It was the end of the season. It promised to be a battle royal between two all-age dog-handler-scout teams. The dogs were Gen-X and Millennial, full-brother pointers, sired in West Kentucky, the latter from a year-earlier litter. The handlers were Mike Eanes and Ike Reams, former team mates in a “helpin’ each other” partnership that went sour. The scouts were Archie Bell and Will Smith, twenty-something former Georgia high-school baseball rivals who had pitched opposite one another in consecutive-year state championship finals games, each winning and losing one. There was no love lost between opposing team members. But that was nothing compared to the rivalry between the dogs’ owners.
Gen-X’s owner was Edward Kite, owner of the largest auto-dealer group in North Florida; Millennial’s owner was Fred Reed, owner of the largest auto-dealer group in South Georgia. They had fought one another across the east-west state line for auto sales for two decades, each sponsoring continuous T-V ads in which they starred personally, first in double-knit blazers, bell-bottomed slacks and cowboy boots, later in fine wool blue blazers, gray wool slacks and Gucci loafers, to assure prospective customers of the best trade-ins, new car prices, used car prices, service prices.
This season their dogs were neck-and-neck for most Purina Points when time came for the drawing of the Masters Open Quail Championship, the major circuit’s last hoorah. They drew the last brace, whether by chance or design unknown to all but the drawers.
News of the drawing lit up Facebook, Twitter, Tik-Tok and Instagram. They would come to the line on Blue Springs and finish on Nonami. The storied plantations were as usual well populated with wild quail and groomed to perfection. Grain had been generously scattered on the courses shortly before the start of the trial.
Three hundred riders were mounted in the gallery for the breakaway. Among the riders were some of the nation’s most lovely female equestrians and hard-bitten male field-trialers, all astride smooth and handsome and well groomed steeds.
“Gentlemen, let ‘em go,” said the senior judge, and the voices of Mike and Ike rang out across the fields of green wheat and brown fallow and through the surrounding groves of live oaks and long leaf pines. The temperature was 55 F and the sky slightly overcast with a soft breeze from the south. Each dog was glimpsed on a forward right edge, then disappeared.
Each handler rode the course confidently, matching the pace set by the judges. Their scouts drifted into the piney woods on the right side of the course and disappeared. The minutes ticked off the many stop watches that had been started at the breakaway.
Soon a duel of alternating finds was underway, each signaled by the call of “point” by a scout. Each time, the pointed dog was found at a KCL off the course being run but at a place where a forward cast might logically take the pointed dog.
The two judges, themselves top amateur handlers, had met for supper and talked the night before. They had been passed certain intelligence about what might happen in the brace, and it was happening. They called in two marshals, each an employee of Blue Springs or Nonami who knew the courses like the backs of their hands, and gave them orders, plus instructions to keep the orders a secret.
Shortly the marshals returned, and the judges rode with them off the course, as if each judge needed to relieve himself. Once out of sight of the gallery, each marshal handed a judge a cell phone which the judge deactivated and placed in a saddle bag.
The dogs down finished their hours but were unseen by the judges their last twenty five minutes and were ruled out of judgment. They finished the season second and third in Purina Points.
Following the announcement of winners and taking of winners’ photos the judges unobtrusively returned the cell phones to the scouts, but only after the individual who had tipped them removed an App from each phone. He was a whiz with technology, seventeen years old, and an avid amateur trialer. What the App did he did not tell the judges, but they had figured out on their own that the phones were leading the scouts to Gen-X and Millennial on their finds.