Category: Field Trial Recollections

Last Trip to Grand Junction

February 4, 2024 | National Championship, Short Stories | Comments
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

Run-off at the Invitational

November 26, 2023 | Quail Championship Invitational | Comments
Judge Sam Scales knew them all and knew them well. That’s why he tried to talk his two fellow judges out of the run-off between Jersey Mike and Alabama Al. He agreed they were the top two dogs among the four that had gone down for two hours today, Monday. And he could have lived with giving the title to either of them and runner-up to the other. But one wanted to name Mike Champion and the other Al. Both were insisting on a run-off Tuesday morning.  Read more

First Time at Grand Junction

November 23, 2023 | National Championship, Short Stories | Comments
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

1938

May 11, 2023 | National Championship, Short Stories | Comments
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

Four Men Two Dogs One Spare Tire

January 25, 2023 | Quail Championship Invitational, Short Stories | Comments
They were two-man teams of rivals. Some thought enemies, but they were not. They were famous, in a very small, obscure world. Each was a trainer-handler or a scout of all-age pointing dogs.  Each handler worked with a scout, usually a black man, who traveled with him in a two-ton stock-bed truck they drove from trial to trial hauling the horses they rode to handle and scout off of and the dogs in the string of pointers (and occasionally a setter) they entered in the trials.  Read more