McCain figured he could train Jack to sniff out zebra mussels if that was required, but so far the dog had only been asked to find the occasional four-legged creature. Asking him to trace the wanderings of a now dead black bear was going to be a challenge, but it might be the only way they were going to find the person who was now missing an ear and some clothing. Luckily, the snow in the area had only been gone for a few days, and with the wet soil, McCain figured he might be able to help keep the dog on the trail with his own tracking skills.
“My guess is that the bear ate the ear, and whatever other parts of the person, in the twelve hours before Tanner shot it,” McCain said. “So, hopefully he didn’t travel too far from where the body might be.”
“Do you really think someone was up here hiking or something and got attacked by the bear?” Stratford asked.
“I don’t,” said Hargraves. “It just never happens.”
“I agree,” McCain added. “But until we find a body, we won’t know for sure.”
“I had dispatch run a check on any missing persons in Yakima County over the past seventy-two hours,” Williams said. “The only missing person was an elderly man who had dementia. I don’t believe this is him.”
“Coulda been someone from the other side of the hill,” Hargraves said.
They all paused and thought about that for a minute, then decided that Eric and Tanner Jamison would help the officers pack the bear meat, hide, and innards out to the trucks for transportation to Yakima. From there the sheriff’s deputies would figure out where to send some of the bear meat and brain material for testing, just in case it had attacked someone.
The human ear and shreds of material, packaged separately, along with the rest of the stomach contents, would most likely be sent to the Washington State Patrol crime lab to start DNA testing to see if, at some point, they might find a match to a person missing from sometime before the past seventy-two hours.
The younger Jamison looked a little disappointed that he wasn’t going to be taking any of the meat or the hide from the bear home, but Hargraves assured him that once the testing was done, he should be able to have the hide and meat, and that they would take extra good care of it. With that, the men shouldered their packs full of meat, hide, guts, and human remains, and huffed off back up the hill.
McCain turned to Jack and said, “Okay, let’s go to work.”
A three-quarter moon was coming up over the trees from the east when McCain put Jack on the few tracks he had found of the bear downhill from where it had succumbed to the well-placed shot by Tanner Jamison. The added moonlight helped McCain with his tracking. It didn’t matter to Jack. He used his super-sensitive nose to start backtracking the bear.
Scientists believe that the sense of smell for some dogs, such as bloodhounds and other tracking dogs, is at least 1,000 times stronger than a human’s. And some dogs’ sense of smell is so strong it can still smell a trail up to 300 hours old. McCain didn’t know if Jack’s olfactory capabilities were as good as a bloodhound’s, but he did know the dog could flat track. And he knew the bear’s tracks were less than eight hours old based on when the Jamison boy killed the bruin.
Watching the dog work slowly downhill through the edge of the clear-cut, methodically picking up the scent, McCain was confident that Jack was on the trail. Before they started, McCain had the elder Jamison, who was packing the bear hide out to the trucks, kneel down so Jack could get one more good snoot-full of what the big bruin smelled like.
McCain kept his powerful headlamp pointed on the ground and carefully followed Jack as he worked the scent. Occasionally he would bend down and check even the slightest impressions he saw in the soft dirt to confirm that Jack was on the trail.
It took them about two hours of slow, steady tracking before they found the body. Or what was left of the body. The bear had done a pretty good job of spreading stuff around as it had tried to bury what was left of the body under some leaves, grass, and pine needles.
From what McCain could tell, his analysis of the ear had been correct. The body was that of a woman, based on the long black hair and what looked to be bright orange fingernail polish on one of the fingers. He didn’t want to be poking around too much, because right now this was a crime scene. His job had been to find the body, and now that that was done, he needed to get back to his truck and call it in.
Before he headed back, he took a few minutes to study the scene. He thought the wounds in the woman’s chest looked too neat to have been caused by the bear, but he would wait to hear what the county coroner came up with before he started sharing his thoughts. One thing he knew for sure: the bear hadn’t killed this woman. With what McCain knew about the snow and temperatures this area had received during the past few months, it was a pretty good assumption the body had been here for a while, and the below-freezing temperatures had kept the body fairly well-preserved. The deep snow had protected it from birds and other scavengers.
McCain finally stepped back several feet, sat down, turned off his headlamp and took in the night. Jack came over and stuck his head under McCain’s arm, which meant he was looking for some petting. McCain obliged.
“Jack,” he said while rubbing the dog’s ears. “You done good!”
He reached into his
