Bill Blain bought Unicorn Plantation with the proceeds of the sale of his own Unicorn, product of an element of Artificial Intelligence he stumbled upon while designing an algorithm. He had fallen in love with the Red Hills of Georgia when an investment banker took him there to shoot quail and to pitch the sale of his start-up.
He fell in love with bird dog field trials when at dawn one day of the quail hunt he rode with a plantation hand to watch him work a derby he was preparing to run in the Continental Derby Championship.
That same hand told him the plantation, then called by another name, was coming up for sale because its owner, great-grandson of a Robber Baron of the Gilded Age who had assembled it in 1890, had made bad investments after the trust that had protected him recently terminated in his favor because of the Rule Against Perpetuities. Bill bought it a month after selling his Unicorn to one of the Magnificent Seven.
Bill’s was a familiar story, except the field trial part. It was rare that the super-rich fell in love with trials, though in times past a few such sustained the sport, men like Hobart Ames (shovels, cannon, Credit Mobilier), AGC Sage (Timber) Walter Teagle (Standard Oil), and Joseph Pabst (Pabst Blue Ribbon).
Bill’s love of trials was cemented when he returned to the area to watch the hand run the derby in the Continental Derby Championship at Livingston Place (Dixie Plantation before Woke dictated its name’s change). By then he was in negotiations to buy what became Unicorn Plantation. When the derby won the Championship, Bill bought him from the hand and signed the hand up to manage his new plantation.
The hand Bill made manager of Unicorn Plantation was Bobby Belk, a thirty-five-year-old Marine veteran of the war in Afghanistan. Bobby had returned from Afghanistan destined for college but soon found the scars of combat had rendered him unfit for classrooms. Only working outdoors in the company of horses and bird dogs could he find inner peace. (As a rebellious teen he had been sent by his parents one summer to North Dakota to work with a dog trainer; that summer later proved a life saving experience for Bobby).
The Albany, Georgia lawyer Ben Reach represented Bill in the acquisition of his plantation. In the course of that Ben learned of Bill’s new-found love of field trials. After Bill came to know and trust Ben, the old curmudgeon undertook to convince him to sponsor a new all-age trial on Unicorn Plantation in the time slot left available when the Florida Open All-Age Championship ran for the last time in January 2022.
Ben had quail and dove hunted there many times under its prior ownership and recognized its topography and cover would make an outstanding trial venue with six hour courses offering mostly even opportunities. Plans were made and cleared with the UKC, successor to the American Field Publishing Company as manager of the Field Dog Stud Book, to sanction the trial, to be run the first time in 2026.
Then, just before Bill’s Continental Derby Champion was to be entered in the 2025 National Championship, tragedy struck. A claim was asserted that Bill’s derby had been stolen when a weanling pup from a neighboring plantation and sold to Bobby Belk with a false pedigree and using false parental DNA in its registration. The seller had since disappeared from the area.
The owner of the claiming plantation had recognized a unique liver marking on the shoulder of the derby when its photo, taken in front of the historic manor house on Livingston Place, appeared on Facebook. A DNA test swab proved the claim true. Upon being told the facts, Ben Reach proposed this solution to Bill Blain and Bobby Belk.
With their permission, he would go to the claiming breeder of the derby and offer him halt-ownership of the derby, with Bill retaining possession (and responsibility for entry fees and training and handling fees). During his campaigning years, Bobby would have him and as customary keep his purse wins and stud fees. After the derby’s retirement from trials, Bill and the breeding plantation owner would share custody for wagon dog service, and in full retirement Bobby would have him.
Ben would also have to convince the UKC to correct the derby’s registration, a daunting task in light of what happened with the Field Dog Stud Book when DNA technology was first introduced. But Ben would have the story of the FDSB’s correction of the maternal side of 2004 National Champion Miller’s On Line’s pedigree based on DNA evidence on his side. Ben was relying most on the importance of Bill Blain’s promise to sponsor a new open all-age trial on Unicorn Plantation to carry the day with the UKC.
Happily, all parties agreed to Ben’s plan. Key to selling the breeder of the derby on it was the influence of Ben’s pal and fellow curmudgeon Sam Nixon, MD, who was the plantation owners personal physician.
The derby was named New Hope.
(Author’s Note: This story is pure fiction, but let’s hope it might someday come true).