The senior judge
Six feet four
Sits astride his mount
Watches two black scouts
Lead up two pointers
Kneel beside them
Stroke their backs
Whisper in their ears Read more
Turn ‘em Loose
Category: National Championship
The 2024 National Championship
Twenty-Eight came to the line
Three finished
Touch’s Gallatin Fire
Handled by Mark McLean
Owned by Alex Rickert
Won with five finds Read more
Last Trip to Grand Junction
He woke alone in the trailer, a single-wide on concrete blocks on a rented half-acre lot on a dirt road off Route 32 ten miles east of Leesburg. Jess Clark looked at the calendar, taped on the refrigerator door, where he marked off the days with a pencil stub on a string, and read in the first un-Xd block, “February 11, Sat.”
He turned the left burner eye on the two-burner stove to high to heat water for coffee and put the enameled steel pot on it. There is something I must do today, he told himself, and strained to remember. Read more
First Time at Grand Junction
Billy Berg was going to Grand Junction, the Ames Plantation, for the National Bird Dog Championship! He could not believe it. He had been running dogs on the all-age circuit only three years. Before that he had apprenticed under his father, John, who ran shooting dogs for the public on the horseback shooting dog circuit out of New Jersey.
Billy had endured lean times but had some success. His owners were mostly one-dog sponsors who had been patrons of his father and placed a dog with him out of affection for his father. But now he had “made his bones,” qualified a dog for the National. This required that the dog win two firsts in open all-age stakes of an hour. Not easy to do, for hour stakes attracted large entries from all-age handlers pursuing the same goals as him, most with deeper strings. Read more
When Field Trial History Rhymed
The field trial seasons of 2006-07 and 2022-23 rhymed, to paraphrase Mark Twain’s adage, “History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Read more
1938
It was a desperate year by every measure. The Great Depression had refused to end; war threatened again in Europe as Germany, now under Hitler’s thumb, smoldered with resentment under the punishing terms of the Treaty of Versailles; and most Americans lived in poverty, those rural who had no debt the best off because they could at least grow and put up their own food for winter and darn their threadbare garments and socks. Read more
A Brace at Ames
The year was 1938. The place was the Ames Plantation at Grand Junction, Tennessee, 55 miles east of the Mississippi River at Memphis. The event was the National Bird Dog Championship. It had been held most years since 1896, and here since 1901. The subject of this story is the winning performance and the players in it, canine, equine and human. Read more
Bound to Happen
After Ben Reach read it on the internet he said to Sam at Breakfast next morning at Millie’s Diner, “It was bound to happen eventually. I wonder if it has happened before and no one ever knew.”
The “it” was this. And the “it” has a long and short version. The short one: the National Champion bird dog of 2023 was discovered to be an impostor. Read more
Perfect Revenge, Almost
The opportunity for revenge came thirty years after the despicable act calling for revenge.
Let us start with the despicable act. Read more
2022 National Bird Dog Championship
Some questions for the management of the Ames Plantation: Read more