Hunting Truffles with Cowboy
Read time: About 5 minutes.
We were out in the woods to find truffles.
The dog leading us might’ve been there to find a body.
I know. That’s not how these kinds of nature walks usually go.
It was winter in the Pacific Northwest, the kind of day when the air feels damp even under your coat. The trees were enormous, looming like the buttresses of a cathedral. The moss was the good kind, pillowy and saturated. And the forest was so quiet it felt like a prayer.
Mike and I were following a dog named Cowboy.
Aiko, his human, was guiding all of us.
You might be picturing some frolic through the woods where a dog does a cute little nose-to-ground trot and everyone gathers politely around a mushroom. That’s not how this works. At all.
Truffle hunting, at least out here, is mild chaos. Controlled, joyful chaos—but chaos. Cowboy would take off at a run, ping-ponging from one tree to another. We bipeds had to hustle to keep up, making hairpin turns when Cowboy’s nose sent him in a different direction.
Some dogs will dig the truffles up themselves, leaving truffle debris in their wake. Others eat them if the humans aren’t fast enough. Cowboy had better manners. He’d sniff, pause, and paw just enough to show where the treasure was buried. Then Aiko would crouch down, do some very specific, careful forest archaeology, and come up with what looked like, well, I’ll be honest. It looked like poo.
But it smelled incredible. Earthy. Garlicky. A little nutty. Like the woods themselves had been slow-roasting something for months.
That was the plan: find mushrooms, learn about fungi, maybe go home with a bag of nature’s weirdest luxury ingredient.
But then Cowboy stopped. Not in the usual “there’s a truffle here” way. He froze, nose working overtime, tail high. Aiko walked over.
“Did you find a truffle, boy?” she asked Cowboy.
And then she dug deeper into the spot Cowboy had found.
She didn’t find a truffle. She found a bone.
A femur-like bone. Dark, smooth, and long. Slowly succumbing to the wiles of decay. Not something you expect to find on a pleasant afternoon stroll in the woods.
Aiko held it up, looked at it for a moment, and said, completely casually: “Huh. Might be human.”
This is where time kind of tilted. Everything in the forest suddenly felt louder. The drip of rain off a leaf, the squish of the earth beneath our boots, the slight movement of Cowboy’s tail—still wagging, like he’d done a good job.
He had done a good job, but I suddenly felt a part of something I didn’t sign up for.
Was I standing at the scene of a long-ago murder?
Mike and I stood there, not totally sure what to say. Aiko, bless her, didn’t seem fazed in the slightest, though. She wrapped the bone in some paper she happened to have and then slid the whole thing, bone and all, into her pack, saying something like, “Well, it’s not unusual. He’s trained for this kind of thing.”
And that’s when the real story came out.
Turns out Cowboy is a dual-career kind of dog. Truffle-hunting is just one of his gigs. He’s also a certified cadaver dog, trained to help law enforcement find human remains.
It made sense, in retrospect. The intensity in his nose, the way he worked—there was purpose in every step. This wasn’t just a foraging field trip. Cowboy was a professional.
Aiko explained that in order to keep Cowboy sharp for cadaver work, she has to run regular training exercises with real human remains. Actual bones. Sometimes with tissue still on them. All obtained legally from officials and, she assured us, stored responsibly.
“In your freezer?” one of us asked.
She nodded. “Of course. You have to keep them from going bad.”
I think I nodded, which makes no sense. What was I agreeing to? Best practices for human bone storage?
Had anyone ever asked me how I might react being in the proximity of a cadaver dog who may have just uncovered a murder, I’m sure I would have said “creeped out.” I mean, this wasn’t just a quirky hobby. We were talking about death. Bones. The kind of work that touches real grief. And yet, in that moment, under the trees with Cowboy sniffing the ground like he was born to do it, it didn’t feel dark. It felt sort of reverent like someone was doing a job that mattered.
One that very few people could do.
Then there was Aiko. She was just so grounded about it all. Here she was, all five-foot-nothing, built like a dorm fridge, but still delicate in some way. She was both hardcore and soft-hearted all at once.
She spent years climbing power poles for Puget Sound Energy to keep communities running. Now she was working in partnership with this loyal, brilliant dog, helping families get answers no one else could give.
We did find more truffles that day. Cowboy went back to his other skill set like flipping a switch. Tail up, eyes focused, nose to the ground. No drama. No confusion. Just a working dog doing the work he loves.
We brought a small bag of truffles home that day. They were coated in forest dirt and triumph. That night, I shaved them over pasta, and for days and weeks after, they went on everything. (Storing truffles in the freezer keeps them longer. But I’ll admit, every time I reached for one, I thought of Cowboy. Of Aiko. And of the objects living in their freezer.)
What’s stuck with me isn’t the taste, though. It’s the quiet weight of that moment in the woods. The way the story shifted beneath our feet. The way Cowboy didn’t flinch—just found what was hidden and carried on.
Cowboy doesn’t just find things.
He follows what’s buried.
Sometimes it’s a truffle. Sometimes it’s the truth.
Either way, he brings it back with love.
