While running a dog at the NBHA National Open derby stake last week I lost a whistle that I had used in South Dakota. I had scratched my mother’s birthday on the side of it on that day, August 27, 1979. I should not have been using it, but it was my favorite. Good things come and go I guess. Losing it, and looking for it, and remembering it, reminded me of the following, one of many memories I have of that summer. It’s not meant to be a work of prose although it may become one sometime in the future. I’m just recounting as it comes to me. However, every word and how it transpired is true, exactly true.
In the summer of 1979 I went with Roy Allison, Robert Weathersby, and Mr. O’Leary to South Dakota. We camped in and around Timber Lake. I had a new Chevrolet step side 4-wheel drive pickup that just fit a dog box we borrowed from Cecil Ladner, a dog trainer from Picayune, Mississippi. The wooden box held eight dogs comfortably. We had nine.
Robert, a dog trainer of sorts, brought a setter named Rudy. Roy, a retired politician, carried a litter of five grown pups he had raised. No particular breeding of interest, although Roy thought different. I brought two bitches, one named Billie, off an Evolution dog in the community and another I had bought from Bobby Davis of Pensacola. Her name was Terrific Chick, don’t remember her call name. Mr. O’Leary brought an old setter with a gray muzzle named Sam.
We were traveling in two trucks. Mr. O’Leary and Robert in one and Roy and me in the other. Each truck pulled a two-horse trailer. My horse was part Arabian and part quarter horse. It would be three years before I would realize the luxury of a gaited horse.
We worked dogs all summer. My dogs ran up chickens the entire time I was up there. I don’t remember ever getting one pointed. O’Leary and Sam stayed in the shade mostly. Robert, an English major, quoted Keats and never took Rudy out of the roading harness. Rudy would just stand there panting, chest deep in a speargrass patch. Robert quit our camp in mid-August to join up with Buzz Marshal to drive a truck back to Oklahoma.
Roy’s dogs were named Ham, Flann, Winn, and Gator, two dogs, two bitches. He also carried Joe, a littermate that he had sold as a baby pup to a wealthy neighbor whose name I never knew. Roy hated Joe, said his tail was set too low and he had no drive. Roy fed his four favorites a special Iams feed he got from a veterinarian. Joe was fed last every time, Ole Roy from Walmart. Roy said it’d upset his stomach to switch feed. What roading Joe got was when I’d feel sorry for him, and take him for an afternoon trek across the prairie. Other than that he stayed on the chain or in the box. When we’d see birds cross the road, Roy would work every pup twice before he let old Joe have a sniff. I can’t remember Joe ever seeing a bird fly off. Roy’d check cord him to where the birds were and style him up and then flush and throw grass up in the air like chickens flying off, and then jam him back in the box with Sam. It wasn’t a good summer for Joe, but he always seemed happy and I really got to liking him. It didn’t take much to make him happy, a scratch behind the ears, or just saying his name when you passed by seemed to perk him up.
Anyway, I could go on and on about the particular and royal treatment Roy bestowed on the chosen ones and the neglect he heaped on ol’Joe but I won’t. Suffice to say he could have been named Cinderella, and would have fit the bill perfect. I will throw in one more thing however. At this time in Roy’s life, he was consulting a seer, a person Roy’d call and tell the situation to and the Seer would tell Roy how it was going to turn out. I never met the Seer, but I did speak negatively about such a trade once and was severely rebuked by Roy. He was definitely a believer.
Well, from what I could gather when Roy got back from the phone in Timber Lake one day, we were all going to go home via Illinois, maybe Rend Lake I don’t remember. They were holding a club trial in mid- September and the Seer said we’d have great success there. Maybe I’d get to see one of my dogs point a bird yet. I ran my pups in that heat and tall grass till their chests were like leather and they could seemingly go all day. What I wasn’t paying attention to was my horse, she was going the wrong way bad.
Roy benched his every morning, stoking my them and saying “whoa, whoa, whoa” until he could walk a hundred yards off and they’d stay posed. They looked good. Then he’d road them for two hours at a time, twice a day. Even the females were bulging now with muscles. Joe took it all in from the chain, laying his head between his paws in the cool grass. Mr. O’Leary and Sam were content to fish at the pond behind our camp for the last few weeks. In early September they left for Louisiana. I’d never see either again, but I can truthfully say they enjoyed that summer. Neither would see another.
We entered. I didn’t have much money or horse left so I opted for the open derby. Both my dogs ran off and it didn’t take long. I didn’t have horse enough to do anything about it. Nuff said there, about my dogs and the Seer. Roy on the other hand entered his in just about every available stake. Open and amateur, derby, and puppy. Four stakes for each dog. I had thought we were both about broke with just enough for gas to get home, but I guess Roy and the Seer had something stashed I didn’t know about. Roy did tell me the Seer had told him to call Joe’s owner about entering him in the trial. Maybe it was on account of ol’Joe that Roy got enough to run all those pups. I’ll never know. Well anyway, without belaboring the story, when the smoke cleared and all accounts were settled, in a true testament to the Seer and to the justice of the universe, Ol’ Joe won first place in every category. Yes first place, it may be a record. I’d like to check on that someday. One of the others placed somewhere in the group, but none held a candle to Joe that day. Roy wouldn’t take a picture with him but I did. Four times I scratched his ears and whispered his name so he could hear, and posed him up just like the king of the world, and that day he was.
It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen at a field trial, and the funniest. I laughed all the way home, 10 hours. Roy was beside himself, bad mouthing the judges, the club, and said he was quitting the Seer for not being more specific. It’s all as clear as if it happened yesterday.
On a side note, Mr. O’Leary passed away that year on Christmas day. Robert later became a Methodist minister, went to China and married a Chinese lady. He and his wife are currently living and doing God’s work near Amite, Louisiana. Roy has since passed away. He loved his dogs. I was 25 at the time and I married two years later. My wife and I raised two children, put them both through college and both have made us very proud. Recently I’ve been able to return to the sport I never stopped loving.
©2020, Danny Bardwell