by Tom Davis | Apr 24, 2025
Shadow is living proof that a pedigree is just a piece of paper, and that there’s ultimately no substitute for heart, guts and desire.
by Tom Davis | Mar 3, 2025
The Labrador retriever’s distinctions are many. If there’s one arena in which the Lab is utterly and incontrovertibly dominant, it’s retriever field trials. The most popular purebred dog in America; the most popular gundog, too: the Labrador retriever’s distinctions...
by Tom Davis | Feb 24, 2025
There are things in this world—rare, fine things—that no amount of money can buy. I’m not talking about intangibles: love, happiness, a satisfied mind. I’m talking about palpable objects of desire, things that exist in the realm of the senses but are simply...
by Tom Davis | Feb 24, 2025
The guy’s name was Charlie, I think. The one time I met him, at the now long-defunct Gustav Pabst Invitational Hungarian Partridge Shoot, he showed up in a Jaguar sedan with his German short-haired pointer riding shotgun. That was pretty cool, but what made an even...
by Tom Davis | Jan 28, 2025
Among the most accomplished outdoorswomen of her day, gorgeous Jane Mason inspired Hemingway’s nastiest femmes fatales.
by Tom Davis | Jan 7, 2025
It was a scene of primal, primitive savagery; it seemed like something out of a corrupted Moby Dick, with the inept, half-crazed Wolf in the role of Queequeg, the aboriginal harpooner who prided himself on his lethal professionalism. Below Elizabeth Falls, where it...
by Tom Davis | Dec 12, 2024
Askew’s Carolina Lady was, and is, the foundation female—the Eve, if you will—of the field-type Irish setter as we know it today. One day a friend of Ned LeGrande’s stopped by to visit him at his Willow Winds Farm, near Douglassville in southeastern Pennsylvania. At...
by Tom Davis | Dec 4, 2024
The greatest equine artist of all time, and arguably the greatest animal portraitist, was the 18th century Englishman George Stubbs. The toast of the town in his day, when the cream of British aristocracy beat a path to his door to have him paint...
by Tom Davis | Nov 22, 2024
Before there was an Eldridge Hardie, a Tom Quinn or a Bob Abbett; before there was a William Harnden Foster or a Percival Rosseau; even before there was an Edmund Osthaus or a Gustav Muss-Arnolt, there was John Martin Tracy. And J.M. Tracy, to use the name he signed...
by Tom Davis | Oct 10, 2024
It was the kind of heat that has weight—like an enormous hand pressing down. Every so often a puffy cloud would pass, obscuring the sun and providing a few moments of blessed relief. But then the sky would clear, the sun’s unblinking gaze would hammer down once again,...