what it is like to be Otis.

Another time, we were searching near a community building next to a large field. A double wide sidewalk separated the building from the field and extended beyond the building to a pond. The weather was cool with sun and wind, and there were stubborn piles of snow that refused to melt 10 feet off the sidewalk in the grass on the field side. I placed a hide in one of the dense, wet, cold piles of snow. Otis described the presence of odor far far away from the hide, showing Karin how it collected in some shrubbery and over some curved metal bike rack tubing. He pulled her at a full run from the collecting odor into the wind, down the side of the building – pausing to search up down and around 4 concrete steps and a railing leading to an entrance at the building’s midpoint before running far beyond the building to the pond. He repeated this pattern.

Karin and Otis relished this type of experience. She was all in to listen to Otis, to receive his behavior, and to converse with him to reach a mutual agreement on the meaning of his behavior. Conversing with Otis in this search included checking in with him as he repeated his race to the pond, “Otis, do we need to go this far?” And affirming his display of behavior at the downwind collection point, “I see. You want me to see this is where the odor is collecting.”

In this search and others I tried my best not to give Karin any information she couldn’t get from Otis. She and Otis would take off from his crate without any boundaries or knowledge of number of hides. I’d narrate Otis’ behaviors – all of them – with plain descriptions of what he was doing. I’d also sometimes remind Karin to affirm what she was seeing from Otis, to stay connected to the behavior happening in the moment. This snow pile search was blowing my mind. It had the quality of a parent and a baby engaging in the conversations that lead to the baby’s first word.

Late in the search, Otis was back at the steps when he switched to the same behavior Karen had seen at the park with the post hide. He went low and slow with his nose crawling along a seam in the concrete sidewalk. Karin could say “I see you. I see what you’re telling me.” with complete conviction. She knew Otis was collecting information that could propel them forward in the conversation of the search.

Otis left the sidewalk for the field and worked up and down a tree – another collection point. He began to describe a smaller area of interest bounded by the sidewalk and some small trees – an area containing the pile of snow with the hide. He found this hide. Karin found a new word in Otis’ language. His way of working the ground for the post hide and the snow pile hide had meaning. Karin would see this behavior again and welcome it as a familiar communication signaling a likely step forward in the puzzle. This is significant, as many people might view the same behavior as a sign that the search effort is failing.

Transcending The Source

In the months before his death, Otis became increasingly excited by the sharing of fine details of the odor picture. He would show how odor brushed across surfaces like invisible paint. How it traveled long distances through the treetops, through sprinkler pipes, and sewer systems. Karin was enveloped in communication from Otis, like standing in the center of a star.

It began when I left a hide behind at a small business center with a loading dock area on the back side of the building. The hide was on the underside of a storm drain cover flush with the asphalt, not too far from a concrete island harboring a couple of trash bins and a lamppost. Karin and Otis would look for that hide on a few different occasions and Otis would describe the edges and collection points of odor with great enthusiasm.

A Parting Message

I must admit that my role as coach sometimes clouded my judgement and led me to focus on Otis finding hides and Karin making accurate alert calls. But, Otis repeatedly showed us that odor is nothing more than a facilitator of relationship. A search is like sunlight, and shared language, mutual understanding and respect, and the practice of being in conversation are the flower, and odor is the stem.

Otis and I searched for a blind hide in the general area of an ice arena. Karin and I really didn’t have an interest in search boundaries, as we knew Otis would help us define the boundaries through his pattern of behavior. I remember taking off behind him from the back of Karin’s 4Runner. The entire experience was one of deep connection, timelessness, intuitive understanding, and flow. He took me on a tour of the edges of odor at the far end of the parking lot away from the arena. He ran me along a berm in the parking lot pausing at a tree stump and cutting to the building. He described odor collecting under a metal staircase, around and in a walled and gated trash enclosure, and up the parking signposts nearest the building and the stairs. He then took me past the stairs and around the building corner.

At one point he showed me behavior that I understood as him catching a line of odor and following it in the direction of source. As he was communicating this line of odor, some teenagers came around the corner and walked through and around me and Otis. Everything that happened after that was edge focused. He ran me to the opposite side of the building. He ran me past the place where he’d encountered the teens and up a set of stairs to a covered entrance area. He took me out towards the nearest road and became wild around a tree a few hundred feet from the building.

Ultimately, Otis found the hide, but again the lesson was not about finding the hide. I had all of the information I needed to know where odor was coming from and where Otis had plugged into odor that could lead him to the source. I didn’t see our traffic jam with the teenagers as relevant. Otis did. Everything he did post the teenager encounter was an attempt to get my agreement and support to continue the work we’d been doing just before the interruption. I needed to be in conversation with Otis. Listening is important. It is not passive. A listener has to hear the words being spoken to him, including the call to action. Otis knew what I had seen before the teens interrupted us. To act as if I didn’t know what he’d already told me would be inauthentic. Otis taught me to try to be authentic.

The Final Search

It’s a bitter cold winter day. I meet Karin in the plowed parking lot of the Lake Johanna boat landing. There’s deep, hard snow covering everything. Karin and I set off in someone’s boot tracks towards the playground and the beach house. We are two people and no dog. Otis is no longer a living canine, but he is not gone. He is with us. We have internalized him, and it is our intention to let him speak to us through the crisp, blue-white air. Well over a month ago I suggested to Karin that she and Otis come to Lake Johanna to see about a hide I believed I’d left behind after a day of coaching sessions. We stop for a moment at a standpipe. Karin references a printed satellite view of the area as she tells me about Otis’ brief interest in the pipe during one of their searches. She describes much more intense behavior that happened in a culvert near the entrance to the boat landing parking lot – not just once, but repeatedly across different days. When we reach the playground, Karin points out an area of interest as described to her by Otis.

Karin knew nothing about this Lake Johanna search other than a very broad area – several football fields in length -and a possible single hide. Everything she was telling me and showing me on her maps made sense based on where I’d placed hides throughout the day and where I believed the lost hide was. But, that wasn’t the point. It didn’t need to make sense relative to a hide or hides. Otis and Karin were blowing apart the narrative of nose work. They were moving far beyond the idea of hides and alerts, of correct or incorrect, yet they were also learning with and from each other.

It’s fitting that Otis did not find the hide in the final search they did together. It’s poetic. I don’t really know that either of them cared to return to the narrative of nose work, the boundaries and time limits, the rules and judgements, the expectation of fast, flawless searching and finding. They had found a mutual flow state. Searching for odor had become a practice like meditation or yoga or tai chi chuan. These practices are about listening and responding. Otis and Karin shared a passion for the deepest of conversations. They did not fear the unknown or the impossible. They both knew that you can’t search the “right way” without going on a journey to discover what that means to the two of you.

Otis was my friend. I am honored to have known him. Otis was my sage. I see the world differently because of him. The conversations with Otis have a quality of “no-thingness”. They are everywhere and nowhere. They are contained within Otis and extending beyond him (thanks to John Vervaeke for inspiring those last few sentences).

Last summer Karin & I were searching with a friend’s German Shorthaired Pointer (GSP); this dog was in a funk. Sometimes connecting with his human, sometimes not. I wasn’t helping the matter with my focus too narrowly set on increasing the dog’s success rate of hides found and rewards given. Karin stood by as I handled the GSP in a picnic shelter. He’d found a hide, then given me some cryptic behavior, and now he was standing still as a statue in the shelter. Karin observed, “he wants to communicate. His eyes keep flicking up towards the roof of the shelter. He’s ready. He’s ready for his human to be all in.” After that search, Karin reached out to the dog’s human and that began a journey that has totally transformed the GSP and his partner. The journey focused on the human going all in and showing the GSP she would follow him to the ends of the universe. All the time Karin spent listening to Otis now connected her to another dog hoping to be heard.

Months later, on a cool, sunny winter day this GSP who had silently shouted communication through his eyes was confidently pulling Karin to great distances up and down a campus quad. I suddenly felt the presence of Otis through the behavior of the GSP. I told our friend that Karin and Otis had a very similar experience where Otis took her all the way around an elementary school building to show her how the odor carried over the building and dropped into a cool shaded area. Karin called out to us, “he wants me to know the odor collects here, but he doesn’t think it’s source.” I didn’t need to wonder how she could know that. Karin had Otis to teach her. Karin had Otis with her still teaching.

Otis, who guided us so many times into the wild beauty of boundless searches. Otis, who showed us that the whole world of scent work can be contained in a grain of behavior. Otis, who in his limited time taught us how to spend eternity in a search.

For, Otis, our friend, we keep endeavoring to listen to every dog.