I guess my favorite field trial bitch of all time was Stanton’s Victory. Her kennel name, of course was “Vicky”!!!

The first time I saw Vicky as an all-age performer was at the Continental Championship in 1955.

A freak “Blue Norther” misdirected from Texas and Oklahoma eastward to Georgia blew in at the Georgia-Florida border, about 30 miles east of Tallahassee, where we were running.

I was thirty years old and I had never seen sleet and hominy snow that far south. It was about January 24th, and the system just invaded, with winds over 25 miles an hour. You could tell, because the broom sedge was bending almost horizontal to the ground.

Judge Dick Dumas was into his handy slicker suit in a flash. Dr. Earl Miles, from Brooklyn, donned his parka and drew the string tight. I had no rain suit.

But Stanton’s Victory and one-eyed Howard Kirk, who had walked iron, cared not one whit for the inclemency.

Mrs. Livingston’s quail greeted the storm with glee and paraded out to meet Vicky.

She pointed first at some budding plum bushes. That’s how warm it had been. She had ‘em right in front of her, and Howard showed the birds. About nine minutes later, and I could see her pink-frosted tipped tail now, trembling and high.

Now it sleeted and visibility was bad—for everyone except Howard Kirk and Vicky. Howard picked his leather and ruberoid hat off of his bald head a third time and the little ice granules showered and bounced off his pate as he rode to a hilltop.

I was soaked and shivering and I cannot remember whether the other dog had been taken up or not. But, for one reason or another, as soon as he had Vicky away from that last find, Howard drifted back behind Judge Dumas to Dr. Earl Miles, reached over, and drew the drawstring bowknot loose from Dr. Miles slicker-parka top, and hollered in his ear:

“Tha’ll due respect. Doc Miles, you cannot see nothin’ through that consti-pated lil hole, now!!! Come on up here, throw that parka back and watch this bitch... Cause she’s dam sure winning this champeeenship!!!”

As we finished that brace, and Howard rubbed Vicky down, Mrs. Eleanor Livingston, owner of Dixie Plantation, sent her horse trainer in a jeep to get me. He wasn’t ever solicitous of anyone’s discomfort, left to his own designs and decisions.

“Mrs. Livingston says you get down and get to a dry warm place,” he said sternly. “You ain’t dressed for this.” I hadn’t noticed that my windbreaker and vest were soaked through. My old newsman’s fedora was soppy like a rag. Only my behind was dry. Well...damp.

“Okay, J. B.,” I said. “She’s got more sense than all of us. This field trial is over, anyway...”

And it was. But here’s a sequel.

A shooting dog entrepreneur tried all spring and summer to buy Vicky from her owner, Mr. Mitchell. This man from up east had enough money to burn up a snow packed woolly mammoth, but he balked within a few dollars of Mr. Mitchell’s asking price.

Howard Kirk told John S. Gates what was happening, and hinted that Gates had “some owner, certainly” who could step in and snatch up the great young bitch. “If I can’t keep her, I hope you can get her,” Kirk reportedly said.

On the anniversary of Vicky’s miraculous performance, John Gates turned her loose at Dixie Plantation in the Continental again. This year it was 80 degrees in the shade in January, and it hadn’t rained between Monticello, Florida and Quitman, Georgia in five weeks.

Vicky swept away independently and had three finds in the first 40 minutes, all perfect. Then she was gone for a while. I don’t remember just how long, but it was nearly 15 minutes, and she was a front running, showy field trial performer, and this was extremely uncharacteristic.

She came back from the left side of the course, and had three more finds—one on which she was found straight ahead and to the right under a live oak, near pickup time, the 110-minute mark.

She won the Championship for the second consecutive year.

But, for the time she was gone, she had been, mistakenly, collared and locked in the Quail Lodge kennel by another dog trainer. And, she was released by another pro, who hastily interceded and directed her back to her handler, Gates and the horse gallery.

I always wondered who the zealous fellow was and who the good Samaritan was. About two months before he died, John told me who the trainer was who returned Vicky to the field trial in time to keep her from being disqualified. It was Bill Conlin, a classically educated architect who was smitten with pointers and setters and trained professionally for the “eastern circuit” and attended some Southern trials and trained in Canada. He and I were always very close, I thought. We were drawn to one another and discussed many things outside Birdogdom. But he never told me who put Vicky up.

Just four years later, a great old Hall-of-Famer, Ed Farrior, won his last championship at the Continental with Crossmoke, a white an orange pointer bitch, whose last find was so far away, that Mr. Farrior didn’t get there for four minutes. Prior to that, the large gallery and both judges took at least three minutes to get to the live oak copse where John Gates sat on his horse, hat raised. He had called point for Mr. Farrior and remained there, protecting the bitch and her “find”, until judges and handler could get there.

In doing so, he neglected his own brag dog, Medallion, which was soon lost out of judgment. Mr. Farrior and Crossmoke won the title, of course. I can remember one dog trainer in that gallery, Winfred Campbell, crying... Huge tears rolling down his cheeks. I remember thinking at the time. “Yeah, that’s really unselfish of John but isn’t Winfred overreacting?”

Then, on April 11, 2005, I have corroboration of an aged suspicion, born on that desert-like day of Crossmoke’s triumph at Dixie.

A witness has unloaded on me: It was Mr. Farrior who, believing she was lost and out of judgment, mistakenly placed Vicky in the kennel in 1956, and John Gates repaid him with gallantry.

Stanton's Victory

Howard Kirk

John S. Gates and Bill Allen

Ed Farrior

John S. Gates

For all those who have ordered Bill Allen's book 'The Unforgettables':

The books are back from the bindery! I will receive a book with a test dust jacket on Monday. After making size adjustments to the dust jacket, it will be printed, trimmed and the book then wrapped. The book will shipped at the end of the week.

Thanks for your patience!

Bill Allen’s wonderful book 'The Unforgettables' is at the bindery and the dust jacket is at the printer so we are on schedule to ship the book at the end of the month or close to it!

Order your limited first edition copy of Bill Allen’s richly-illustrated, hardbound book today! You must order your copy by December 31. The book will ship in January. You can order The Unforgettables by mail, filling out our Orderform (click here: Unforgettables_OrderForm.pdf) or using our secure online PayPal Shopping Cart (scroll down to The Unforgettables banner). If you are ordering several copies and need shipping costs or if you have any questions, please call 207-892-4201.

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Everyone who cares deeply about pointing dogs, upland game and field trials will want copies of Bill Allen’s The Unforgettables and Other True Fables.

The collection includes the original seven Unforgettable, five later showpieces, and work never before publicly published, penned by the writer who competed in and wrote of trials in four decades, and for the American Field during the 50’s, 60’s and 70’a—a period regarded by many as the premiere years for Field Trials held on wild upland game in North America.

The Unforgettables deliver a panoramic and hilarious taste of untold yarns from Saskatchewan and Manitoba to Georgia’s live oaks, Texas’ pecan groves, Mississippi’s vast river bottoms, Illinois’ Egypt, Indiana’s Dunes and the Blue Ridge.

Allen has been called “the incomparable reporter” by his editor, Bernard Matthys. Collier Smith once said “you can smell the horse sweat and almost hear a hassling dog” when you read Bill Allen.

Funny, touching, revealing as well as daring, the prose in this volume has a style and flavor that truly cannot be imitated and never surpassed in its love and respect for what Allen calls “the forgotten little dog, so often eclipsed by human egos”.

In this volume, the author leans heavily on the feeble efforts of men to match the heroics of their canine charges. He lays bare his own ineptitude and “learning curve” along with accurate accounts of his own errors alongside the triumphs of his friends.

A fond critic once said of Allen reporting a trial that “if there was no appreciable drama, he would craft one for the report that rivaled Shakespeare, Chekhov and Arthur Miller....”

In this volume, there is mostly farce and hilarity and no dark matching of conflicting adversaries. Like Walt Kelly’s Pogo, Allen has seen the circus and it is us.

_____________________________________________________________________

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On the morning of March 9, in a cotton field just outside Hernando Mississippi, on the (Leslie) Anderson Place, Eddie Mack Farrior shook me awake and said:

“You want to see her now?”

“Hail Farr, Ed Mack,” I mumbled, “a feller’s hafta be crazy AND drunk to take a dog out this morning. I already looked out!!!”

“Let’s go,” he said, his Hallmark Trademark Adam’s Apple bobbling in delight.

“It’ll be a real test!” I admit to having had favorite dogs when I began in trials. I had a derby the same year Warhoop Jake was a derby, and I saw him. He was nonpareil. He was as good as ever lived. I saw him win and I saw him robbed. I saw Jake win one-course trials on liberated birds and I saw him win on the wildest birds in the rottenest conditions. He was also a “Fountainhead.”

I asked Eddie Mack to find me a Warhoop Jake dog. He said he had a white and black bitch, less than two. He brought her to Hernando. The ground was like permafrost, with a layer of sleet under five inches of snow. The big cotton stalks, Mississippi sized cotton stalks—had a good inch of ice around stalk and branches. It was a bright morning and the field looked like miniature jeweled trees in perfect rows.

Sue was straining at the leash. We couldn’t get mounts, so we were afoot.

“I’m gonna turn her loose,” Ed Mack said, “She’s never been lost.”

“You got more guts than money,” I laughed, “but, then, one never knows...”  Eddie Mack Farrior was notoriously F R U G A L!

Well, he unsnapped the leash and she filled the air with glittering crystals, running crossways of the huge cotton field’s rows, reminiscent of Texan Boy when he won the Free-For-All at Shuqualak.

On the other side of the cotton field, she whirled suddenly. I realized just then she had been racing down about a 10 mile per hour gusty breeze.

Now, this heartbreaking harlequin demon slid at point through a cotton stalk, and a close-knit covey burst up as she stayed, just a moment, and then powered off after the one she picked out....

Joe Hurdle, Florida Championship, Chinquapin Plantation, 1989. Photo: John Criswell

Presales of Bill Allen’s “The Unforgettables and Other True Fables” will be available through Strideaway in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!!

WITHOUT misquoting Tennyson and without attacking or impugning the motives, character, literacy or parentage of anyone living or dead, this writer would like to relieve himself of a burden of thought that has been abuilding for many months — several years, indeed.

It is with great regret that this piece is offered without rib shaking anecdote or without circumlocutionary diatribe, but with the same sincerely ingenuous (not ingenious) interest with which Jonathan Swift offered his “A Modest Proposal” to a jaded empire once on a time...But it may be nevertheless entertaining.

First of all, I would lead you through a remembrance or so. Whether it was at the age of seven (as in my case) or at the age of 27, all of us at one time or another were exposed to a bird dog for the first time. In order to understand the question posed by this piece, we must first of all and firmly establish this experience in our minds, and upon it build the rest of our experience with bird dogs.

Hypothetically, let’s postulate that the first bird dog we saw was old Jake, with a knot on his nose and a hump on his head and a tendency to crouch the closer he got to game. He was broke to a farethee-well. How did he get that way? In succeeding years we found out.

I found out by crawling through briers, honeysuckle and gallberry swamps to flush birds for the grown-ups and then, occasionally becoming very disturbed when younger less well-taught “Jakes” flushed the birds before I could and I got blamed for it because, surely “that dog wouldn’t run up a bird ahead of you, son.”

So let’s say that we broke some dogs. How long did it take? It varies with the dog, you say? Ah, yes, but at what age would you say that a dog — pointer or setter, now — would be ready to fulfill every mission you had attributed to his ability? At what age is a dog absolutely foolproof? We are talking about dogs now — hunting dogs.

Now with the answers to these questions in mind, let’s settle down to the investigation of the institution known as the Derby stake. The effort here is to stir up thought, not controversy. It seems to me that a Derby should be a Derby within the age limits designated; however, this is not the purpose of this piece. It is the increasing pressure on the dogs entering their Derby year that is disturbing to me, and the consequent loss of great young dog flesh. No matter how anyone is able to re-direct the attention of the judiciary to potential, instead of explicit performance, the fact will remain that if one Derby knocks and chases a covey and another had clean work and Derby A then has a good find which is matched again by immaculate Derby B, and both have comparably excellent races, then Derby B will win.

True, and I say that the Derby that runs like a Derby and has two finds without error has more potential that day than the one which runs comparably and makes an error. But, still, until the Derby championship competition begins in January, nowadays, more Derbies that point and handle birds flawlessly, and run nice, forward, limited patterns win Derby stakes than the ones which are exhaustive, vibrant, alive, fiery and unpolished. This encourages the whispers and sniggers about overage dogs in Derby stakes, unbreakable old mavericks in puppy stakes and a never-ending flow of winning Derbies which wilt away and are never heard from again. I don’t know when olden days began and stopped, but even I can remember when Derbies won Derby stakes. 

Back to part-time attendance at field trials, covering them for a daily newspaper, I began to do some grouse hunting in the Nantahala and Chattahoochee National Forests in north Georgia and North Carolina.

Very few people of my immediate acquaintance did this in those days, and it was the last hunting I ever did that was bloodthirsty by nature.

Since two birds in a day’s hunting by two men was a bonanza to celebrate, I did the population no damage.

But I did learn two things. The grouse you hear drumming and that you see pecking around the logging roads left by the Ritter Lumber Co., at the turn of that OTHER century, are not the same ones that we hunted in season.

Those birds that aped my Buff Orpington pet hens were seeking cohabitation or were drunk on fermented grapes.

Never did I own a dog that “quit” in the hunt. But I had one good setter that just lost interest when the third bird he pointed flew ‘way down the cove almost to the creek for the third time.

Looking back on my brisk but close hunting Nemo brittany, I must say that some dogs are just temperamentally equipped to learn grouse hunting and some are not.

How the Texas Traveler, son of ol’ Jimmy, the Texas Ranger won the 1947 Grand National Grouse Championship, is a testament to the fact that Jack Harper’s great dog DID bring brains back to one pointer line.

Grouse hunting takes more brains than I had in those days. What I learned in those mountains is that, hunting ruffed grouse, you must have a truly gifted dog. Use of wind direction, whirling messages in the steep coves, caution in the rhododendron “slicks” are all necessary. And, a bell that stops its noisome trill. Definitely not something a dog or a man can learn in brief exposure.

We left me in my usual state of quandary in those days, caught between Guy Stancil who was thoroughly convinced one could selectively breed a dog that would want to stay in front of a horse galley and Buddy Williamson, who believed that malleability could be selectively bred, but that his fine hand was necessary to “make” a class bird dog.

My next years, stretching from 1948 to 1976, never completely settled that argument in my mind, for I saw many dogs who would not cast behind a gallery. But in the nature/nurture argument of the ages, I never wandered far from the natural view.

Immediately following the above recorded colloquy, I followed these men and others, to the feet of folks who seemed to be sorcerers in disguise. Ches Harris was a giant from Alabama by way of Big Cabin, Oklahoma. Herman Smith was short of stature, huge of heart, a former market hunter from the Virginia Blue Ridge. John S. Gates, who kenneled at Philema, near Albany, Georgia, was originally an Alabamian, now embedded in the Plantation wonderland of southeast Georgia. George Crangle, a New Yorker and a grouse hunter, was now located in Burke County, Georgia, near Waynesboro. A Hoosier, E.A. “Red” Weddle, worked around Dublin, Georgia.

These men had dogs that literally hunted ahead, many times out of sight until they struck scent and located game. In a phrase of those days, they “ran off...but not QUITE!!!”

(Author’s Note: Our two prior installments were presented in “third person” because much of the material was objective and common to at least the two youths, if not, indeed’ general knowledge collected by many in similar circumstances. The remainder of the Odyssey is much more subjective, personal and grist for debate. Therefore, I have chosen to retreat into a comfortable mythic “first person” style. I can DO that since I am doing the composing. And my comfort is extremely important.)

World War II was over, and strange changes had occurred by 1949 in Georgia and in quail hunting.

In the first place, it was widely and wildly rumored that some fools in south Hall County, angry at nocturnal fox hunters releasing more foxes in the area, had trapped several grey fox, infected them with distemper, (omnipresent in those days) and released them, willy-nilly.

Whether or not this was true, there was a steep diminution of foxes in the Piedmont area I knew.

But...and here I had my first intimation of the “Bounties are Bunk” standard of which I have since been a stalwart bearer...the quail were gone, too. 

Most of the fox’s prey were enemies of the upland game bird also. It was all out of kilter. Then, there came the fields of crimson clover and the planting of myriad pine trees. Pastures went all the way into the woods, eliminating “edge”. There was no cotton, and very little corn.

Most of the quail we found were close to the barns, outbuildings and houses. And their “crops” held less seed and more insects.

Now, we put the dogs in the trunk and went from site to site, “spot-hunting”. In cold weather, they had time to gnaw the wires and we got warned for not having brake lights.

We moved out of the Hills, toward the coastal plain, and we heard about an organized hunting competition called “field trials”. My mixed group of hunting partners were not interested, but I was.

An early influence was a former big track race car enthusiast and Studebaker dealer named Guy Stancil. He had some young pointers he ran in trials. He introduced me to a bachelor gravel-and-rock hustler named R.J. “Buddy Williamson, who lived on what I called “PlumNelly Creek” because it was plumb out of my county (Gwinett) and nearly out of Fulton (Atlanta). He had some good hunting area within his reach on Sopalding Drive.

Guy and Buddy began instructions in field trial dogs, and that magical phrase of Bill Brown’s, “You can have more fun with a live quail than you can with a dead one...”

Next, I subscribed to the American Field magazine.

Before they parted company, not to hunt together again, Bill and James picked up some hunting habits that were not all bad.

They carried extra socks and fatback in cat head biscuits that would keep well and stick to the ribs, thighs and calves. They carried a slip collar and a short lead in case they needed to “correct” a dog.

On one hunt, Bill took a swipe at the skull of a third party’s pointer bitch running in front of Monk on point. It was in THIS exercise that he learned that a pointer’s occiput is tougher than Circassian walnut gunstocks. His weapon was splintered at the tang by the blow; the bitch did not blink; her owner was excluded from the hunt, and James did some shooting on the way home, allowing Bill two singles.

Consulting with their elders, they learned that a flaring temper has no home in a hunting party. Monk was withdrawn and Bill, disarmed and dogless, spent hours soaking rawhide, punching it with an awl and lacing it around the splintered, separated stock. There was some trimming to do—of rawhide and splinters, but when it dried, the gun was shootable. Barely.

But Bill had to sell a lot of Saturday Evening Post magazines to pay for a new stock. It was NOT Circassian walnut, and had no cheekpiece either.

One of the first things they learned was to never strike a dog with any limbs of one’s own body, bare. Too “personal”. They were reduced to using hunting caps when they were beltless. Both the youths wore overalls with many pockets. Before they went away to college, they both learned that Carhartts turned briars best.

And they were instructed to never assume that because they got all their own correction in the general area of their backsides, they were NOT to direct DOWN on a dog, or strike him on his back. Better correction was achieved by holding the dog up by the collar and..even with a hunting cap or leash...fan UP at the chest.

They never had a dog or a puppy cringe or melt or “go down” on point. The dogs these young men were raised with only crouched when they hit rich scent suddenly or birds flushed in their faces and they crouched and rose. That was where Uncle Pat and Jack were somewhat different...even estranged...from other meat hunters in the area.

They ingrained in the boys, the attitude that quail just tasted better when the dog had something called “class”.

Class was more than standing tall, though. The gait of the dog had to show genuine happiness. Monk got demerits for nosing around on the ground while the setter bitch, Kate was praised for her high-headed, sifting of even the deadest air. It was a sign, the tutors said, that her scenting acuity was “higher on the scale.”

What scale?

Uncle Pat had his own theory about that. He used what he called the “sound cycle” scale to explain it. Today, he might be enthused to use the entire electromagnetic scale.

The human voice, he said, was limited, unless you were dealing with opera singers like Caruso and Madame Galli Curci, or with Al Jolson and Ethel Merman. They had a different, richer scale. More cycles that 6,000 I think he said.

But we can HEAR them.

Then, comes radio, which is in the double digit thousands of cycles, and we need radio sets to decipher the waves. Even higher in cycles, were the short wave broadcasts that Wendell Power got of Hitler and the British Broadcasting Company. Very special, different decoders, called short wave receivers were used to unravel THOSE waves.

He said scent was the same and that man just cannot “smell” the scent of a rabbit or a coon or a possum or a quail...all of which left what he called “beads” and what we know is a sort of effluvium, peculiar to each specie.

Some dogs decipher scent at a lower threshold than other dogs, and do so under different weather conditions and in different cover.

Sensitivity to meager traces of a specific game bird scent also was a mark of elevated “class” the boys learned.

Kate used her olfactory acuity by thrusting her nose into the upwind like a magic wand and locating coveys from as far away as the width of a football field on some days. Monk plodded, his nose close to the cover. He never missed a running single. He could, at times, cut them off, his claim to fame: never flushing a bird.

And, as James went to Annapolis and to the Pacific, and their partnership was sundered, Bill was led to other partners and tutors to delve deeper into these mysteries of “class”.

Red clay crenelated with upthrust ice scrunched underfoot.

Thistles bobbed and broom sedge waved gallantly in the chill northwest wind from the pond. 

The punkin-eyed setter and the jug-headed old pointer emptied out and trembled in the early rosy light of a clear January denim sky as the two boys began their first unchaperoned quail hunt together.

The setter, “Jack” was Bill’s. The pointer, “Monk” was a joint project, with fellow feather-fin-and-fur chaser James.

These two throwbacks to 1880 were pledged to a pre-World War II regimen of restricted shooting...at quail, mostly. They were shooters from their earliest days in the woods, beginning with Daisy BB guns and guilty of stubborn destruction of songbirds for too long.

Then, Bill’s Uncle Pat and James’ Dad, Jack opened the secret door of upland bird hunting and that most seductive of all esoterics, the pointing dogs.

Youngsters, whatever else they do, are vulnerable in the area of “secrets”.  So, despite the fact James had winged a barn pigeon in flight with a 22 rifle and finished it with a second shot, both young men succumbed to the mystery of the amazing dogs that located bunched up “coveys” of plump Bob Whites with the majesty of an untaken step.

Years later, James, who became an Admiral, confessed his .22 was loaded with rat-shot that scattered like a shotshell when he downed the pigeon. Even so, he was the better shot, always.

These two were never allowed to take the dog for granted. They were guided by their mentors to check the wind and the “glass” as their guides called the barometers on their porches, for threatening “lows”.

Without effort, they just drifted into wood wisdom without realizing it, but about directing and correcting the pointing dogs, they were instructed more by the dogs than by any heavy-handed adult.

So, by the time they set out on that January morning when Jack pointed in the edge of a sedge field, Monk honored with a back, and they each took a cock bird, the two were “boys” in the field no longer. They took two more singles located by Monk and went on toward the Little Mill looking for another bevy.

What morphed these two typically bloodthirsty children into restrained “sportsmen” who chose not to wipe out a covey of quail?  It was a sentence Uncle Pat Greer picked up from reading the American Field, words from the great William F. Brown:

“You can have a lot more fun with a live quail than with a dead one...”

So the world took a couple of turns or so, and Bill, who did NOT become an admiral—or much of anything else important —went to work for Bill Brown as a “reporter” for the FIELD.

The pressing theme here is that when a youngster sees and feels the mystery of the pointing dog, and marches to all the myriad nuances of training and presenting a field trial performance, he is never a bloodthirsty killer again.

Field Trialers in the 21st century need to take ownership of this truth and sketch recruitment strategies accordingly.

You're rolling in at sunset with a truck of restless dogs
And the whistling wind comes, sounding rather scary.
Unlock and open camp, then light the lanterns and the stove.
And we'll face another summer on the prairie.

Tomorrow we will cull them. And you'll say your string’s the worst,
But, of course, it’s far from extraordinary.
Some mornings on the check-cord and some hunting of young chicks,
And they’ll carry all their days the mark of “Prairie.”

You'll wrench an arm—and bounce—when your brainless nag departs
After dropping you kerplunk—(you were unwary)
A skunk gets you from one side and a porcupine the other
If you dismount haplessly upon the prairie.

Your best dogs point them, too, and there's little you can do
To correct their “varmint finds”—unnecessary.
If hail and twisters lay and you find the birds today,
You may still get something done out on the prairie.

The summer speeds away and you feel you've come to naught.
Then your dogs show form that’s due next January.
When the money trials come up, you don’t place a single pup,
So you fold your camp and vow to shun the prairie.

But, dreaming, longing nightly for the blue flax fields in bloom,
When your Junetime state-side life is sedentary,
You’ll jam the truck with gear and set your wheels for northern roads,
Toward the hopes, dreams—and mirages—of the prairie.