Parts of our country are a natural fit for game birds and bird dogs. Richmond County, North Carolina, is one of them. Robert Ruark, widely known for a career of outstanding writing including The Old Man and the Boy, worked as a newspaper stringer in the town of Hamlet. The nearby town of Hoffman is the home of the J. Robert Gordon Sandhills Field Trial Grounds, a 58,000 acre tract of longleaf pines, lovegrass, and a bobwhite quail course.
For decades, some of the most famous bird dogs have run the course, and many a young pup has come into his own here. Even New Englander Corey Ford headed to North Carolina in the winter when his grouse and woodcock coverts were frozen solid. Richmond County is more coastal plains than Piedmont which makes it to birds and bird dogs as George’s Bank is to fish and fishermen.
I had come to the town of Ellerbe to visit my wife’s family, which is big enough for me to wish that they all wore numbered jerseys and that I had a team roster. On this February trip we kept dinner to a short list of Uncle Herbert, Aunt Annette, and Pastor Wayne, another uncle. After dinner we headed across town to visit with our good friend Bill Webb, who was going to let us run our setters on his farm.
The best way to describe Bill Webb is to borrow the description usually reserved for Mark Twain; ”known to everyone, liked by all.” He’s a lawyer by trade. A long time ago, Bill’s grandparents raised peaches, tobacco and a wide variety of crops that ranged from sweet potatoes to peanuts. Through traditional farming practices Bill has transformed the farm, and created a quail Valhalla in the process. There are coveys of wild birds scattered throughout the fields of Egyptian wheat, milo, wiregrass, broomsedge, Johnsongrass, and bicolor lespedeza. The Webb Farm is so perfect it causes the heart of even the most discriminating quail hunter to flutter.
At the Webb Farm there are dogs, lots of dogs. Most are muscular pointers but there are setters, too. Head guide and dog trainer Wade Meachum trains them all, and he comes by his love of bird dogs honestly. His father, in addition to being the pastor of the Methodist Church was a renowned bird dog man. That meant when Pastor Meachum stepped into the pulpit on Sunday mornings it was common for parishioners to hear a sermon liberally sprinkled with bird dog, quail, and gunning references.
When W.H. Auden said, “in times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag,” I am positive he was describing my wife perfectly when she met Albert, an English setter, during om visit. Albert was Bill’s stately five-year-old tricolor, and he could barely walk. A torn ligament in his front leg confined him to hobbling about in a knee-to-foot cast. It’s always a difficult decision of what to do when a working dog comes up lame, but in this case Albert was well cared for by Bill and Wade.
It’s a good thing my wife doesn’t play poker because she’d lose every hand she was dealt. It was all over but the shouting when she laid eyes on old Albert. There are points in life that just stand out from all others, and this was one of them. Angela was smitten.
That feeling is probably what prompted Bill to recommend that we bring Albert home to Massachusetts, and expose him to a softer, gentler life. Bill thought it might be good if Albert enjoyed the cool ocean breezes in the summer, and became part of a covert rotation for grouse in the uplands and for woodcock in the lowlands. We could return in the winter for bobwhite. Compared to the long days that he’d become accustomed to, Albert would be a dog of leisure.
I was flattered by Bill’s generosity. What a kind thing to offer, and it made some sense. Then I ran some quick numbers. Two female setters, two heat cycles each per year, three weeks at a clip and it all adds up to 12 weeks of madness. With a busy career and two kids in middle school the last thing I needed was to spend a Friday night apologizing to the neighbors for a dog barking non-stop. It’d be easier to breed our dogs with someone else’s male and forgo the stress and strain. Call me a stick in the mud, but I said no. We went on with the hunt and had a great time. And while nobody said boo about my decision, I could tell that there was a pall in the air.
A few months passed and Bill called with an update. The vet had given Albert a clean bill of health. His cast was removed and the new project for Bill and Wade was to rehabilitate old Albert. The setter was six years old now and, since he was hobbling, they started with short conditioning sessions which involved a lot of swimming in the ponds. Bringing him back was a slow project, but after being cooped with a cast in the kennel Albert was a good student and happy to be liberated.
While Albert was rehabilitating in Ellerbe, North Carolina, there was a parallel change and development going on in our Massachusetts home. My daughter Morgan had taken quite a liking to bird hunting. Her interest piqued in the summer when I began working out the dogs for the upcoming season. Morgan was fourteen, a perfect time to get fully involved. She joined me in working them out three times a day, cooling them off in the ponds, and feeding and grooming them. Our dogs were seasoned veterans, and it was a good place for her to start learning.
In October we went to our New Hampshire grouse and woodcock coverts. Every weekend, Morgan was awake and ready in the predawn darkness way before her alarm clock rang. She neither complained about the challenges of a grouse and woodcock covert, nor bemoaned water going over the top of her boots while fording a seep. She remembered her riding gloves for when the temperatures dropped, and an extra pair of socks when her feet got wet. She fit her hunters’ safety course in after soccer practice and before homework, and by the end of the season she had borrowed one of her mom’s shotguns to carry unloaded through the woods. Some more practice on a skeet field and she was good to go.
All the while there was something that kept nagging at me. Truth be told, I liked Albert too. He was growing on me. T wouldn’t say that I was sold on the idea, but I wasn’t as closed off to it either. Maybe that’s all it took, seeing him one time. Maybe Albert was just that kind of dog.
Well, grouse and woodcock season ended up north and in December we were ready to head back to North Carolina. We decided that Morgan was going to accompany us on her first quail hunt. I thought she’d enjoy hunting with Bill and Wade, and take special comfort in hunting an area where her family grew up. She’d get to see a professional kennel with dozens of dogs, and different breeds, too. I figured she’d enjoy hunting without getting all tangled up, and bombing around in a quail wagon is always great fun. Within a half hour of arriving she asked to see the famous Albert that her mom raved about.
Bill and Wade introduced Morgan to Albert. He was fit and trim, moving all around and wagging his tail. Setters as a breed are biddable dogs, and he was happy to get a pat. Maybe he was thinking that he was going to load up and go hunting. Or maybe he had a good sense about Morgan.
Like bees and honey, peas and carrots, and cookies and milk, so it was with Morgan and Albert. Morgan loves dogs, but there was something about old Albert that just clicked. It was love at first sight, just like it had been with Angela.
A little time passed fussing over the dog before we regrouped to hunt some birds. I had loaded our dogs into the kennels on the mule and Wade added a few of his pointers and his favorite Irish lab, Finn. Then I surprised even myself and said, “I’d love to see Albert work. Can we take him out this morning?” “Albert? He’s already loaded up. It’s his day to work.”
When Wade smiled T laughed. What are the odds of our arriving on a day when it was Albert’s turn to run? Clearly it was my lucky day, and I vowed to buy a lottery ticket on the way home. I just knew I would win big.
Bill let us put our dogs down first. They found and pointed a bunch of birds. The heat was about 45 degrees warmer than what they were used to, and after an hour they started to tire. We watered them, and it was Albert’s turn. He was paired with a good looking all white setter named Bubba. They worked well as a team, and I watched closely as Albert worked the fields. His focus was sharp, his drive was intact, and he put on a half dozen miles of running without so much as a limp. I liked the way he quartered, he was patient around birds, and his points were staunch. All of Bill and Wade’s dogs are good, and Albert was really good.
After our hunt, Bill pulled me aside and asked again if I would like to take Albert home. It was a cause for celebration when I said yes.
I had changed my mind for a variety of reasons. A third dog, and a male, would make life around two un-spayed females a ruckus for a few times a year. Retooling vehicles to accommodate additional dogs would be a shift, too. Expanding a kennel would require tin1e that we didn’t have, but we would make it.
What made the decision finally is that faith, hope, and charity overruled logic and practicality. I had faith that when Morgan told me she was going to rise to the challenge and take total care of Albert that she would follow through. She was like her mom, committed, and for me that was a conviction without fact.
I had hope. I tossed out any of the doubts or worries that come from another dog because I knew that after the initial adjustment everything would work out just fine. People don’t always get what they want, but they get what they need. The magic is when what you get what you need which is also what you want. That was the case with Albert.
And that charity didn’t just come from Bill giving Albert to us. It came from his understanding that there was a much bigger purpose at hand. It came from feeling that it wasn’t just the right thing to do – for a girl just getting into bird hunting it was about as warm, generous and joyful a gift as a gift could be. I’m just glad Albert wasn’t a Tennessee walker.
I know I’m not the guy to try and work with old Albert. He’s got a way of doing business, just as I have a way of doing business. I don’t have the aptitude to change the old boy from a professional hunting dog who runs 13 miles a day into a house dog who lives in a kennel and hunts aggressively for a few months of the year. That job is best done at the hands of someone far more capable than me, I can think of no one better suited to the task than Morgan.
We left Bill Webb and the farm, and Albert for that matter, too. Not for good, just for a while. We had some prep work to do before bringing Albert home. There was a yard to clear and some land to level. A concrete foundation needed to be poured. We’d need to re-engineer the truck with kennels so that we could accommodate all the dogs.
A dog box would go in Morgan’s room, and there would be new collars to buy. The owner’s name on the brass plate would not be mine. It would be Morgan’s. We’d be picking up Albert soon and I can’t wait.