Dog's Best Friend

At 63 he has a thatch of hair that is solid grey. But Alabama's Clyde Morton is as lean and tough as a bottomland sapling, and he still has a young man's grace when he swings a long leg over the saddle and rides out to the field trials to match his bird dogs against the best in the nation. Rival trainers unabashedly gawk when Morton and his pointers begin to hunt for quail in the South's winter-barren cornfields and amid the tufts of sedge and lespedeza. "Clyde Morton," says one owner, "is to dog trials what Babe Ruth was to baseball."

Morton not only has permanently retired ten of the sport's major trophies, but he has eleven times won the "world series" of field trials: the National Bird Dog championship, held near Grand Junction, Tenn., where the quail burst into the air like clouds of ash, and the loping dogs may cover up to 45 miles during a three-hour hunt.

"Whoa" & "Woof." Last week, busily at work with his year-old pointers, Morton explained the art and science of training dogs to hunt birds. "A dog has to learn to scent the body of the bird, not his track," said Morton, "or else he'll be pointing at where the bird was instead of where he is. If a breeze is blowing toward him, a good dog can pick up the scent of a bird 100 yards away.

"To teach a dog how to point, first you get him to stop when you say 'whoa.' A good dog will stop in mid-air when you say that and come down motionless. Then you watch for the little 'woof' a bird dog gives when he smells game. Every time he says 'woof' you say 'whoa.' Finally you teach him to hold the point. He'll hold it for half an hour or longer.

"The most important thing that a trainer ever finally learns is that dogs are like children--each one has to be handled differently. You get some of them to work by coaxing and some by whipping, but which ever way, when you're finished the dog has to want to work for you. When he stands on point, he should point like he's proud of his work and is ready to jump right in after the birds."

Field Honors. Son of a farmer-storekeeper, Morton has been working with dogs since he was a kid growing up in Myrtle, Miss. He started with the modest breed known locally as "potlikker hound," then traded his bicycle for two frayed foxhounds. At 19 Morton began training the teams of dogs that hunt bear through the canebrakes along the Mississippi--big hounds that run the bear into exhaustion, and darting terriers that hold him at bay while the huntsmen come crashing up. Says Morton: "Once, after we shot a bear we found a terrier named Frisco lying under him with a mouthful of bearskin and a look on his face as if to say 'Well, it's about time you got here.' "

Morton won his first National in 1933, came to earn $2,400 for handling a winning dog in a trial, developed champions that made as much as $14,000 in stud fees at $200 a pairing. By 1948 Morton and his wife Sibyl had saved up enough money to buy a 7,500-acre cotton and cattle plantation outside of Selma, Ala.

Even Dozen? Two years ago Morton stumbled while hunting and took the full charge of a 28-gauge shotgun in his groin. Given little chance to live, he was back on a horse in six months with some 125 pellets still in his body. "It doesn't bother me much," says Morton, "except I just can't bring myself to use that gun again."

These days Morton likes to pull on a black velvet hunting cap and ranter along after his pack of baying foxhounds. "I just like to listen to their voices and tell who's ahead and who's behind." He sells dogs to such fancy fanciers as former Treasury Secretary George Humphrey and British Cinemogul J. Arthur Rank, once turned down an offer of $8,000 for Palamonium, a liver-and-white pointer that won the 1956 and 1959 Nationals. In addition, Morton has his pack of some 25 pointers that he hopes will some day produce his twelfth National champion. "All in all," says Trainer Clyde Morton, "I'd say the plantation was worth about $1,000,000--and that's not bad for a farm boy from Mississippi."

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