Chapter 7
Dax had moved to the front of his run. He was not alert in the rigid, watchful way of the previous days. He was alert in the way that dogs are alert when something in their environment has shifted from threatening to interesting, and interesting is an orientation that allows learning.
He put his nose to the fence and pushed it gently against the chain-link.
I put my hand on the fence a few inches from his nose.
He pressed his muzzle into the fence and held it there.
Mercer, watching from outside, did not say anything for a long time.
Then she said, "I'll have the protocol submission form on your email by end of day."
I kept my hand on the fence.
"Thank you," I said.
The protocol approval took six weeks. The access that came with it took another three to establish at the appropriate security level. The research it produced over the following two years was published in a veterinary behavioral journal and a military medicine journal simultaneously, which was not a common occurrence for either publication.
Rex passed his recertification nine months after the kennel incident. He deployed the following March with a handler who had trained with him for six months under the modified protocol, which paid specific attention to the environmental factors that preceded behavioral deterioration rather than the deterioration itself.
Kilo was retired from active service and placed with a veteran from his former handler's unit, where he regained his full appetite within the first week and, over the following year, returned to something very close to the dog he had been before the supply corridor and the ventilation unit and the fourteen days in the isolation kennel had taken that from him.
Dax was still working.
I saw his deployment record in an update six months after the research publication, in a note from Mercer that was three lines and said only that he had passed his most recent operational assessment with no behavioral flags noted, and that the handler who worked with him had completed the environmental conditioning module from my protocol before their first deployment together.
I was in the ER when I read it. It was a Tuesday at 0600, between a chest laceration and a pediatric intake, and I read it twice at the nursing station and then put my phone back in my pocket and went to where I was needed.
May you like
The work does not stop for the things that have resolved.
But sometimes the things that have resolved find you anyway, in the form of three lines in an email, and it is worth standing still for a moment and letting them mean what they mean before you go back to what is next.
