Twenty-three were entered
Sixty-nine hours worth of hunting potential
Eight finished fifteen did not Read more
2022 National Bird Dog Championship
Category: National Championship
Turning Her Loose
You’re at Ames
Finally
You’ve been trying
For years
She won two
Firsts of an hour
To get here
Let ‘em go Read more
The National — As Seen By A Handler
Here we go
Three hours down
Please birds move
Come out of the woods
If you stay put
Where you roosted
In that stick stuff
My dog won’t point you
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Luck
Billy Kane had qualified Wheelman in the last one-hour open all-age run before the National Championship entries closed. He had not expected to. The first qualifying win had come two seasons before, and he had not expected that one either. Won it when the best dog’s brace-mate failed to back and it went with the thief after the birds. But here he was approaching the Ames Plantation, never expecting to be here. But his usual bad luck returned. Read more
Going to Ames
So your dog is qualified
And you’re going to Grand Junction
To run in The National Championship
The one and only
To run on the Ames Plantation
Where for a century and a quarter
The continent’s best bird dog has been yearly crowned
And where bird dog stories true and fiction abound
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The Test
Carl Dean slept little. He was up as usual at five. He and his partner Fred Archer were living for the duration of the National Championship in a former tenant house on a farm ten miles east of the Ames Plantation. This was the trial’s last day, and Fred Archer’s sole entry, Arkansas Andy, would go down in the afternoon brace. Carl would scout. His inability to sleep last night Read more
A Rivalry
It’s the 1930s, times are desperate, the Great Depression has the world in its grip, yet for a few at the top nothing has changed. So it is for Harley Keen and Richard Bain, owners of businesses whose products are still in demand at prices producing a profit. Keen’s is tobacco, Bain’s is whiskey, legal again with Prohibition’s repeal. They are sports, and their shared passion is bird dog field Read more