Mu is very good at his job. He has found the lost cat at least 300 times in six years. He is good at it because he enjoys his work. Probably, of any animal or human that does any sort of work on this planet, Mu enjoys his work the most. A dog who searches for lost cats. What more suitable work could any creature possibly have? Mu also enjoys going with me on the search. Every morning when it’s time for me to leave with one of the dogs, Mu knows it’s a work day because of the preparations I’ve made and the tools I’ve gathered. He makes sure to line up right at the crack of the door and sit, and look up at me with his big eyes. He does this grumble and whine like a broken church organ, and it is unmistakeable that Mu desperately wants to be the one who goes to work with his dad. It is very sad on those days that I take one of the other dogs. When it is his turn to work, he flies down the front walk to the car and dances by the door. He sleeps while we are on the freeway, sometimes glancing over at me, or asking to be petted. When we start turning onto side streets with lower and lower speed limits, he gets more and more excited to work, whining and trembling. He can hardly hold still for me to put the harness on.

Mu is talented because he enjoys his work, but he also has a skill for simply enjoying life. Mu is the champion of napping. Whether he is sleeping by himself on the couch or in a favorite chair, or if he is napping with one of his people, or the other dogs, Mu has a way of twisting himself into the nap, a ballet of sleep. He can curl up tight or sprawl out if he gets hot. He naps by the fireplace, often convincing someone to turn on the gas fire just for him. On a sunny afternoon, he will ask to be let out specifically to take a nap in the sun. Then he comes back in when he gets too hot, in about fifteen minutes. One day, on the ride home, he fell asleep with his nose pointed straight up in the air, and his ears dangling, and he managed somehow to make look like the most comfortable sleep ever. If I fell asleep like that, I would have to go to the hospital, and my neck would never be right again. Mu has a snore that is better than a cartoon dog’s snore. Sometimes it is a gentle little snore, like a cat purring. Other times, he really sounds like a cartoon dog, with his lips sputtering and flapping on the exhale. Every night, Mu sleeps against my back, or against the back of my legs. He turns in a circle and then dives into his sleeping position with his spine against mine. Even on days that he works, Mu sleeps most of the day. I should keep track some time. It must be at least 16 hours a day.

As much as he sleeps, you’d think he wouldn’t have much time left to enjoy other things. He really loves to play with the dogs, mostly Tino and Sky. He will grab a toy or a scrap of cardboard, and he will shake it while doing a play bow in front of one of the other dogs. During this ritual, he growls very low and deep. It is a scary growl, but also happy, like a parent reading a bedtime story to a child and making monster voices for effect. Mu’s monster voice is the best, musical and rich. Once the chase begins, the dogs sprint around the living room, bouncing off the couches or flying over them. Mu can change directions on a dime. Tino usually has more speed and momentum, and often goes flying into a wall or a door. At the off-leash park, Mu can fly over fences. When he was younger, during some searches, he would jump retaining walls as high as seven feet. He doesn’t jump quite as high any more, but most fences are easy for him to sail over. If I throw the ball to him, he jumps about twice as high as he would need to to catch the ball, and sails higher with the ball in his teeth as a kind of end zone celebration.

Mu also loves to eat, of course. If you have treats, he slams into a sit position so that his heels clunk on the floor, because maybe if he sits harder, he will get more treats and faster. All of the dogs get cookies in the morning, and it makes for a symphony of crunching, but Mu adds extra sound effects. He takes each cookie with a snarfling inhalation, again like a cartoon character. He doesn’t just enjoy his treats the normal amount the other dogs do. He adds an extra dimension to treat time with his own sound effects. The snarfling noises must make the food taste better.

One of the things Mu doesn’t particularly enjoy is having his picture taken. He often looks like I am burning his soul when I ask him to sit and I hold up my iPhone. I have gotten the best pictures of him when he is working or playing, or if I am holding cheese, of course. Even though he doesn’t particularly like having his picture taken, he usually is a good sport about it, and he knows there will be treats or play afterward. I have thousands of pictures of Mu, and at least a hundred that are really pretty good. My favorite pictures capture him in full enjoyment of his work or his play.

Eat, sleep, work, play, Mu enjoys it all. He knows how to live right. He makes an art form of everything he does. Often, while we are conducting a search in a residential area, he will be sniffing along, checking for cats, and he will suddenly tumble onto the lawn, and roll and snort, and get himself a good back scratch. Then after a few moments of that, he pops up and gets back to work. I make the same joke every time, because I’m always with a new person who hasn’t heard it before, that Mu has a contract that specifies 15 seconds of rolling on the lawn for every fifteen minutes of work. People often ask me how I will know if Mu finds a cat, and I reply that the signs will be unmistakable. He pulls hard on the leash and whines. If he just smells the cat but can’t get to it, such as when the cat is under a shed, then he inhales so deeply that you expect the cat to be sucked over to Mu and vacuumed right out of his hiding place. When he sees a cat in the distance, he will whine and bark and jump, and I pull him away so that we won’t displace the cat. He knows he gets the string cheese in my pocket when he finds the cat, and he sits with a clunk and whines for the cheese, and he makes the snarfling sounds as he takes the cheese from my fingers.

I enjoy my work because we help cats and dogs, and we save lives. Mostly I enjoy my work because I get to work with my dogs. We do something that can only be achieved by two species working together. Neither of us could do it alone. My dogs are my friends and my family, and I am very fortunate that my work allows me to be with them all day long. On top of all that, Mu’s love of life is infectious. He enjoys life so much that he makes all our lives better.

I went for a run through the woods today. I would like to have taken a dog with me, but they tend to pull too much, or lag behind, or stop and smell things. I decided to run through the woods with Kelsy. An imaginary dog doesn’t yank on the leash and pull you off stride.

As I remembered all of the times I ran with Kelsy, both on actual searches, and in our fictional story, The Retrievers of Useless Bay, I thought about her various styles of running, and how her ears would flop. When she was on a scent trail, where the lost dog had traveled a long distance down a road or path, Kelsy would get into a groove, and the tips of her ears would bounce. I imagined her running along the trail with me like that.

For two months now, I have been keeping this blog of my life with dogs. In a way, I am creating my reality by being selective in what I remember. I’m not blogging about, 3 AM, I was asleep, 4 AM, I was also asleep...5 AM I had breakfast, cereal and soy milk. I’m writing down things I want to remember about working and living with my dogs. As I was thinking about the life I lived with Kelsy, I realized that I’m going to have so much more material to remember with Mu, Fozzie, and Tino. I’m taking more pictures and video than I used to, and keeping more records and spreadsheets about our work and play. At any moment, I could picture Kelsy clearly, as if she was sitting right in front of me, and I can imagine what she would do in a particular situation. Because Kelsy was a fictional character in a novel, who had the power to speak to the protagonist through a link to a chip in her brain, I can of the things that Kelsy might say, based on that story. It was nice to have her company as I ran through the woods.

I was thinking about how my running was progressing, or not progressing, and how I really needed to avoid injury to keep working out and not have to take time off. I was concentrating on my stride, running on my muscles instead of my joints. By that I meant that I was keeping my legs springy, not slamming into the ground, but catching the ground with my feet and then throwing it back out behind me. It’s like trying to catch a football. If you just hold your hands out, the football is just going to bounce off your hands. I know from experience. You need to pull your hands in as you make contact with the ball. I have had knee problems in the past, so I definitely want to keep my knees healthy as I increase my weekly mileage and get in shape.

In general, in life, we can see the footballs coming, so we can have soft hands, and catch the ball instead of hurting our hands and dropping the ball. Most of the things that annoy me or set me back are predictable. Instead of getting angry about things that go wrong, I can predict the troubles I’m going to have, and be ready to soften the blow. For example, I know it is likely that there will come a day in the future when all of my great dogs will be gone, and I will have only memories of our time together. Instead of standing flat footed and letting that horrific future crush me, we can live the hell out of life now and have an overflowing of memories later, on the other side. I can shape my future reality by choosing what to pay attention to now.

About the time of that thought, I was running along the trail at the top of Seahurst Park. I tripped on a tree root, even though I have run or walked that trail hundreds of times. As the ground came rushing up toward my face, I turned my body, tucked my shoulder, and rolled. I didn’t quite do the thing where you tumble and pop right up, but I didn’t break anything, which was quite an achievement. I softened the blow, even when I didn’t see it coming. I was really happy that I fell, and that I tumbled harmlessly instead of putting an arm out and breaking a wrist or something. My shoulder was a little sore, but I felt energized by having handled the fall relatively well, better than I have some times in the past. After I found my glasses, and brushed off some of the dirt, I ran on with new energy. Shortly after that, I met a very nice golden retriever who ran up to me and wanted to be petted.

Another thought I had was that, when I get old and have dementia someday, I hope I talk to an imaginary Kelsy. My dad is always talking to people who aren’t in the room, carrying on long, elaborate conversations, usually about crazy new business schemes that are sure winners. Maybe you don’t get to choose the way you go crazy, but if I could, I would chose to talk to an imaginary Kelsy when I’m really old and can no longer distinguish reality from imagination.

Mu searched for a cat today in Snohomish. We started at 7 AM. The conditions were relatively good, 55 degrees and light rain. Mu whined at a storage shed in the neighbor’s yard, but it was locked and the neighbor was at work, so we couldn’t check it. We found several other potential clues, white fur on the bottom of fence boards and paw prints in the mud by the creek. Mu and I searched for four hours, covering about six acres of yards and green belt.

We had just about covered the entire planned search area when Mu gave a strong alert on something. I had to look at the ground for several moments before I could make sense of what I was looking at. Finally, the image resolved in my brain. It was the mandible of a cat.

Mu has found the aftermath of a coyote attack at least 115 times during the last seven years. Coyotes usually don’t leave much behind, but if they leave anything substantial, it is usually the lower teeth. I told Mu he was a good boy, and give him his treat reward. I asked him to sit while I examined the scene. The mandible was definitely from a cat, by the shape and the number of the teeth. They also appeared consistent with the age and size of the missing cat. 100 feet from their yard, in the woods, along the path he had been known to travel, everything fit with the hypothesis that this was the missing cat. I couldn’t find any evidence to rule it out. With Mu’s nose helping me, I found more skull fragments and part of a femur. I looked for any remnants of fur that could confirm or eliminate the lost cat, but we didn’t find any. Coyotes typically eat almost every part of their prey.

We got back to the house, and I told the cat’s owners that Mu found remains that could not be ruled out as having come from their cat, and that the location would strongly suggest that it was their cat. I told them they didn’t have to look at the remains, but they could if they wanted. They said they wanted to see, and I left the evidence with them while Mu and I continued along the coyotes’ trail in search of more evidence. We followed their trail for a quarter mile, but didn’t find anything else.

When we got back, the owners said the remains could belong to their cat. Another young cat had gone missing two weeks earlier on the next block, and the remains were not inconsistent with that cat, based on my limited information. They asked me if they should keep looking for their cat, and at first I didn’t know what to tell them. I felt 95% certain this was their cat, but I have been wrong at least once in the past. About six months ago, Mu found remains of a cat near the yard of a lost cat. There was some fur remaining and it generally matched the color of the lost cat. I told that cat owner that his cat had most likely been killed by a predator. The next day, his cat came home. The remains Mu found just happened to be from a similar looking cat.

After I thought about it a few moments, I told them they should keep looking if they couldn’t confirm it was definitely their cat. I told them they could send the remains to a DNA lab for testing and confirmation, and they said they would. I hate to give them false hope when I was 95% certain their cat was deceased, but I wouldn’t want to stop them from looking if the 5% probability turned out to be true. They said they would keep searching until they got the DNA results.

Whatever the outcome, Mu did an excellent job, as always. Finding some cat teeth in acres of forest is something a human couldn’t hope to do. Even when I was looking right at the evidence that Mu pointed out, it took several moments to distinguish the object from the background of dirt and twigs. Without Mu, the cat’s owners probably would never have known what happened to their cat. Mu and I prefer to find the cat alive, but if my cat was missing, and no longer alive, I would prefer to know that than to always have to wonder.

Tino searched for Spice today. Spice is a Springer Spaniel, two years old, 45 pounds, no ID or microchip. She came from California a week ago, and she escaped when her owner tripped and fell. She ran off dragging a purple leash. Tino started 25 hours after the escape. The conditions were okay, not ideal, with rain and a breeze, about 60 degrees. The scent trail led us around the block, over to the Kirkland Library, down to the marina, and then to Heritage Park. We had to stop at private property where it appeared Spice went through a yard and down to the lake shore. No one was home to give us permission to continue. It seems very likely that someone would have seen Spice as she wandered. Her owner will be putting up signs to try to generate a new lead. Tino cooled off in the lake several times during this search.

Mu has a theatrical pretend growl he uses while playing. It’s somewhat musical and very low. It is sweet because it is mock-ferocious. He had a ball in his mouth and he chased Tino around the living room, trying to get the puppy to chase him. Mu is still very much a puppy sometimes.

Fozzie came with me on a five mile run through Seahurst Park. At one point, there was a log across the trail. He could have gone over or under. He jumped up on the log and then waited for me to take his picture. He has become accustomed to having his picture taken on rocks or logs or sculptures because I’m always telling him to hop up on something. Of course, I took his picture, and then we continued with our run.

This was an unusual case, different from any other search I have done in the past 11 years. Ted was a Pomeranian, about 7 pounds, and extremely fluffy. His owner described him as more fur than dog. She had let Ted out into the fenced yard at 6 AM, on July 29th, and when she came home for lunch at noon, Ted had vanished. Yesterday, his owner found a large amount of fur, that looked like his. It was mixed with leaves and dirt, at the edge of the school parking lot, about 200 yards from their home. She asked me if my search dog could positively identify that fur as belonging to Ted.

I explained to her that search dogs can do that sort of thing, but that my dogs were not trained for that specific task. My dogs are presented with a scent article, at the point that the missing dog was last seen, and then we start tracking the scent trail. I thought about it for a while, and I decided the best way to present the challenge to Tino would be to set it up like any other search, except we would work the trail backwards. We would start where the fur was found, and track to where it came from, if we could. Since the scent trail was 20 days old, the scent going backwards would be 20 days minus one second at the next point, so, virtually no different. I told Ted’s owner that I didn’t think it would work. The oldest documented scent trail ever worked by a search dog was 13 days old. I have Googled for older scent trails successfully worked by a credible search dog, and I haven’t found any record of such an event. This was a slightly different situation. If it was Ted’s fur, there might be a distinct scent trail from the point where the fur was found, going back to Ted’s house. To make it a fair test, I wouldn’t know where Ted lived, so I couldn’t steer my dog, either consciously or unconsciously. While the scent trail was 20 days old, a week older than the oldest documented successful search, another complication was that Ted would have been carried in the coyote’s mouth, not touching the ground. For these reasons, and because we had never done such a thing before, I told Ted’s person that I didn’t think it would work, but we could try if she wanted us to. She said she did want to give it a try so she could have more certainty that the found fur was Ted’s.

We started at 6 AM. It was cool and cloudy. Relatively cool, anyway, about 59 degrees, which was warmer than Tino’s comfort zone. I figured it wouldn’t be a long scent trail in any event, so he wouldn’t overheat too much. I brought Tino to the pile of fur on the ground. He examined it more thoroughly than he normally does, and he immediately took off at a gallop around the tennis courts and toward the soccer field. He turned into a neighborhood and went about twenty feet, but then he turned to look back at me, his “negative” signal, showing that he had run out of scent. He came back to the edge of the soccer field and followed it around, beside the woods. Tino led me down a trail, and right to the fence of Ted’s yard. I didn’t know in advance where Ted lived, and Tino could have followed the scent any direction, 360 degrees. Or Tino might not have been able to follow the scent at all. That Tino tracked it right to Ted’s yard was a very strong indicator that Ted had been taken by a coyote, who had jumped the fence into the yard and then jumped back out.

This search work by Tino seemed to settle it pretty conclusively, and the owner felt assured that she knew what happened to Ted, and that the fur she found wasn’t from some other pet. I raised the possibility that Tino had been tracking her footsteps, due to some scent contamination, but she never walked there, so we could rule that out. In spite of the enormous challenge of following a scent trail 20 days old, where the lost dog had been carried above the ground, Tino followed it swiftly and with conviction. Watching him work, there couldn’t be much doubt that he followed the correct trail. I was very proud of him. Although Ted’s mom was very sad about the finality of knowing he was really gone, she really appreciated Tino’s skill and drive. She gave him a bowl of water and some special treats.

Walking back to the car, Tino found a stray tennis ball near the courts, and he brought it to me to throw. I tossed it for him several times, as a reward for his good work. I am always proud of Tino, and I would be even if he wasn’t a working dog. When he does amazing things like he did today, it makes me feel very lucky to be able to share a life with such an magnificent creature.

Tino searched for a 6 pound dog named Bandit in Issaquah. He had been missing for three days. The scent trail led through the woods, through some heavy brush that a small dog could easily get under. Tino plowed through, and he dragged me through. After we came out of the Woods on the next street, the trail led to a dead end, and didn’t go any farther. The most likely explanation would be that the tiny dog had been picked up, probably by a human, possibly by a predator.

After the search, we went to Lake Sammamish for a swim. I threw the tennis ball into the lake, and he fetched it dozens of times. When I tried to get him to go back to the car, he just sat in the lake, with the ball in his mouth, and he wouldn’t come out. I threw his ball a few more times, and then I kept the ball, and carried it back to the car, in order to coerce him to come with me.

Fozzie likes to fly. He runs so fast that his ears flow like wings, and his feet are mostly airborne, touching the ground for the tiniest fraction of a second. When he first came to live with us, he took flight once, and it took about fifteen minutes to get him back. After that, I put a GPS tracker on his collar, to keep track of him when he would go flying down the driveway, and explore the neighborhood.

Lately, he’s been pretty good about not trying to sprint down the driveway and cruise the neighborhood. I’ve been testing him, setting him down Beside the car, and asking him to go to the house. Once in a while, you can see that he gets that look in his eyes, and then he takes off, flying down the driveway. He’s been coming back, right away, though, just sprinting the 200 feet to the end of the driveway, barking his fanfare of freedom, and then galloping back triumphantly. Now I tell him, “Don’t go too far.” As long as he stays on the property, it seems like a good compromise, to allow him a fifteen second sprint. He really seems to enjoy it, and I love to see him galloping back to me. As long as he doesn’t abuse his privileges, I think he can keep taking the occasional short flight.

Today I ran a mile in nine minutes. That’s very slow, by objective standards, but it was a big improvement for me. I haven’t been running regularly for the past few years, and this year I have started up again. I’ve lost 25 pounds since the first of the year. My fastest time in high school was about 4:50. I hope to get my mile times down to 6:00 within the year.

The thing about running to get in shape is that most of the time you feel like you are slow and out of shape. Also, if you don’t keep at it, you lose it, so you have to keep running all the time. Besides running a 6 minute mile, my goal is to enjoy my workouts. I’m not just running for the future, I’m also enjoying the moment. It felt good to run my fastest mile of the year.

Other ways I enjoy running are to visit my favorite trees in the neighborhood, or run through a park full of trees. Quite often, I will get an important idea for my writing while I’m running. I don’t expect to meet cats and dogs while running, but it’s a nice bonus. On this run, I met two cats and a dog. The dog was a black Lab. She had a bit of gray on her muzzle. She reminded me of Kelsy, of course, even though there were obvious little differences. This black Lab came toward me, wiggling and happy, like we’d known each other for years. She was the highlight of my morning. I was a little worried she could be lost, but her happy behavior didn’t signal any sort of trouble. In a few moments, I heard her person calling her home, casually, like she was in the habit of briefly checking out the street often. I wish I’d taken her picture.