You’re one of a kind

“I volunteer as — victim.”

Wait, shouldn’t that be, “I volunteer as tribute,” courtesy of “The Hunger Games” series?

    Not for me. In Fort Collins during the 1980s, I volunteered as victim. I worked at Colorado State University and took a few classes on the side, which is how I met a German instructor who trained search and rescue dogs to find lost hikers in the mountains.

One day he asked our class if anyone would like to volunteer to be a victim for canine training exercises. I was intrigued. I said yes.

The instructor had a beautiful German shepherd, fine-boned and intelligent. If you looked into her eyes for long, you began to feel that she was about to deliver a commencement address, or at least impart some sage advice.

On the first day, our instructor told us where to meet and asked that we each bring a pair of unwashed socks in a paper bag. They’d be used to cue the dogs on who to find.

We converged near a wetlands area. The training goal was for the dogs to avoid distraction from the hundreds of geese in the area.

I marched off to where our instructor had asked me to hide. The ground was flat, so I couldn’t raise my head to watch his German shepherd working, but before long I could hear her coming, casting back and forth through the reeds at the edge of the water.

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