Among the boring habits of the old is talking about their pasts. At least I write of mine, so friends can easily turn me off — just stop reading.
So here mostly for my own amusement is an essay on what bird dogs have meant to me. If you are still reading you likely have a similar essay inside you.
Bird dogs have meant the world to me: my hook on fun for more than sixty years. How did this come to be? Let’s see. Think back to 1959.
I was beginning my second year of law school and schoolmate Bill Anderson of Danville invited me to go home with him for the opening of small game hunting season. Billy had a pack of beagles and his boyhood friend Fred Leggett had a farm on the Dan River and some English setters.
On opening day we hunted rabbits in the morning and quail in the afternoon. Game was plentiful (Fred’s Cloverdale Farm was in Eisenhower’s Land Bank, covered in lespedeza, a game paradise). I had a Sears pump shotgun and could hit nothing. Fred lent me a side-by-side double and my marksmanship improved (it was a Purdey but I did not know what that meant).
I fell in love with bird hunting. Two years later I graduated law school and landed a job with an old-line firm in Richmond as its ninth lawyer at $400 a month (it seemed all the money in the world). Today the firm where I practiced until 2005 has 1200 + lawyers and offices across the globe (McGuireWoods LLP). I still practice law but in a boutique firm with my son Scott.
In 1961 Fred Leggett gave me a setter pup I named Pat for my wife. I promptly ruined her (gun shy) but my father-in-law, an avid bird hunter, raised a litter from her that produced Duke, his pride and joy. He died a year later of a heart attack at age fifty-seven and after a year running loose on a farm Duke came to our house and became my first gun dog as well as my wife’s companion and best friend. Duke had a super nose and was staunch to a fault but the year of freedom had made him a self-hunter so I mostly hunted for him on point (this was before beeper collars much less tracking collars).
I will not bore you with accounts of the gun dogs of my life. Suffice it to say they have been many, some pretty good, some less so. But I have never since been without one (or more) and until 1995 I hunted afoot for quail or grouse every Saturday in season and plus a week-day every chance I could steal one.
In 1995 I was invited to report the Florida Open All-Age Championship. I reported it then and have every year since, plus many other great trials through the years. Now at eighty three I report only the Florida plus when asked the Virginia Amateur, including its 100 Anniversary Celebration this spring, a special honor. And my reporting has led to a second career (albeit not a lucrative one), writing and self-publishing bird dog tales, fiction and non.
You cannot watch a bird dog work and worry. That very simply is what bird dogs have meant to me. My escape from worry, a gift beyond measure. As reporter I have watched the best dogs in the world, year after year, at Chinquapin, the Livingston Place (for me and many others, always “Dixie”), Sedgefields (East and West), Coney Lake, Paducah, Columbus ND, Killdeer Plains, McFarlin Ingersoll Ranch, Chickasaw and Abigail, Sehoy and Cut-a-Whiskie Farm.
So what do I owe bird dogs? My sanity. They have provided my escape from the everyday cares of this crazy, modern world. And most of my significant clients, who share my love of bird dogs. Plus many friends, though Father Time is taking too many of these away, like my dear friend Luke Weaver with whom I shared so many laughs around bird dogs.
And as a special bonus I have been privileged to watch my sons Scott and David and grandson Thomas (fifteen) become avid bird dog fans. My cup runs over.