Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/528216
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 6 2 white dots on the horizon—I was so stiff and sore I could barely walk. Not that I've ever been mistaken for an equestrian. Indeed, over the years I've formulated what I call Davis's First Law of Working Dogs from Horseback: The only disadvantage is the requirement of the horse. For pros such as Huffman and Vincent, of course, saddles are essentially the offices where they conduct most of their important business. They sit a horse as comfortably as most of us sit in our recliners. One morning I watched Vincent draw abreast of a hard- running pointer and, in one smooth continuous motion, swing down from his saddle, clip a rope to the dog's collar, and swing back into the saddle again. When he saw that I'd been watching, he grinned and said, "Not bad for a gray-haired man." W e rose every morning in the black dark, gulping coffee and grabbing a granola bar before loading dogs and horses into trailers, driving a few miles, and parking wherever Huffman and Vincent had decided there was enough country to work all the dogs that needed to be worked that day. We'd turn loose just as the sun boiled up, the dogs streaking away as if shot from cannons, their handlers cantering after them, singing all the while. The first find would come with the prairies bathed in honeyed light, and we'd gallop to the spot to find a pointer standing tall, proud, and pop-eyed with intensity. Then the sharptails would rise, their snowy breasts flashing in the sun, and a pistol would go crack!, and the dog would stand motionless and resolute through it all until his handler Allen Vincent steadies a young pointer. Field-trialers agree that one summer on the prairies is worth two years anyplace else. grabbed him by the collar and whistled him on. There was the fire and abandon of the younger dogs and the poise and polish of the veterans; there were dogs with bright futures, dogs that could go either way, and dogs whose early promise had gone unfulfilled and whose owners had sent them north hoping for something like a miracle, one final shot at redemption. And that, finally, is what you come to understand: that as much as the prairies are about cool mornings and accommodating birds and wide horizons and all the lessons they have to teach a pointing dog, they're really about the more enduring currency of hopes and dreams.