Delia

Greg Ellis' family was from the elevated town of Gate City,
Virginia. It gave them all a regional twang, something Greg would
not be self-conscious about until college. One of the members of
the Ellis family was Delia, an unusually feisty bloodhound. Most of
the time a bloodhound is just fine, thank you, with fulfilling their
mission of being the most stoic dog on earth. Greg saw Delia
as "just a dog" for most of his youth. But that was before Greg
earned the Orienteering merit badge in his scout troop. Many think
that merit badge is what ignited Greg's lifelong interest in
Directionality (his own pet name for cartography), but without
Delia, that interest would have faded away soon after Greg left home.
The Orienteering badge work involved a lot of solo navigation in the
field. The Ellises felt better about sending Greg off into the
wilderness with Delia, plus it didn't break the rules of
doing `solo' work. Most of orienteering is comprised of marking
where you've been, such as slashing tree bark or arranging rocks.
Almost all of orienteering is using your sense of sight since humans
are primarily visual creatures. On the other hand, many animals –
dogs included – have their sense of direction strongly linked to the
senses of hearing and smell. Bloodhounds, like Delia, have the most
acute senses of smell in the canine family. If a finch alights from
a branch 300 feet away in clear weather, a human would first notice
the movement. Most dogs would first notice the sound of wings
flapping. Bloodhounds also hear the wings but can pinpoint the
location of the bird most accurately by combining the sound with the
smell of that flying chicken nugget. In a slow-moving hobby like
orienteering AKA Being Lost For Hours At A Time, this is not very
useful. But if you are a duck hunter, the split second that it
takes your dog's bark to get to your ears could help you get a shot
off before the flock disappears behind the trees.
Greg did not use Delia for hunting. They teamed up to break
records. The courses for the merit badge were fairly vanilla. (You
did not even need a dog.) The trails were deliberately misleading
at times, but they were not designed for Nature Walk merit badges.
Throughout the trails, Greg fared well enough on his own, but always
wondered what would make Delia wander off into the scrub only to
find her way back to the trail. He would call after her a few times
but soon figured out that she was doing some orienteering on her
own. Was she showing off that she had so much free time to dawdle
while Greg hacked through the brush? Was she seriously
disinterested – what holds a dog's attention, anyway? After he
completed the courses, he would go back in with Delia and take a
break from some parts to just follow her around. She noticed him
following her and started on more of a romping pace. Sure enough
they would always come back to familiar territory. How she found
her way back was just as confusing as why she sometimes stopped for
nothing to stare and bark. Greg couldn't just up and ask her what
she was doing, so all he could do was imitate her. He wouldn't
usually bark but he had to try it a few times. When Delia would
stop, he would look where she was looking and eventually found the
bird or squirrel she had locked onto, and started to read her pauses
ahead of time.
The sounds were the first part he noticed. Small things would
change, like the way the sounds bounces back off the crunching
leaves under your boot or even the echo of your breath. Improving
your sense of hearing, he found, was simply practicing the Art of
Shutting Up. Plus having a full supply of Q-Tips at home. And
before starting a course, Greg would stretch his ears pulling on his
earlobes.
The big gap in Greg and Delia's senses of smell was purely
biological. Greg couldn't become canine no matter how many times he
dropped a deuce in the woods. However he did what he could; he kept
his nose clean (just like mother used to say) and flared his
nostrils so frequently that it became second nature once he set foot
outside. Just like with his hearing, if he just stopped and focused
he could smell things without knowing they were there before.
Honeysuckle. A stagnant pond that would have a hundred mosquitoes.
Smoke from a campfire – a campfire that was roasting ribs - HONEY
GLAZED PORK RIBS – and have campers who would be more than willing
to share a half rack with a local kid and his slobbering dog.
Greg cleared the merit badge courses like all the other kids. After
he started to time himself he was still disappointed in how long it
took him to get back. Based on his own standards, of course.
Asking the scoutmaster how he could get his times under an hour, he
was told this particular trail was not a one-hour course. 120
minutes was average. 120 was expected. Finishing the course under
100 minutes was rare. In fact the troop record was 94 ½ minutes,
set by a scout on the high school cross-country team who would later
earn a full ride at Stanford. Greg had chicken scratched his times
in an old middle school notebook and they all were under 100
minutes. Obviously the scoutmaster thought Greg was confusing the
courses or timing them wrong. Greg went over the rules and assured
his scoutmaster that he had indeed run the course multiple times
under 100 minutes. One time even read 64 minutes (or 69, his
handwriting was not great).
Before the scoutmaster went ahead lauding young Gregory Ellis as the
next Billy Q. Stanford, he went out to the course himself. The
scoutmaster set it up with the markers signed for authenticity. The
course started by the high school ball fields. Greg met a half hour
after school so he could go home and get Delia. The scoutmaster was
hesitant at first but figured the bloodhound would slow him down, if
anything. Before the scoutmaster made a firm decision about the
dog, Greg shouted, "Start the clock now!" and Delia bounded after
him. He started the stopwatch and focused on Greg for a minute
until he was out of view.
The scoutmaster pulled out his new issue of Popular Mechanics and
sat in the passenger side of his truck. The sun was on its way
towards the horizon now but he hadn't finished the magazine when he
heard some distant barking. It was a playful bark and Delia emerged
with Greg a few seconds behind her. The scoutmaster was expecting
an hour and a half, maybe two. The stopwatch was at 67 minutes, 40
seconds.
"What'd I get?" Greg shouted out of breath like the first time he
ran the course. But the time was a little better than that first
run.
"A little over…" The scoutmaster looked up at him, "67 minutes."
"You see, you timed it right! Right? Yeah! That's why I'm asking
how to get it under an hour. If I can do it in 67 minutes I can do
it in 60."
He didn't know what to say except, "Let me see the flags there.
Greg." They were all there but ripped in two. "What happened to
the markers here?"
"Well I left the other halves on the trees so I could do it again."
"Wha – do it again? We already timed you as breaking the troop
record by almost a half hour!"
"Because I thought you might ask about her", Greg said, nodding
towards Delia.
"You mean the way she came out first? As if she was leading you or
something…" The scoutmaster looked past Greg into the course.
"Yeah. Before I got to the first marker, I was thinking about Delia
on the trail with me. I brought her because it was just a habit.
And we have always done it together; I learned from her. But that
troop record you're talking about was not set by a kid and his dog.
I thought I could be disqualified."
"So why didn't you just come back and start again?"
Greg kneeled down and scratched Delia behind the ears. "She
wouldn't let me. She saw you and sensed it would be one of our last
courses we'd run together."
"Ha, and I reckoned she would slow you down. Wow, 67 minutes,
that's – that's amazing either way."
Greg lifted his bloodhound up awkwardly and stuck her face in the
drinking fountain. She pawed at the lever and slurped away at the
spigot.
The scoutmaster asked, "You want another go at it, then?"
"Of course I do. And I think she knows I gotta do this one myself
anyway." He put Delia back down. "There's a leash in my bag if you
wanna walk her. And a rope tug."
"If you wanna go for it for real, I reckoned to be out here a whole
nother hour. Give it a go, Greg."
"Hold on." Greg took a full minute at the drinking fountain and
turned toward the course. "Okay, just tell me when."
"Ready, set, go."
Greg shot away. Not like a sprinter eager to beat the
record, but by a kid who loved being out there, and loved getting
lost, just to say he knows where he's going. His energy just
happened to be strong enough to give him an internal boost. A
twenty-seven minute boost.
The scoutmaster walked Delia around the baseball field a couple
times. He turned on the radio and let her jump in the cab of the
truck. He started thinking maybe he should have told Greg to try
the course again another day. The sky was getting even darker, and
what if he couldn't make it back without his dog? All his trial
runs were with his dog. Was he really dependent on his bloodhound?
Could a dog shave a half hour of his time? He half-ignored those
thoughts off and looked back down at the article on hydrogen-powered
cars. He started to finish the magazine, but he never got to finish
to finish. Greg ran out and slapped the handful of flags on the
windshield. The scoutmaster jumped up and Delia jumped out the
truck window and started barking.
"What'd I get? What'd I get? Better or worse? Better or worse
than 67 minutes?"
The scoutmaster knew the stopwatch wasn't broken. He hadn't dropped
it or anything. But he still he had to look twice at the timer when
he clicked it off at 59:45.