Long Time Leaving (44 page)

No, no, I said, language is
a physical
thing; it is right and proper for
beat
to pick up a stick. She couldn't grasp, so to speak, my point. She should have been at the field trials.

At the field trials, the marshals say, “Hold your horses” every few minutes. And back in 1979, I heard some other old expression used quite literally. But then it slipped my mind. For thirteen years I tried to remember it. Last year, I went back to the field trials looking for it. That year, Jerry was a staunch and responsible figure who jumped into a pond where somebody else's horse was drowning and pulled out his knife—
what was he going to do with it?—
and slashed the girth so he could pull off the saddle and the lightened horse could get his head up above the surface. I was there last year on the Friday afternoon when the all-time field trial gallery record was set: 1,511 people, many of them full of beans.

So there was plenty of “Hold your horses” last year, but I never heard that second figure of speech. It kept bothering me. I went back again this year.

Let me explain how the field trials work. Well, I don't know how they work, but I know this much:

The national championship—this year's was the ninety-fourth annual—is the culmination of a year of field-trial competition around the country, during which thirty or forty dogs qualify to vie for a $13,000 purse plus sizable side bets and possible future enshrinement in the National Bird Dog Museum and Field Trial Hall of Fame, which is down the road from the Ames Plantation. The national championships begin in the middle of February and go on for as many weekdays as it takes for all the qualified dogs to go out and demonstrate, over a fifteen-mile course, how classy and efficient they are at pointing coveys of quail. Two dogs go out at a time, one brace in the morning and one in the afternoon.

The dogs are accompanied by their handlers, their owners, the judges, the marshals, and any other fool who shows up on a horse. Me, for instance, and Ruff. This year, we were joined by my friend Vereen Bell, who teaches English at Vanderbilt University. Vereen says that from now on when his students demand to know his basis for grading their papers, he is going to read to them what is known as the Amesian Standard.

Mr. Hobart Ames was a sportsman who owned the Ames Shovel and
Tool Company of Easton, Massachusetts. In 1901 he bought a 13,000-acre Tennessee plantation for a country place and established it as the site of the championships. He also set down his standard, in plain words (big shovel-and-tool men wrote better back then):

I have to tell you that I would not know superior bird work if I stepped in it, so to speak. That's why the marshals have to keep telling the front-running members of the gallery to hold their horses, so they won't ride right through the superior bird work. But not many members of the gallery ever see the bird work. Most of them are way back in the rear engaging each other in impromptu races and occasional fistfights. Most of us gallery riders, in fact, do not come anywhere near meeting the Amesian Standard ourselves.

Two fine-looking dogs (almost all pointers these days, setters having largely been eclipsed) are unleashed. Their handlers ride along behind emitting lightly directorial yips. Then come the judges, steeped in Ame-sianism. Then the marshals (for years, the most prominent “Hold your horses” man was named Hamlet Yarbro—I hope someone said “Good night, sweet prince” at his funeral) and the registered nurse, who often has her work cut out for her. (From the herd.)

For the event's direct participants are followed by—depending on the weather—either a cloud of dust or a froth of muddy water, which encloses more people doing more different things on horseback—or muleback, in some cases—than you are likely to see anywhere else in our culture. Through creeks and thickets and bottoms and up and down hills we ride: a beautiful young woman riding bareback and barefoot (when it's warm); a man afflicted like Richard III loping smoothly although his spine is canted at a forty-five-degree angle to the right of his horse's; a soft-spoken Morgan Freeman-looking person named Rayfus Jenkins who has gold teeth all across the front and calls himself “the last of the black cowboys;” and a plethora of young bloods in the aforementioned Garth Brooks hats, some of them chasing runaway horses whose riders are nowhere to be seen.

Each morning or afternoon outing lasts three or four hours, and…

“Wait a minute, I don't want to give the impression that up around where the dogs are working, it is chaotic. Not there. No, there it is Ame-sian. A wild-eyed youth in a Van Halen T-shirt may ride to the fore and holler,
“Let's turn our hats around back'ards and LET IT LOOSE!”

But if he does, a marshal (who may well be a pistol-packing deputy sheriff) will say something quietly to him and he will say, “Oh. I didn't recognize you there,” and the marshal will say, “You do now,” and that will be that.

At the end of the ride, however, nobody but the judges knows how the dogs have scored. And the judges aren't telling until after the last day, when they quietly announce which dog has proved most Amesian. Back in the gallery, all we hear of the competition is an occasional laconic rumor: “unproductive” or “dogs backed each other.” We do eventually learn which dogs have found how many coveys, but chances are that the gallery has shaken the earth so much that most of the birds have dispersed before the dogs got to them.

Until recent years, the gallery seldom amounted to more than a hundred or so enthusiasts. But what with increased local affluence and exposure to the Country Music Association awards show, or something, more and more people these days manage to show up eager to exercise their horses and to ride out from under their hats and then dash back to pick them up and maybe shoot a bird (in the figurative sense) at another rider who then starts yelling, “What's
your
problem?” to which the traditional answer is, “I ain't
got
no problem, what's yours?” And so on.

There's a little country church along the afternoon-course route; people congregate there to take a few nips among the tombstones; last year Nita Howell and Duane Lax got married in the churchyard, on
horseback, and then “did what all field trialers do,” according to the
Field Trial Review,
“they finished the course.”

The National Field Trial Champion Association has been trying to come up with ways to limit the crowd. If it charged a fee for riding in the gallery or even for parking a van on the premises, the association would have to pay through the nose (so to speak) for liability insurance. As it is, the gallery is warned that it is riding at its own risk, which seems to please the gallery greatly. “It's a wonder,” Jerry Bolden observed last year, “that more don't get hurt than they do.”

Let me say that my figure-of-speech quest this year was no day at the beach. The first morning we rode, the temperature was 14 with a wind-chill factor of 6 below. And that was a wet, bone-chilling cold, my friends. We weren't riding appropriately gaited walking horses, we were riding Jerry's rodeo quarter horses, former bucking horses, in fact. They were used to rodeo turf and did not savor frozen mud. And they were used to going like lightning or not going at all. I was forever either urging my horse not to fall farther behind or restraining him from flinging me up and down, and he was forever responding to me the way people in France do when I try to convince them I am speaking to them in French.

At one point, Ruff and I shakily dismounted to ease our bladders. My feet were so frozen that I couldn't be sure when they hit the ground. As for my hands, I had to hold on to my horse's reins with the left one, and when I got my other glove off, my right hand was so numb that I couldn't tell whether I had ahold of my zipper or not. That hand was
objectively
icy, however, as I became aware when at length it blundered into contact with the requisite member—
it,
the latter appendage, proving quite capable of registering sensation, and…

Sometimes a dog will completely disappear in the middle of a field trial, according to Billy Fitch of Holly Springs, a co-owner of The Hitchhiker, the 1992 national champion. “Generally somebody will call to say they've found him—but only after he's been bred to every bitch in the county.”

(And I guess when he gets back home the other dogs ask him, “Where you been?” and he says, “Being bred.”)

But I'd like to see the man or dog who could be bred, outdoors, on a day like this one. I stood there shrinking, fumbling, coaxing—and Ruff's horse got loose, and I grabbed its tail, and my horse started moving in another direction, and if there is a figure of speech for such a crisis in “sustained demonstration of general behavior” (see Standard, Amesian)
as I found myself caught up in then (“on the horns of a dilemma” does not suffice), I had just as soon you keep it to yourself.

At the beginning of that first morning ride, one of the marshals had come out with a good one: “This is the kind of weather,” he declared, “that separates the kindling from the cordwood.”

Moments before, Vereen had employed a simile I'd never heard:
his
horse, he maintained (not having ridden it yet), was “as sweet as an angel eating pie.”

Those references, however, were figurative. No actual firewood or angels were in the picture. I might say that I awoke the next morning feeling like cordwood, except that cordwood, so far as we know, does not ache all over.

That second morning we just parked on one of the roads that cross the course and watched the procession go by. “When you see top-notch dogs from the front, as they go by, they give you a look like
“Hooo-eee,
it's cold. Y'all seen any birds?”

But we rode again that afternoon. Got to get back on that horse.

That wasn't the expression I was looking for, though. I decided I'd better go to the extreme journalistic length of interviewing someone. Mr. Joe Hurdle, president of the National Field Trial Champion Association. I asked him whether the quality of the competing dogs had changed over the years.

“No,” he said. “Looks like there's a few good dogs and a lot of sorry ones every year. But, then, you see a dog, and you say, ‘That's the sorriest dog in the state,’ and—we had one here a couple of years ago. Bluff County Mike. “Wouldn't think he had a chance. But he went out in the last brace and went and
won
the thing.

“Every dog has his day.”

P
eople—and by people here I mean veterinarians and poodle owners—keep telling me, get a poodle. Not the little toy ones named Bijou or Etienne but the large standard ones, who all seem to be named something like Robert. These poodles, I am told, are smart, cordial, healthy, and brave. I believe it. “When I meet these poodles,
I like them. Robert, and Howard, and Margaret. But I have been unable, so far, to find a very gratifying petting surface on a poodle. Where a poodle is fluffy, I can't get any traction, and where it's close-cropped it's like petting a nubbly carpet. I prefer a dog that is somewhere between a chicken and a baseball to the touch.

The most overexposed breed, in recent years, is the Jack Russell. Now I love a Jack Russell. Sixty-four ounces, or so, of concentrated dog. You would have to soak one for several generations in molasses or eggnog to plump it out into a Lab. Which is also a nice breed of dog, if you like a big smile on a dog, which I do, certainly, but a Lab is so on-the-nose. I like an edgier dog, which, heaven knows, a Jack Russell is. When I say Jack Russells are overexposed, I mean on television and in movies. Jack Rus-sells are irresistible, in photographs or on the screen. But to live with one is like living with a movie star who seems to be able to handle quite a lot of cocaine. You become Jack's sidekick, if, and this is a big if, you can keep up.

It comes down to this: every breed of dog has its pros and cons. So why not mix and match?

The most overrated dog is any purebred dog.
Your
purebred dog is an exception, but aren't a lot of the others sort of generic? You get a cairn terrier pup, you know it's going to be a cairn terrier. And let me say quickly that I have met some extremely engaging cairn terriers. But say you had a baby. Would you want to know already what it's going to look like when it grows up? “How about a Scottie child?” “I don't know; they're so chunky.” See what I mean?

And, of course, when a breed gets highly popular, it tends to become inbred and overbred. You have to get one from the right source, who I guess is somebody who weeds out the flawed ones, and who wants to be a party to that?

The most underrated dog is the hardy hybrid. Conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all dogs are created different. Offspring of a pug, say, who's had the gumption to go find romance with an open-minded bichon frise. That's not illegal is it? In
America?
Or a poodle-beagle mix. You don't have to call it a poogle or a beadle, call it Buster.

Even richer mixtures are readily available. My own practice has always been to visit the animal shelter and check out the polymorph puppies snoozing and tumbling there. Half the pleasure will be in wondering how in the world the one you choose is going to turn out. Gerard Manley Hopkins put it best, in “Pied Beauty” (I had a dog once named
Pie, who must have had as many different roots as the English language has):