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Should We?

March 30, 2024 | Short Stories | Comments

Hurricane Hattie had requalified with a third place in the last qualifier of the season. Should they enter her was the question occupying her owner, Sam Slade, and handler, Mack Bain. Both were ambivalent and unsure of their judgment on the issue. Hattie was nine years old. She had won the National Championship as a four-year-old. Could she go the three hours now was the issue. Both Sam and Mack judged she could, but they worried about the toll it might take on her. Neither wanted to shorten her good years left. She had won four major all-age championships for them and the Purina All-Age Dog-of-the-Year Award the season she won the National. Why stress her? both asked. Read more

Leaving the Circuit

March 25, 2024 | Short Stories | Comments

Harley had recognized he had a problem soon after he regained consciousness. Lying on his back, he felt first the warm breath of Chester, his favorite dog horse, on his face. Opening his eyes, he looked up into Chester’s big kind ones. Slowly, his mind cleared. He had no memory of hitting the hard North Dakota prairie. Perhaps Chester had stumbled, but he seldom did. His ability to see and avoid holes of all kinds had endeared him to Harley all their decade together, that and his smooth gaits, flat walk, running walk, fox trot, slow lope, canter. Chester had been a good—no, a great, dog horse. Read more

Perfect Race

March 19, 2024 | Poetry | Comments

Have you ever handled A perfect race? One where your dog goes To every bird-blessed place Where the front’s All he wants to seek And he reaches for it In one constant sweep Read more

Rained Out

March 11, 2024 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments

Ben Reach enjoyed nothing more than a rained-out day at a major field trial. A day when participants had no choice but to sit around a clubhouse and wait to see if the rain would lift enough to resume the running. Today he was at Paducah, where a decade or two before he had ridden more than once as a judge or reporter on Thanksgiving weekend for the Invitational or right after for the Kentucky Quail Classic and Derby. Today it was 45 degrees F with rain falling steadily. A log fire roared, lunch was over, and hope was slim for more running today. Read more

The Scout

February 29, 2024 | Short Stories | Comments

He was a mystery man. None on the circuit knew him or where he came from, who his parents or other kin were, where he had been before he showed up at the Ames Plantation one February pulling a small goose-neck horse trailer holding three dog horses with a five-year-old diesel dually bearing New Mexico plates. His voice betrayed no accent or region’s twang; his complexion and facial features could have been guessed to reveal a mixture of all or some of several races, white, hispanic, black, Native American, oriental, which and in what proportions was anyone’s guess Read more

First Placement

February 22, 2024 | Poetry | Comments

It was likely at A one course trial Held on a weekend Close to home Read more

Call Em Back

February 13, 2024 | Poetry | Comments

Of all the words I hate to hear We are calling back two Are the worst by far Read more

Last Trip to Grand Junction

February 4, 2024 | National Championship, Short Stories | Comments

He woke alone in the trailer, a single-wide on concrete blocks on a rented half-acre lot on a dirt road off Route 32 ten miles east of Leesburg. Jess Clark looked at the calendar, taped on the refrigerator door, where he marked off the days with a pencil stub on a string, and read in the first un-Xd block, “February 11, Sat.” He turned the left burner eye on the two-burner stove to high to heat water for coffee and put the enameled steel pot on it. There is something I must do today, he told himself, and strained to remember. Read more