The scent of death

Abstract

Mary Cablk and her dog Inca spent a week last September searching the ashes of remote California towns ravaged by forest fires. They were looking for people who had died as their homes and everything in them burned to the ground. Cablk had just finished training Inca, an 18-month-old Malinois, to alert her to the presence of odors wafting from human remains. The weeklong trip from their home base in Reno, Nev., to help a California disaster response team was one of Inca’s first major assignments, literally a trial-by-fire. When they arrived at one home reduced almost entirely to ash, instead of the odor of burnt wood and smoke, Cablk and Inca were enveloped by the scent of a propane tank leak. Cablk’s heart sank. All she could smell was the sulfurous stink of ethyl mercaptan, a compound added to propane to warn humans of a tank leak. A dog’s