Bud Cole and Andy Grimes were rivals, to put it mildly. Each was a pointing dog trainer-handler for the public in the shooting dog category. They were based in Southside Virginia, a land where tobacco and pine trees for pulpwood and saw timber dominated the rural landscape. The year was 1963.
Bud’s best customer was Fred Reed, an undertaker who preferred to be called a funeral director and least liked to be called a mortician. Mostly, he liked to be called when death visited, as it inevitably did. Fred was smooth. If he got the call he usually got the job. And he knew how to lay on the guilt to sell a first class layaway, bronze casket, full embalming, new suit, shirt and tie for the deceased, limousines for family, clergy, pallbearers, actual and honorary, lodge brothers. Lots of flowers (he owned a flower business lodged next door to his funeral home). His least favorite word was cremation.
Andy’s best customer was Albert Prince MD, a family physician of the old school. He never turned away a patient for lack of insurance or the money to pay his bills. An astute investor as well as a Harvard Medical School graduate, he had saved and invested wisely enough from the modest income from his practice that he had no financial worries. When a patient in his care died he invariably advised the family to elect cremation, pointing out the money saved which he knew the survivor(s) needed. Needless to say, Albert Prince MD and Fred Reed were not close despite their shared love of bird dogs and field trials.
Bud was a very skillful handler. But he had a weakness: He could not break a dog steady to wing and shot without making it a flagger or a dropper-on-point. As a result, all the dogs he won with were developed and broken by others. Thus he was always looking for broke dogs for sale.
Andy and Doc derived much amusement from selling dogs to Bud, especially for Fred Reed’s account. Dogs so sold often appeared to be very good prospects but had a hidden hole. Hiding the hole’s was Andy’s specialty.
Albert Prince MD’s most fun from the field trial game was riding with Andy during tryout and training sessions with puppies and derbies. He loved it when a coming derby showed a flash of promise. He and Andy had high hopes for one from the Fast Delivery line acquired as a stud fee from Doc’s best dog. Then tragedy struck. Andy took some young prospects to Georgia to a great quail plantation on which a friend was dog man to work them on wild birds. He and the friend each put down a male coming derby. Neither suspected the one put down by the plantation’s dog man would be a fighter. But somehow it didn’t like Andy’s, and attacked him viciously off the breakaway. They got them separated before permanent physical injury, but henceforth Andy’s derby would attack any male bracemate put down with. Its career was thus over before begun. Andy hated having to report this to Doc Prince.
But when told, Doc Prince just smiled. “When you get him broke just invite Bud to come work with you, bring his best bitch to work with the broke derby you have for sale.”
Bud bought the broke derby, thought he got a bargain. It won first in the season’s first derby stake, lucked out in the draw, got a female bracemate. In the season’s second derby stake it was not so lucky.
“What did you do to make that derby a fighter, Bud?” Andy asked after the judges ordered Bud and Fred Reed’s prize derby up.