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Text: Torsti Mäkinen, photo: Torsti Mäkinen & Maud Matsson
The day before yesterday we drove to a small village south of Östersund at the vicinity of their Great Lake to bring home a new ES puppy. The breeder seen above; Roland Ohlsson with the Ohlsmyrens kennel and his dogs, greeted us welcome. He has a fistful of dogs, both ES and Pointers. For years he has been most successful with his ES and Pointers and has produced a great number of field trial champions.
Long ago he started with "Stövare", the Scandinavian hare hounds. He made some extensive research on them considering the heredity of their working capability, using field trial statistics from all the Nordic countries. Very interesting, useful and educational stuff for every breeder. Roland is by the way a surgeon and hence knows a bit more about genes than the average guy.
At some point in time he got interested in bird hunting and started with pointers, but also more or less stumbled into an ES bitch "Siri", as seen in this painting together with her daughter "Freja". Siri is after the American import Equimark, as can be understood from the high tails. Siri came to be the ancestress to Roland's ES kennel. However, later, and very, very sadly, both Siri and Freja went through the ice side by side and drowned at the same time. When this happened there were tears in not only Roland's eyes, but many other eyes all around Sweden, including mine and Maud's.
Rolands first pointers Jo-Kells Etta and Jo-Kells Champagne as seen by the artist. Well, the rest of the photos speak for themselves, as we say in Swedish. Our puppy's mother FTCH Sue-Sine is a work-hardened, no-nonsense bitch and in addition she has the colors on her head that requires special light conditions to look good on a photo, so we did not get any good photos of her in the haste. My favorite in Roland's pack of dogs came to be Peggy-Sue that is the sister to our late and very unfortunate Sunnie Sunshine, her story can be found elsewhere in Torsti's corner. You may notice from the photos beneath that the warm feelings are mutual between me and Peggy-Sue, she is a lovely bitch, indeed! The kennel name of our new puppy is "Rospiga", that means a girl from the Swedish archipelago around the Sea of Åland. It soon crossed my mind that a good nickname would be "Snow White", the beautiful girl from a Disney story. Maud, a genuine "Rospiga", and me will probably fight the rest of our life's about what name to use... but then again... what the heck does it matter? In a few months Rospiga will have shown her talent and then we can work on her according to her ability. My guess is that she will become a great dog and also a good companion to Lärka who really has deserved a playmate after such a long period of solitary.
Rospiga already knows how to climb stairs.
Peggy-Sue jumped up to me without asking for permission and the lemon and white Simsalabim is begging for the same favor.
but she only wanted to be close, so close!
Since I could not manage Peggy, I let her manage me. This is how she wanted to treat me! BTW, the young Peggy wiped out all the competiton around her during the last field trial season.
Simsalabim is very much like our late Foxy. She even has the same "eye" when looking at me.
Peggy on my knee, Sue-Sine and Simsalabim at my side. How often can a poor man like me mix with such celebrities?
Rospiga together with her mother Sue-Sine for the last time. Most likely they will meet again quite soon. |
