I Thought This Was Chapter 155 (2)
"Norangi. You need to find this scent."
"Fooound iiit!"
I called over a staffer who'd been buried in paperwork at the training center and ran a test, and the result came back unmistakable. Two strokes under the chin and a sniff of the target scent were all it took for him to do a detection dog's work. Out of a crowd of people waving sausages and jerky, he singled out the one with a tiny plastic packet of flour tucked in a pocket.
"Here! Here! Here!"
Having found the person hiding the flour, Norangi spun tight circles around them and barked for all he was worth.
"Well, I'll be…… Do we really have to start calling you a Druid? We threw everything we had at this and got nowhere, and you turn out a result in under thirty minutes."
"Hard to ignore the advantage that comes from simply being able to talk to them."
I shrugged under the look No Wooju was giving me, as if I were something extraordinary. I ought to have been used to it by now, but praise still left me preening whether I wanted to or not.
At any rate, once I'd worked out a way to tell the detection dogs which scent they were after, I moved on to the next exercise. If each dog memorized only one scent, hunting down drugs, explosives, and the like would mean fielding an enormous number of them. Cheongho had been through detection training himself, so I took him along and started in on the candidates.
"All right. We're going to build on what I just showed you. You can handle that, right?"
"We'll find anything you want!"
"Obviously!"
"That guy over there's got something really tasty. I want it."
"Oh yeah, I love treasure hunts."
At my words the candidates bounced and yipped, delighted, and showed no sign of settling. One big bark from Cheongho at my side flattened them.
"Just like I showed you, people are going to give you a scent, and then you find it. But what if they give you two?"
"Find the tastier one!"
"Find whichever they said first!"
"We find both."
"Whichever!"
Something like two hundred and fifty candidates barked their opinions all at once. Even in that racket, I managed not to miss what a few of them were saying.
"The baseline is, you find both. If it's three, your goal is three."
They brightened at that. A human would have grumbled about the extra work, but dogs took the whole thing as a game—the same way a treasure hunt only gets better the more treasure there is to find.
"And once you've found what you're looking for, what do you do?"
"Eat it!"
"Take a bite first and see how it tastes!"
"Bring it to Master!"
"Rip it to shreds!"
The answers came in every color. The gentler, fiercely loyal breeds talked about carrying it back to their handler, and plenty of others meant to sample it themselves. A handful of beagles—the breed people bluntly call the crazy dogs—even declared they'd tear it apart.
"All wrong. You don't eat it, and you don't tear it. Tearing it is the last thing you do!"
"Hnngh."
I paid no mind to the beagle who'd gone sulky at the ban on shredding.
"Most of what you're after is going to be on a person. Try to bite them or snatch it, and they won't like that, will they? So when you find it, all you do is let everyone know, right there on the spot, that you found it."
"Found it! Like this?"
"Exactly."
The word was barely out of my mouth before all two hundred and fifty dogs were howling that they'd found it.
"Quiet! You think you came here to play?!"
"Eep……"
The ruckus, of course, died the moment Cheongho roared. I gave a pat to the one who'd stepped in with exactly the right help at exactly the right time, then pulled a few candidates aside for a test. People had already agreed to carry several items, so I took some of those out and set the dogs to finding them.
First up was the beagle who'd been ready to shred his find. I stroked his chin and let him take in two scents: a packet of crushed cold-medicine powder, and a tiny wad of gunpowder, the sort people commonly called a bean charge.
"These are what you find. You can do it, right?"
"Rip it!"
"Don't rip it!"
The beagle shot off at a scramble. Nose working, he tore around the area, then started circling the spot where several people stood. Round and round he went, sniffing hard, until he stopped dead.
"Fooound iiit!"
He'd picked out the person carrying the bean charge, one of the two. The moment I walked over and told him he was right, he bolted again, this time after the cold-medicine powder he still hadn't found. Packaging or not, a dog's nose was in a different league from any human's, and even a trace of scent clinging to the wrapper was enough for him to track it down.
"It's right here!"
He turned up the powder just as fast. Stuffed deep in a pocket or not, he had it in moments and barked that he'd found it.
"Good boy."
I let the dog who'd found both things I'd set him take a treat. As if working out the grudge of not being allowed to shred the real articles, he tore the jerky apart. Then, halfway through demolishing it, he suddenly took off, ran up to someone nearby, and started barking.
It was none other than the person who'd been carrying the test items to begin with. I'd handed them back once I had no more use for them, and the beagle had gone and found them anyway.
"……Right. That's how you keep on finding them."
Hazardous material wasn't something you located once and forgot about, so I praised him. I pulled several more dogs after that and tested them, and not a single one failed to pass. Even the poorest performers could be taught to hold at least four scents.
Once all two hundred and fifty candidates were up to a standard where they could go straight into service as detection dogs, I put Cheongho out in front. I couldn't be on hand to help with every session, and the point was to have them pass the know-how down to the next generation themselves. I'd heard this wasn't going to be a one-off—they meant to keep raising detection dogs—so I was laying the ground for that.
"Fall in!"
Cheongho gathered the two hundred and fifty or so dogs and set about teaching them how to train. Put less kindly, he was teaching them how to chew the ranks out from the top down. In short: give the juniors a demonstration clear enough to watch and copy, and if they fail to keep up, that is when you light into them. Whether they'd truly taken it in or not, once the lesson ended every face wore a look of anticipation.
I didn't just teach them something I shouldn't have, did I?
It occurred to me, unbidden, that the next class of dogs might deserve some pity. It wasn't going to cost me anything, though, so I set the thought aside and walked over to No Wooju with Cheongho.
"You're finished already?"
"Well, it isn't hard. Even if the goal is getting them to pass a technique down, animals already tend to hand all kinds of knowledge on to the next generation."
They really did have a habit of teaching their young this trick and that. The young animals at our zoo made it plain enough. No one had sat them down and explained the toilets, and yet they knew how to use them, having learned it from their parents—as good an example as any.
"Thank you. Truly."
No Wooju nodded and bent into a deep bow. I'd privately figured that turning even half of the nearly three hundred into detection dogs would count as a success, and since I'd qualified almost every one of them, he could hardly do anything but thank me. I told him there was no need to make so much of it, and went over a few things to watch for.
"Teaching the dogs a scent this way and having them find it is clearly a solid method…… Nose work is a pleasure for them, but it burns stamina, too. Please see that they get enough rest."
"You don't need to worry about that. We mean to rotate them through duty, so they'll be guaranteed plenty of time off."
"And on days when nothing that needs screening turns up, it'd be better if you planted a fake—just so they still get to find something."
No Wooju tilted his head. He couldn't see why they should manufacture fakes of the very things they were meant to screen out, only so the dogs would have something to find.
"It's a way of giving them a sense of accomplishment. A successful find usually earns a treat, so on a day they come up empty, they sometimes decide they've failed and take it to heart."
Maru was the same way. If she didn't manage a faster run than the day before, she tended to mope through the rest of it.
"I'll make certain that gets passed to the unit operating the detection dogs, along with the point about rest."
I gave him a few more pieces of information after that, and some talk that ought to help with the training, and then I headed home again.
A little time passed, and I began to hear that the detection dogs posted to aviation, the ports, the mail, and the rest were turning in results one after another.
The dogs must have been performing, because the articles all but sang hymns to them. There was even word that several other countries, having seen the results, had called wanting to outsource their detection-dog training. It wasn't empty rumor, either. No Wooju sent word that he was looking favorably on the requests coming in from overseas, and that he would pay me a royalty.
"Suhwan! They're saying they want to give you an award, and they need your schedule!"
"……An award?"
"Yeah. Some kind of plaque of appreciation, apparently. Must be about that detection-dog business."
And so, on top of everything else, I was to receive a certificate of appreciation—recognition for my help in raising the detection dogs, and for the part that help had played in solving problem after problem.