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S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S • 173 T he folks at Wild Wing Lodge, tucked back in the hills and hollows of Western Kentucky, told me I'd find Ed Rader "workin' dogs in the bottoms." And I did. Striding smartly through the russet sedgegrass, a merry-tailed setter quartering ahead, he had an easy, loose-limbed gait that belied the fact that he'd long ago surpassed his Biblical allotment of three score years and ten. He was looking sharp, too, as he always does, sporting high-dollar rubber knee boots, a quilted suede jacket, and wraparound yellow shooting glasses— glasses perched atop a face so deeply lined by wind and weather that it could have been lifted from the side of a mountain. "Mr. Ed," I said, stepping out of my car and walking up to greet him. "It's been awhile." "Good to see you, Tom," he said, smiling broadly and engulfing my hand in his. Like many of the great dog men I've known—Bob Wehle and W.C. Kirk spring to mind—he has big, expressive hands, their knobbily enlarged knuckles testifying to decades of hard use. Ed's been wrangling animals all his life (he grew up on a farm in southern Indiana), and at various times he earned his daily bread running an auto body shop, building homes, and training dogs professionally. For fun he restores cars and handcrafts furniture. "God may not have made the Raders the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree," he GundoGs by Tom davis The "evangelisT of The e-Collar" has helped us all beCome more effeCTive Trainers. likes to say, "but He blessed us with the gift of being able to do things with our hands." That may be true as far as it goes, but trust me when I tell you that when Ed Rader trots out his "country boy from Indiana" shtick, that's just what it is. If the truth be told, he's one of the shrewdest, savviest cats you'll ever meet—and perhaps the gundog world's ultimate behind-the-scenes player. I think of Ed as one of the Three Wise Men of our sport, the other two being his close friends Delmar Smith and Bob West. His name may not be as familiar as theirs, but if you're involved in the hunting dog "industry" at any level, it's as certain as death and taxes that you've cut Ed's track somewhere along the line. And if you're a gundog owner who's ever used a variable-intensity e-collar, regardless of make or model, you owe Ed Rader a debt of gratitude. E d was one of the driving forces behind the establishment, in 1978, of the National Shoot-to-Retrieve Field Trial Association, taking a concept that had originated at the Conservation Bird Dog Ed Rader just might be the gundog world's ultimate behind-the-scenes player.