Elvis Finds A Bone

Book 4: Reckless Camper Cozy Mysteries

by Libby Howard

Genres: Animal Cozy Mysteries

Synopsis

Sassy and Elvis have joined a local tracking club, but their first event with the Reckless Sniffers is an utter disaster. Instead of finding the container with the correct scent, Elvis runs off course into the woods and returns with a bone—one with a hiking boot attached.

With help from Mom and Lottie, Sassy and her rescue Bloodhound dive into the case. Was his death due to a hunting accident, hastily covered up? Or is there something more nefarious about the man's murder?

Release date: September 12, 2022

Publisher: Debra Dunbar LLC

Print pages: 230

Sample

Reckless Neighbors App:

The Reckless Sniffers Club will be holding a field scent detection event this Saturday. Come out, cheer on our tracking dogs, and enjoy free donuts and coffee! Call Mike Allen for more information about the event or about joining our club.

I adjusted the bright red harness around Elvis’s chest, snapping the forty-foot lead to the ring at the top. The hound was alert and excited, his head high, his ears forward, his tail curved into a long “C” over his rear. It had been over two years since we’d done an organized tracking event together, almost a year since the last time I’d attended a Search and Rescue Group meeting. My cancer treatment had put those kinds of activities on hold, and so had my purchase of Reckless Camper Campground, but I’d seen a notice on our neighborhood app from the local tracking club, and decided it was time to return to our hobby. One quick online application and an internet payment later, and I was now a member of the Reckless Sniffers.

This was Elvis’s and my first event, our first time even meeting the other club members. I was a little nervous, and had already downed two chocolate frosted donuts and a large coffee from the food table in a futile attempt to calm my nerves.

“No pressure, buddy,” I told Elvis, who ignored me.

My hound had been one of the stars of our former tracking club. He had a great nose, and unbreakable focus when on the trail, usually heading straight to the correct item and sitting to indicate he’d reached the tracking object. Seventy percent of the time, he’d scored in the top three of our group at scent detection events.

But the other thirty percent…

Sometimes Elvis arbitrarily decided to track a scent that wasn’t the one I’d set him on. In those cases I’d found myself staring down at the wrapper from a discarded chicken sandwich, or some spilled potato chips, or cookie crumbs—all of which Elvis would hoover into his mouth. The hound loved tracking, but he also loved eating. Sometimes a chicken sandwich took precedence over a tracking scent, and I couldn’t exactly blame Elvis for that. I liked a good chicken sandwich myself.

He’d done much better at search and rescue, happier finding people and animals than determining which container had clove as opposed to the seven boxes with other scents. By the time I’d had to quit, Elvis had been close to testing for his SARs certification, but I was sure we’d need to relearn a lot of things we’d both forgotten.

Today was supposed to be a friendly competition, but looking around, I could see these people took their tracking seriously.

“You the new member?” A man in his midsixties who was wearing an honest-to-God tweed jacket with a matching hat put out his hand. “I’m Andy Treeling. And this here is Xanadu.”

“Sassy Letouroux.” I shook his hand. “And this is Elvis.”

Xanadu was a white foxhound with a lean, athletic body and big tan and black spots. Her tail wagged slowly as she and Elvis touched noses, then each went to sniff the other’s caboose sections.

“Good looking bloodhound,” Andy said with a nod toward Elvis. “Have you met Marcus LaSalle? He’s got a bloodhound as well. Bought him for dog shows, but after a few years and no wins, he decided he’d do tracking instead. Dog’s got like six names, none of which make any darned sense, so we just call him ‘Nose.’”

I glanced around and saw a tall, dark-haired man with a black-and-tan bloodhound. “He’s gorgeous,” I said, meaning the dog, not the guy. The man was attractive, but the hound was definitely the looker of the pair. “I’m guessing Nose is the dog to beat today?”

“Nose is good, but he’s not the real competition. Ellen Preston’s Lab, Harper, is a strong contender, but the winning dog is usually Marcie Boarding’s Sarge.”

There were four other women here besides me. One was Ellen Preston, the forty-something blonde with her yellow Labrador Retriever, the second was a middle-aged woman of color with a German Wirehair Pointer, the third a twenty-something Southeast Asian woman with a French Bulldog, and the fourth a woman that looked to be my age with her snow-white hair pulled back into a messy bun. At her side, attentive and focused, was a Doberman.

“Is Sarge the pointer?” I asked. “Or the Dobie?”

Sarge wasn’t exactly an uncommon name for a dog, but if I were to make a guess, I’d say this particular Sarge was the Doberman. They were fast, smart, obedient dogs, and it wouldn’t surprise me one bit that a Dobie would excel at scent detection. But pointers were no slouch either when it came to nose work.

“The Dobie,” Andy told me. “Pauline’s pointer, Thor, is good, but he’s new to tracking and still not much more than a puppy. Give him a couple years and he’ll probably be leaving us all in the dust.”

I nodded, then looked again at the Asian woman with the French Bulldog. Which one of these things, is not like the others…

“What’s the story with the Frenchie?” I didn’t want to diss anyone’s dog, but French Bulldogs had adorably smushed snouts that didn’t really lend themselves to nose work. And as enthusiastic and energetic as they were, those stubby little legs would lose time compared to the larger dogs.

“Jessica’s our social director, so she always brings the coffee and donuts.” Andy nodded toward the food-and-drink table. “Actually Curly is kind of our club mascot. We give him a breed and size handicap and with the adjustments he usually scores pretty well. Plus he’s so darned cute.”

Curly was cute. I was a sucker for any dog, but the bouncy little white bulldog inspired an urge in me to scratch his head and tell him what a good boy he was. Although all the dogs here were beautiful in their own distinctive way. I looked around at the other members, and noticed something. Every dog except for Elvis had a strange, orange-colored collar with a coated wire antennae sticking a good foot out the side.

I leaned forward and pointed at the one Xanadu wore. “Is this a club thing? Should I have bought one of these before I came to an event?”

“No, it’s not required that you have one. They’re GPS collars.” Andy showed me something that looked like a small television remote. “They run on satellite and on cell service. Most of us use our dogs for hunting, and this allows us to find them if they get out of visual range.”

That was amazing and something I really needed to think about getting for Elvis. “Does it have a vibration button? Sometimes I use an e-collar on Elvis when he’s on the scent and his ears are turned off.”

Andy laughed. “I totally understand. Xanadu is the same when she’s got her nose to the ground. These only have the GPS locator, but I think there are models with a vibration function. Ask Mike. He’s some big-time executive for Rio Grande Electronics. Got the club members all a discount on these last year, so he might be able to get you a discount as well.”

Mike Allen was the president of the club, and the man I’d spoken to when I was making inquiries about Elvis and me joining. I looked around, spotting the bald man over near the coffee and donut table.

“I’ll definitely talk to him,” I told Andy. I liked to make as many of my purchases locally as I could, and tried to keep to small businesses, but online shopping was convenient, and Rio Grande Electronics was the most convenient of all with their same-day shipping and two-day delivery guarantees.

“How do you think Elvis will do today?” Andy asked.

I shrugged, because this was a scent detection event and not a SAR one. We’d be looking for little tins in the tall grass of the field that contained the matching essential oil to the target scent in the jar we randomly picked. It was a roll of the dice whether Elvis would remember his training, or even think the scent I’d chosen was worth the bother of tracking.

But I needed to be positive.

“I’m hoping he can beat the Lab. And maybe the Dobie as well,” I said, my competitive spirit surging. I tried to tamp it down with the rationalization that it had been quite a while since Elvis and I had done this. I didn’t want to set unrealistic expectations for today. If Elvis didn’t end up following a trail to someone’s leftover lunch, I’d consider it a win.

Besides that, there were reasons Sarge and Harper might outperform two bloodhounds who had tracking and nosework bred into their DNA. First, trainability. Second, versatility.

Bloodhounds excelled at tracking people and animals. Scent hounds didn’t just have great noses, they had the independence, the drive and focus, and the persistence to keep searching for a lost scent long after other breeds might have given up.

But while other breeds may not quite have a hound’s nose ability, they were often able to switch things up and track spices, drugs, or anything else. Bloodhounds tended to pick favorites and be uninterested in tracking other scents. I’d long been a fan of Labradors with their quick ability to learn and their easygoing nature. And Dobermans as well, with their intelligence, strong chase-drive, incredible loyalty, and the determination that meant they didn’t give up easily either.

Elvis? He was focused, independent, and stubborn. But his recall was hit or miss, especially when he was on a scent. It had taken him five times as long to learn a task compared to others in his obedience classes, not because he wasn’t smart. He just wasn’t interested. Why sit and stay when there was an intriguing smell over there? Why bother jumping over an obstacle when there were scents to inhale? And why come when called? Didn’t his human understand the priority was always in sniffing, in finding, not in racing over at her beck and call?

Put a well-trained bloodhound on a two-week cold trail after three days of rain and he’d find that lost kid in the forest. But here, at this event? Who knew how well, or poorly, we’d do.

“Ooo, we’re getting ready to start.” Andy pointed to Mike Allen, who was gesturing to gather everyone near. “Good luck to you and Elvis.”

“And good luck to you and Xanadu,” I replied.

We each were to go one-at-a-time, selecting one of several glass jars that looked like they should have been used to can jelly. Inside the jar was a scent-laced cotton ball. Our dog was to sniff the odor inside the jar, then start tracking, eventually—hopefully—leading their handler to the metal tin with a matching-scented cotton ball that was hidden somewhere in the tall grasses of this field.

It wasn’t nearly as easy as it sounded. We had drawn numbers that signified the order in which we’d search, and those who went first would have a relatively clear field in which to track. Those at the end? Their dog had to sort through the smells of all the competing dogs and their handlers who’d zig-zagged across the same terrain, possibly messing up the scent trails. The metal tins were perforated with holes to ensure the scent wafted out, but today’s lack of wind meant that the dogs wouldn’t have a scent-cone to catch and follow back to the target item. They’d need to search on a grid pattern and hope they were quick in finding the matching tin.

There were eight competitors. I’d drawn number eight. And Elvis had been out of work for two years. Yes, he’d tracked down several deceased bodies in the past few months, but I hadn’t set him out to find those bodies, and he wasn’t trained to do cadaver work, so none of that counted.

We led our dogs over to the table filled with carafes of coffee and boxes of donuts. Mike went over the rules and the process for the event, then we got started. The Dobie went first, sniffing the contents of the jar at his owner’s command, then sitting at attention, ears upright and dark eyes fixed on his human.

“Find,” Marcie told the dog. Sarge took off like a shot.

The Doberman was unleashed, and I had a twinge of envy at the woman’s confidence in her recall. The tall weeds of the field vibrated as Sarge crashed through them. Marcie followed, holding back and to the side so she didn’t accidently cross the scent trail. Outside of the noise Sarge made crushing foliage under paw, he was silent and focused, his nose firmly to the ground. He was tall enough that I could see the dark line of his back and the stub of his tail over the patches of weeds—an advantage for us spectators while watching him work.

I could clearly see the dog’s methodical search pattern, as well as the moment when he’d locked onto the scent. It was like Moses parting the Red Sea as the Doberman tore through the weeds, Marcie following as quickly as the footing would allow. Suddenly the dog halted and sat, his noble head like a statue of Anubis as it appeared above the green and gold vegetation.

“Hold your dog,” Mike called out. His instruction was unnecessary as the obedient Sarge was frozen in place. Marcie reached him first, but remained a few feet behind the dog until Mike caught up.

The man bent down and came up with a metal bucket. Sarge’s eyes followed the bucket, but the rest of him remained unmoving. The club president removed a metal tin and looked at the number on the bottom.

“I’m sorry, but this is the incorrect scent,” Mike announced.

Marcie made a choked, incredulous noise, her mouth open. The rest of us sucked in a breath, equally amazed. So much for the ringer of this event. Sarge had failed to bring home the trophy, and I got the impression that was a rare occurrence.

Every dog had his bad days. Either Sarge was a little off, or this supposedly friendly event was far more challenging than I’d anticipated.

Or there had been a mistake.

Marcie clearly was going with option three.

“That’s impossible,” the woman sputtered. “It’s sweet birch. I clearly smelled it when I showed Sarge the jar. The target scent was sweet birch. Someone put the wrong number on that tin.”

“I put the scents in the tins and in the jars, and I put the number on myself.” Mike scowled. “And it’s not sweet birch in this tin.”

“Then Sarge locked onto a secondary scent,” Marcie insisted. “If you put the sweet birch in the initial jar and something else in this tin, he was probably following your scent instead of the animal’s one.”

I considered that a second. In prior events I’d been to, the same person loaded the target and tracking boxes and also put them into the field, just to avoid this very thing. Plus most scent dogs were trained to track specific scents and not humans. It was mainly the Search and Rescue programs whose dogs could make this mistake since those dogs were primarily trained to follow human scents.

Some events were SARs focused. Others were focused on animal scents, appealing to those who trained their dogs in game retrieval. More commonly the events used spices and other strong oils in tracking. Dogs trained in one kind of event were at a bit of a disadvantage when it came to the others

 “I used disposable gloves when I applied the oil to each scent pair. And I used tongs to place the buckets and tins. I was the only one handling and placing the scent containers,” Mike told the woman.

“Well, maybe the oils from the sweet birch jar somehow got on your hand or the other gloves when you loaded this tin,” Marcie argued.

Mike scowled at the accusation that he’d been careless. After a deep breath, he made visible effort to calm himself.

“Sarge is a talented tracking dog, and one of the best in the Reckless Sniffers Club, but maybe you need to spend some extra time working on the different scents with him,” Mike snapped.

Those were clearly fighting words. Marcie reached out for the tin and threw it on the ground. She and Mike stepped into each other voices raised and fingers jabbing into each other as they argued.

Sarge had been watching the exchange, only his eyes moving back and forth between the two humans. At this point he rose from his sit, his lips curled back in a snarl. I caught my breath, worried that the dog would intervene and defend his human. I didn’t want to think what the sleek dog could do to Mike, or the repercussions of even a minor bite. The pair would be kicked out of the club, Marcie could be fined, and Sarge might even lose his life.

Before the Doberman could act, a long mournful bay filled the air. I looked down at the hound by my side. There was Elvis, his head lifted to the sky, his loud, deep baritone practically shaking the ground.

Nose, the other bloodhound, responded in kind, followed by a higher-timber cry of the foxhound and even higher yip of the French bulldog. In less than a second, every dog at the event aside from the Dobie was vocal.

The noise disrupted the argument between Mike and Marcie. Both turned to see what the commotion was about. Sarge’s snarl faded and he sat once more, looking at the other dogs with an expression of curiosity on his sculpted face.

I wasn’t sure what Mike and Marcie said to each other at that point, but I was guessing they agreed to discuss this later, when the event was over and when they’d both had time to calmly assess the situation.

The rest of the event went smoothly, but as Mike examined each tin it became clear that Elvis and I were in over our heads. My hound was good at differentiating animal scents, and even better at tracking humans, but these were scent oils used in AKC and other regulation events. We weren’t all that skilled at this sort of scent detection. Plus the lack of a breeze, the tall grasses, and the buckets that held and blocked the scent emanating from the perforated tins were clearly making this a very difficult task for even the most experienced of tracking dogs.

The cotton balls had been spiked with a drop of sweet birch, anise, clove, cypress, vetiver, pine, wintergreen, or myrrh. I wasn’t sure Elvis would be at all interested in most of those scents. The novelty might intrigue him, or he could decide that he’d rather find a pile of deer poop rather than the scent I’d asked him to locate. But I decided I wasn’t going to worry about any of that. We were here to have fun, to reintroduce ourselves to tracking, and to meet others in the local tracking club. If the perfect Sarge had failed to locate the correct box, then I wasn’t going to sweat if Elvis also failed today.

I repeated that to myself like a mantra, but truthfully I was more than a little competitive when it came to these things. I’d learned early on to curb that competition when winning relied pretty much on my sometimes unpredictable bloodhound, but deep down I still wanted to win. There might not be a trophy or even a certificate for today’s event, but I wanted this new club to see that Elvis wasn’t just a pretty boy with a nose, that he was a dog who could really track a scent.

Out of the seven other competing dogs, only two had managed to find the correct box. The dogs to beat right now were the yellow Lab, Harper, and her human, Ellen Preston, and, surprisingly, the little French Bulldog, Curly.

Ellen had gone second and I would be going last, so we’d chatted off to the side as I waited my turn. I really took a liking to her. She’d grown up in a dog show family, but had taken to obedience trials and Fast-cat competitions when she’d been in her teens. At thirty, she’d discovered tracking and that had been her main focus ever since. As a pup, Harper had excelled in obedience, eventually earning her championship there. She’d also brought home quite a few ribbons in the Fast CAT racing competitions, but she really enjoyed scent work. Harper had both the nose and the dedication to really shine as a tracking dog, and Ellen was equally enthusiastic about the sport.

By the time Elvis and I stepped up to receive our jar with the target scent, my fantasies of winning had suffered a reality check. Elvis still had a shot, but Harper’s score would be hard to beat. Honestly it would be hard to beat Curly’s handicapped score. Even Thor, the German Wirehair Pointer’s, and Xanadu, Andy’s dog, had performed well today, although none of them had been able to locate the correct scent tin.

I opened the jar, eyeing the cotton ball inside before lowering the jar down for Elvis to sniff.

“Work,” I told him, even though he was already smelling the contents of the jar. If you put anything in front of a canine nose, they’d sniff it, but a bloodhound in particular saw the world through smell. Still, I wanted Elvis to know that he’d be expected to locate whatever was inside, and not just enjoy a good smelling opportunity.

I let the hound take a good long sniff since the timer didn’t start until I set the dog off.

“Ready?” I asked.

Reluctantly pulling his nose from the box, Elvis looked up at me. His dark droopy eyes sparkled with anticipation. His tongue lolled from the heavy folds of his mouth. His long thick tail swept slowly back and forth.

“Find,” I told him.

I didn’t need to ask the hound twice. Elvis took off at the word with a speed that belied the stereotypes of a lazy bloodhound. I gripped the red leash, letting it out as he ran. I was the last entry of the day, so it wasn’t all that important for me to hold back or stay off to the side. I wouldn’t be messing up anyone else’s scent trail, and any damage I might do to my own had probably been done by the seven competitors that came before me.

Elvis was hauling butt through the field, trampling grasses with his nose firmly rooted to the ground. I hurried after him, trying to stay out of his way and feeling a little guilty that I’d ever doubted my dog. I’d never seen him this focused, this driven. Maybe the time off tracking had been good for him. Maybe he’d matured over the last year and could focus more on the task at hand. Maybe whatever scent was in that jar was something that really, really interested Elvis. Either way, he was moving at a pace that made me think we might have a chance at beating Harper and Ellen Preston after all.

With a sudden burst of speed, Elvis took off. I let out the remaining slack in the leash, racing after him as fast as I could. The hound made a sudden left and I frowned, wondering if Mike had actually put the boxes this far toward the edge of the field. But I needed to trust in my hound, so I pivoted, stumbling as I tried to keep up with Elvis.

Elvis kept running, straining against the leash with his hundred pounds of muscle. We were heading for the woods, and I was pretty sure that wasn’t where any of the tins had been placed, but I just didn’t have the strength to reel Elvis in. I barely had the strength to hold onto the leash.

“Off course,” Mike yelled.

I dug in my heels and leaned backward, trying to stop the hound’s momentum, but he kept going and I was jerked forward. I threw out my hands and they hit the ground before the rest of me. The leash flew free. Scrambling to my knees and onto my feet I yelled for my dog, knowing how futile my calls were. When he was on a scent, his ears seemed to turn off. The only thing that ever broke his concentration and brought him back to me was the vibration collar—the one I’d left at home because it would be too embarrassing to admit that I had a dog whose voice recall was iffy at best.

Not as embarrassing as having my dog run off in the middle of an event, though.

I raced for the woods where Elvis had disappeared. Hearing something that sounded like a herd of elephants crashing through the weeds, I glanced back and saw that Mike and the other participants were hurrying my way.

Great. Not only had I lost my dog, but I now had most of the Reckless Sniffers Club coming to help me look for him. So much for all that SARs training Elvis and I had done. What had he been tracking, running off into the woods like that? He’d been hot of the trail of something, but whatever it was, it wasn’t the scent that was in the tin.

I stopped at the treeline, still calling Elvis’s name. Mortified as I was, I was also worried for my hound. It was probably a good thing I’d have these other people helping me look for him. Maybe we could put the other tracking dogs to work. If Sarge couldn’t find Elvis, I was willing to bet that yellow Lab, Harper, could.

The others caught up, all of them breathing heavy from their race through the field.

“Do you have a GPS collar on him?” Mike asked me.

“No.” That was absolutely something I needed to purchase. “He’s microchipped,” I added, thinking that at least if someone found him and turned him in to the pound, I’d be notified.

Animal Control was the least of my worries though. Elvis on the scent was liable to run right in front of a speeding truck. Or he could encounter a not-so-friendly farmer who might shoot him. Or someone could decide to keep him, chained up in the backyard for the rest of his life.

I took a deep breath and slowly let it out, trying to calm myself down. He was going to be fine. We just needed to organize a search party, complete with tracking dogs, and find my hound.

“What was in that tin?” I asked Mike, wondering what Elvis was supposed to be tracking.

“Pine,” Mike told me.

I groaned. Elvis had been trained to detect the scent of pine. That should have been an easy job for him. We should have found the tin in record time, beating even Harper. But noooo. My hound had evidently found something more interesting to track.

“Why don’t Andy, Marcie, and Ellen take that side of the woods,” Mike directed. “Marcus…”

Mike’s voice trailed off, and I turned to see what had caused the stunned expression on his face.

It was Elvis, coming out of the woods, trailing a red forty-foot leash behind him. In his mouth was a giant bone—a bone with a dirty hiking boot attached to one end.