The Irish Setter: A Victim of Its Own Beauty
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...
How Pomp Saved Our Christmas
The no ’count yellow hound which strays into camp turns out to have a nose after all and takes his place among the immortals.
Wolf Secrets
“Incoherent,” she paused. “The sick man was incoherent.” “Incoherent.” My left arm curled around the top of the page hiding a small scrap of paper. On the paper several words were written in tiny print. She continued with “incomprehensible,” “divisible” and 17 other...
A Good Dog Always Knows
Ain’t nothing to writing Papa Hemingway said, you just sit at the typewriter and bleed. I sat at the keyboard and cried for Zebo, damn near about shorted it out with my salty tears. It’s a twisted tale, as good tales are. Me and Miss Biscuits built a house on...
Lost & Found
Nothing about pulling a kennel from the back of my pickup and placing it on the ground in the jack pines’ shadows felt right. Tossing in a stinky t-shirt in the kennel was something you do with puppies not adult dogs. Leaving bowls of chow and water next to the open...
September’s Lessons
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,...
Black Dog Handlers
For the past 43 years, on the first Monday in March, after the close of bobwhite quail season on the fabled plantations of the Red Hills Region that that spans Tallahassee, Florida, north to Thomasville, Georgia, the invitation-only Georgia-Florida Shooting Dog...
25 Years of the Super Retriever Series
Spring rains in southeastern Georgia can be either a blessing or a curse. If they’re cold, then handlers running Labs will need a lot of layers to knock down the chill. If they’re warm, then the heat combined with high water levels will bring out the water moccasins....