Bob Cain and Booty Blevins
Was up in North Dakota
Their twentieth summer
Working bird dogs
They’d come up from South Georgia
Where they was based at
Where they lived in a single wide
When not on the circuit or training on prairie
Bob was the handler
Booty the scout
But in truth they was both
Bird dog Gypsies Read more
Blog
A Boy and a Derby
Ben Reach had a place reserved for the lad in his heart. He had promised the father to look out for the boy.
The father was Wally Steel, an all-age field trial trainer-handler based in Lee County who had died in his prime from lung cancer, cursed by his cigarette-smoking habit. At that time the boy, Sammy Steel, had been eighteen and apprenticing under his father, following the trial circuit fall to spring, training in North Dakota July to mid-September.
After Wally’s death Sammy had been trying to carry on with his string. Wally’s owners liked Sammy but were unsure he had what it took to make it. The four owners would give him a chance for a season with the dogs they had with Wally at his death, but placed no new prospects with him. Sammy had partnered up to travel in one rig with a contemporary of his father, Dan Eanes, also based in Lee County. Read more
Boyhood on a Mountain Farm
Bluegrass and clover
Blanket steep Appalachian hills and valleys
Greening in spring
Feeding cattle and sheep
They graze gain and bear calves and lambs
On our least-sloping land we plow harrow and plant
Alfalfa for hay
Then pray for rain
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Me and Horses
My history with horses is checkered. I stopped riding at field trials soon after waking up riding in Ray Warren’s pickup truck one Thanksgiving weekend, not knowing where or why I was there or who Ray was (or who I was).
I had fallen off a runaway borrowed horse at the Quail Championship Invitational at Paducah, Kentucky where I was reporting. Ray was taking me to an emergency room. Fortunately, I suffered only a mild concussion that day. The spot where I dishonorably dismounted is marked by a sign, “Tom Word’s Oak.”
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The Lucky Trade
Truck tires were still rationed and mostly unavailable. The War was over in Europe but not yet in the Pacific.
The first breakaway was at seven tomorrow morning at Pinehurst. Jess and Booty figured they could just make it if they drove all night. They did not know if they had a dog in the first brace but with six entered of a draw of about thirty Jess figured there was a pretty good chance they did. Read more
A Haunting Story
This story has haunted me many years. I do not recall where I first read or heard it. I do not know whether it is true or fiction or who wrote it.
They lived in a small frame house, unpainted, close beside the railroad track. They were black. The father was a feed-mill hand in the nearest town. He unloaded sacks of unground grain from farmers’ mule-drawn wagons and trucks, loaded sacks of ground and mixed feed back on them, and did whatever else the mill owner asked him to do. He walked along the track to and from work six days a week, three miles each way. Neither the father nor the mother could read or write but the son could. He was a diligent student. Read more
An Interesting Fellow
In the summer of 2015, I received a poignant hand-written message from a granddaughter of a former head dog trainer-quail hunt manager of a large quail plantation in the “Quail Belt” between Albany, Georgia and Tallahassee, Florida. She and the grandfather were unknown to me.
In her message, she explained that her grandfather, my age, had a bucket-list wish to attend the Florida Open All-Age Championship and observe it from atop the dog truck with me. She explained the grandfather had in the 1960s held his plantation post ten years, then when the plantation owner died returned to his home county in Northern Virginia where he spent the rest of his working years in the employ of an electric utility supervising a right-of-way maintenance crew. Read more
Illegal
Ben Reach had warned Pete-Bob Dix from the start not to embark on his quest to make money from “portability,” a feature of the federal estate and gift tax law since 2011.
Under portability, a spouse could give to a surviving spouse on death his or her unused gift and estate tax exemption. When Pete-Bob repeatedly asked Ben supposedly hypothetical questions about the portability rules, Ben said, “Do not ask me for advice about “portability.” Ben knew how Pete-Bob’s mind worked and thus the opportunities Pete-Bob saw in “portability” from reading about it in the Wall Street Journal. Read more
Minerva’s Rescue
Minerva was a pointer, seven years old. She was handled by Arch Reams, age seventy-five, and the last of a breed of handlers of the old school, who rode the pace set by the judges and mostly in sight of them and let a dog hunt ahead and make its pattern, hopefully to the front. He was quiet, sang with a voice Minerva heard but did not shout or ride frantically to turn her or see where she coursed over a hill ahead. Read more
A Good Bird Dog
A good bird dog
Is a gift from God
If you get one
You owe it care
You owe it time
When young to learn
To stay with you
And search the front Read more