In Remembering Ben, I told the story of my favorite pointer gun dog.
When Ben was four, we hunted the last day of quail season with Sam Kerr in Appomattox. It was one of those magic days. With a snowstorm coming in from the Southwest, flakes began to fall about two, and quail went on a feeding frenzy. We were in birds almost constantly until dark. A covey was feeding in every lespedeza patch.
Ben found himself in a trash pile beside an abandoned cabin. When we called the dogs to the truck to load for home, Ben came in limping. He had sliced a pad on something in the trash pile. Next day I took him to my vet, Dr Bill Clark, who stitched the wound.
Two weeks later, Ben suddenly lost muscle tone and grew very weak. Back at Dr. Clark’s, the diagnosis was uncertain. A brain tumor was a possibility. Then a new vet in the practice identified another possibility, and a blood sample was sent off to a lab at the University of Pennsylvania. Two days later a call came from Penn. The young vet’s hunch had been correct, Ben had tetanus, or lock jaw, contracted from something rusty in the trash pile. He was injected with an antitoxin and slowly recovered.
I used this true story in Gentlemen, Let ‘Em Go, a Novel of Field Trials.