A subtle vocation
Local man searches to save lives
By Johna Strickland
Argus Observer
Saturday, August 9, 2008 10:49 PM PDT
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| Johna Strickland | Argus Observer
Washington County Sheriff’s Posse president and tracker Tony Buthman examines the first footprint — a smooth-soled flip-flop on packed dirt — of a trail. On the first print, he sketches the tread, measures the impressions and size of the foot and records his finding on a card. This becomes the standard to check other footprints against. |
Weiser—Tony Buthman sees “things you normally wouldn’t see,” he said.
A footprint in packed soil.
Foreign debris on a sidewalk.
Grass trampled by someone’s feet.
A bruised leaf.
These things, and the clues within them, tell him where someone has gone and how long ago — a useful skill when the Washington County Sheriff’s Posse and search and rescue team head out to find a missing person.
Buthman, 48, Weiser, learned how to track people from a three-day course he took with Joel Hardin Professional Tracking Services.
“Their philosophy is that if a person makes a passage, unless he levitates, he leaves evidence of his passage,” Buthman said, noting his training taught him to see this evidence as part of a whole, not an isolated piece.
“That’s one of the parts of this course is the power of observation,” he said.
Two years later, Buthman continues to train his eyes to see what appears to be invisible.
He practices once a month. Even if it’s just examining his yard to see if the neighbor children cut through.
The real-deal moments arrive when the posse’s search and rescue team is called out. Then, Buthman, a nine-year posse member and eight-year posse president, starts fact-gathering.
The initial questions are clear when Buthman starts his search.
What type of shoes was the person wearing? Type of tread? When you parked the four-door pickup, through which door did he exit?
“Get your facts straight before you start, you know, that’s very, very important,” Buthman said.
Each detail will help him at the point the missing person was last seen and help him determine which track leading out of the area belongs to the lost individual.
An inaccurate fact, could hurt his entire search and misinformation played a role in his hardest case, which came before he attended Hardin’s class.
Buthman spoke with the missing man’s three brothers, and each said he was wearing boots with a distinctive print. The posse never found that print. After the man’s safe return, they learned he had worn a different pair of boots.
“Many, many man hours were spent looking for what wasn’t there,” Buthman said. “They (the brothers) were not paying attention to the details.”
When Buthman, a novice tracker, sets out at the point-last-seen, he brings two people with him to search the flanks for contamination while he follows the actual track.
The group will move slowly through a search area, sketching and measuring the first footprint onto a blue card. Later, the group will check other prints against the information on the blue card.
“These (cards) are worth more than a photograph. They want you to draw what you see in that footprint, then it’s embedded in your mind,” Buthman said, noting his search team never photographs a print because shadows and light can create an inaccurate image.
“We spend a lot of time deciphering the evidence in a footprint,” he added.
The slow work — training Buthman’s team took 16 hours to move 200 yards — adds up to a smaller search area, though. If someone walks at a rate of three miles an hour for 20 hours and searchers do not know where he or she went, the search area becomes 5,026 square miles. Washington County is only 1,474 square miles.
But if a tracker can pick up the direction, that search area narrows to 209 miles.
Even as the information Buthman and his team generate helps those searching out in front of them, he knows someone else will find the person.
“The mantracker himself rarely finds the subject,” he said.
Still, Buthman tracks on using equipment from simple to complex.
A 36-inch dowel marked with a red rubber band and a yellow one tells him where to search for prints next. At the first footprint, Buthman calibrates the stick, setting the yellow band at the person’s heel and the red at the toe. Then he measures the person’s stride, adjusting the bands until the tip of the rod lands on the heel of the next print and the bands show the foot’s length.
“From that point I can pivot this 180 degrees, and somewhere out there will be a footprint,” he said of the rod.
Other tools include his notebook where he records any changes in the trail, a cigarette or a gum wrapper perhaps, and a specialty flashlight. The product of various research projects, Buthman’s flashlight holds a specific bulb engineered for quality light up close and a three-cell battery chamber. Most flashlights hold two or four batteries, but four provides too much light and two wouldn’t last through the night.
Buthman also said he reads the environment.
He looks at dirt litter from one footprint to the next. At creeks, he watches for scuffed slime, foreign debris and overturned rocks. And he uses a little biology to determine the age of plant signs. He knows a maple leaf bruised by a foot will begin to show a drier spot in a few hours. He knows which leaf was on the ground when his subject walked over and which just fell. This helps him to establish how long ago the person was there just by the dying process a leaf goes through when separated from it’s tree.
It’s subtle clues, coming to know how “they transport themselves from one point to another,” he said.
Does the person step heel-to-toe or vice versa?
A young man’s long stride or a shorter 80-year-old’s stride?
A taller, heavier person or a smaller, lighter one?
Each detail keeps him following the track across packed dirt and concrete even when there seems to be none.
Buthman said he arrived into the world of signs and subtlety because of fear.
He remembers when Stephanie Crane, a then 9-year-old, disappeared Oct. 11, 2003, in Challis, Idaho. He remembers her name 15 years later. And he knows she was never been seen again.
“It scares me to pieces to think that some little kid’s missing and will never be found,” Buthman said.
Spurred, by his interest in Crane’s case, Buthman came to wonder about search and rescue in Washington County.
He researched it and discovered a sheriff is ultimately responsible for someone missing in the county. So he signed up for the sheriff’s posse in 1999 and soon started work to organize a search and rescue team with the help of Sheriff Marv Williams and a few other posse members.
Their record is perfect, seven for seven. No losses. Seven successful finds.
