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
Perfect Race
Blog
Rained Out
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
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
It was likely at
A one course trial
Held on a weekend
Close to home
Read more
Call Em Back
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
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
A Questionable Entry
We turned him loose
On “27” at 1:15
He cast to front
Was soon unseen
But Lordy Me
Our
Sung out far right
And it was he on point at 10 Read more
When I Was Young
When I was young
Til I grew old
I got my joy
From dogs afield
Dogs seeking birds
To point with style Read more
My Love Affair With Chinquapin
My long life (85 years) has been marked by good luck. None so great as meeting Ted Baker and gaining his invitation to report the Florida Open All-Age Championship which I did from 1995 through 2022. As a result, I watched the continent’s best all-age dogs in competition head to head annually over twenty-seven consecutive years on wild quail. Just think of it. Read more
A Derby
Billy Hanes had been a framing carpenter until rising interest rates choked the house building business around his native west Kentucky and he withdrew his savings, bought a four-year-old dually and a well used gooseneck livestock trailer he adapted to haul horses and dogs and lit out for North Dakota in June, hoping to find a place to train. He lucked on to that in a week of driving around and asking wherever he saw a roadside mailbox in likely looking territory. He had with him four green horses he’d picked up at a sale barn and a dozen dogs, half pups, half coming derbies, all pointers. Read more