Category: Remembrances

Characters in My Life

May 5, 2023 | Donald McCaig, Remembrances | Comments
I look back on a long, full life and remember the characters in it. By characters I mean folks who were unconventional, unusual, different, distinctive, and giving to me — of friendship or knowledge or both. I want to briefly remember a few of them, one here and others later in other brief essays.  I start with Donald McCaig, the kindest, gentlest most unselfishly giving-to-me-person I ever knew, for no reason but a shared love of working dogs, his for sheep dogs — Border Collies — mine for pointing dogs.  Read more

Memories

March 18, 2023 | Remembrances | Comments
With no Florida Championship to report this year, I have turned to re-reading memoirs of great field trial handlers, namely Jack Harper, Ed Mack Farrior and Leon Covington (via his biographer, John Chriswell). Their careers spanned 6 decades (1919 through 1960s). I knew only Mr. Ed Mack, and what a privilege! Read more

Andy

March 17, 2023 | Great All-Age Dogs, Joe Hicks, Joe Hicks | Comments
It is not hard to find joy and sorrow joined close together in our game. In fact, they are a recurring theme in the human-canine dramas that tie together men and women and great field trial bird dogs.  As I reflect on the dramas surrounding the Florida Open All-Age Championship over the twenty-seven years I reported it, none is so poignant as that of Chinquapin Andy, Florida Champion in  2009 and 2010, his trainer-handler, Joe Hicks, and his owners, Ted Baker and T. Jack Robinson.  Read more

Hunting Grouse

November 8, 2022 | Grouse Hunting, Remembrances | Comments
Hunting grouse when I was young was my escape. No matter my troubles, and they sometimes seemed many, I could make them go away for a day. I would rise at four and jump into my boots, orange shirt, khakis and briar chaps and load my dogs in the trunk of my Dodge Demon and drive west to Augusta, Highland or Bath County, turn out a setter dog at the head of a holler and walk up it. Read more