Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, November 18, 1995 TAG: 9511200032
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DIANE STRUZZI STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
He's paid with a hot dog. His bark rises from deep within his belly. And he smells like sweaty socks.
Pet the 110-pound hunk of bloodhound they call T.C., and his odor never leaves you.
"I don't know how bloodhounds smell anything, the way they smell," said Bedford County's chief forest warden, Richard Miles, as T.C. stood on his hind legs and leaned on him.
Along with three other forest wardens, Miles trekked into Bennett Springs on Friday to show off the tracking skills of T.C. and the newly formed arson investigation team of the state Forestry Department.
The team combines the efforts of the chief forest wardens of Bedford, Botetourt, Franklin and Henry counties to expedite major forest fire investigations. It is one of only two such teams in Virginia, which counts one out of every five forest fires as arsons.
T.C. is called in to ferret out information that human beings cannot. The initials stand for Twin County - so named for the counties of Carroll and Grayson, which paid for him.
The dog lives in Carroll County with his handler, Arthur Cox, a state forestry technician. The two have been working together for three years.
"I consider a dog like a person," Cox said. "I consider him fully trained the day he dies."
On a dirt trail in the woods Friday, one of the foresters set a fire, leaving a lighter nearby. T.C. can pick up a scent from a footprint, a branch or a single match.
Cox strapped a leather harness to T.C.'s body and the dog was off and running, his handler lagging behind. When T.C. tracks, his large jowls flap, his ears fall forward - trapping the scent near his nose.
"It may take him two minutes, or it may take him 20 minutes" to find the arsonist, Cox said.
Hiding beneath a leafy ridge was the "arsonist" - actually a district forester - who set the fire. Within 10 minutes, T.C. wound his way through the forest and found him.
In T.C.'s short career, he has caught six arsonists, found a bunch of missing people and tracked at burglary and murder scenes.
Sometimes his success rests solely on his sniffer. A scent is like a fingerprint: No two people smell the same.
Take the time in Pulaski County when T.C. was in the back of Cox's truck at an arson site. A boy walked by the truck, and T.C. barked.
"I said, `There's your arsonist,''' Cox said. "I was kidding."
T.C. wasn't. When people are scared, they give off a different scent, Cox said. You might say that T.C. can smell fear. The boy was questioned and confessed to setting the fire.
Other times it's his mere presence; his bark can be worth a thousand words. Arson investigators once caught a man they believed had set a fire.
"He said, 'I'll tell you anything you want, as long as you don't turn that dog loose on me,''' Cox recalled.
People say arsons are the hardest crimes to solve, Cox said, but they're really just time consuming and tedious.
"Trust your dog," said Cox, explaining the golden rule of tracking. "Dogs are a tool. They are not foolproof. They make mistakes. But they don't know how to lie."
by CNB