Gandalf and the Search for the Lost Boy

The trail went cold for the massive team of trackers -- until a dog named Gandalf appeared on the scene.

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Working Together Intuitively

The moon was hanging low in the South Carolina sky as Misha Marshall finished loading her pickup. Then she led Gandalf to his cage in the back. It was 3 a.m. on Tuesday, March 20. Misha's husband, Chuck, came out to see her off. "Don't expect to go up there and find that lost Boy Scout in the woods, because it's just not going to happen," Chuck said. A retired paramedic and firefighter, he had seen more amazing things than a kid surviving three cold nights in the mountains, but he didn't want his wife to be disappointed in herself or her dog.

Three days earlier, 12-year-old Michael Auberry had vanished from his troop's campsite in Doughton Park, 7,000 rough acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina. A massive search had been launched, but there was barely a trace of the boy.

Misha, a corporate tax manager, and Gandalf, her two-year-old Shiloh Shepherd, had trained for a year with the South Carolina Search and Rescue Dog Association. But this was their first real job, and Misha worried that she'd miss Gandalf's subtle signs. A search dog doesn't learn specific signals. He doesn't act like a pointer spotting quarry. Animal and human work together intuitively.

A mountain girl from Asheville, North Carolina, Misha grew up with working dogs -- German shepherds and collies. Even as a child, she could get these no-nonsense animals to do tricks no one in her family could, like make them line up and roll over. She could, she says, "feel like them."

When she was ten, her little collie, Laddie, ran away. Misha asked herself, If I were a puppy, where would I go? At the end of the block, across the main road, was a goldfish pond. She walked straight to the pond, looking nowhere else. Laddie was there -- stuck fast in the mud.

Misha found Gandalf in a kennel in Tennessee when he was six weeks old. A little ball of black fur with oversize feet, he looked more like a bear cub than a puppy. A gentle, laid-back bear. Misha, a big fan of J. R. R. Tolkien, named him Gandalf, after the wizard in The Lord of the Rings, because she believed he was special.

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Customer-service reps repeat the same tired phrases so often that we can do the job in our sleep. We hear a beep telling us a customer's on the line, and we're on. I never knew how this humdrum routine affected us until a co-worker had heart surgery. She was coming to, following her operation, when she heard the beep of the heart monitor. In her anesthetized stupor, she groggily said, "This is Sue. Can I help you?"

-- S.B.

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