What happened
This year at the Ames Plantation?
Was it bad birds
Bad weather
Bad feed?
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What Happened
Blog
In Defense of Sharecropping
Since Reconstruction Sharecropping
Has had a bad wrap
Landlords branded ogres
Tenants victims
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Turning Her Loose
You’re at Ames
Finally
You’ve been trying
For years
She won two
Firsts of an hour
To get here
Let ‘em go Read more
The National — As Seen By A Handler
Here we go
Three hours down
Please birds move
Come out of the woods
If you stay put
Where you roosted
In that stick stuff
My dog won’t point you
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Luck
Billy Kane had qualified Wheelman in the last one-hour open all-age run before the National Championship entries closed. He had not expected to. The first qualifying win had come two seasons before, and he had not expected that one either. Won it when the best dog’s brace-mate failed to back and it went with the thief after the birds. But here he was approaching the Ames Plantation, never expecting to be here. But his usual bad luck returned. Read more
Going to Ames
So your dog is qualified
And you’re going to Grand Junction
To run in The National Championship
The one and only
To run on the Ames Plantation
Where for a century and a quarter
The continent’s best bird dog has been yearly crowned
And where bird dog stories true and fiction abound
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End of a Partnership
John Ford had worked as an over-the-road-for-the-public-all-age pointing dog handler his last twenty years. For the last ten he had partnered on the road (“helpin’ each other,” the system was called) and for summer prairie training with Billy Green, whose career had mirrored John’s, the difference being John hailed from Georgia, Billy from Alabama. Each was forty-three, married with two teen-age children, and with a hard-working wife, John’s a nurse, Billy’s a sales rep for internet business services. Read more
The Call
The call came as a shock to Ben Reach, though he knew it could come any time. Carle Dixon was dead at age sixty, had fallen dead from his horse while handling in the North Dakota Open All-Age at Columbus. The cause was a burst brain aneurism, detected three years before during a cat scan following a horse wreck while checking for a concussion and inoperable. Read more
The Boys of the Road
The boys of the road
Follow a circuit
That starts way up north
As summer is ending
They’ve been up there
Since mid July
Training young bird dogs
And young riding horses Read more
Chinquapin Immortals
I reflect on Chinquapin After twenty-seven Florida Championships Reported there From 1995 through 2022 A piece of earth crafted From lime-rock and sand Covered in wire grass Jack oaks and sparse pines Sculpted uneven by The Master With an all-age bird dog in mind Its courses laid out in 1969 By Fred Arant nickname Goochy Since then it has served As a place to hunt quail And for a week Read more