Ben Reach

Hunting Companions

September 8, 2022 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments

A covey lifted at Cyrus’s feet and flew out bunched and low. Cyrus fired quickly and Ben and Sam on the wagon saw a bird fall. At the moment of the blast all heard a yelp. The pointing dog’s bracemate had been backing from heavy cover thirty-five yards ahead in the line of Cyrus’s hasty shot. Cyrus had broken another of Sonny Eanes’ recited rules of the hunt: “Know where every one and every animal is before you shoot.” Read more

The Bad Summer

August 16, 2022 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments

For 130 summers they had trekked north in July to the northern prairies with their young bird dogs. They sought relief from the brutal southern heat, and the game birds that thrived on the vast open lands. For two months they worked their pupils early mornings and long late afternoons. The effect could be magic on a talented pupil, transforming a gangly pup into an accomplished all-age derby performer, that performer every trainer-handler sought but seldom found. Read more

Diss and Ace

August 2, 2022 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments

“What does diss mean?” Ben asked Joanne. “Disrespect, or a put down. Kids say it a lot.” “That clears things up,” Ben said. He had just got off the phone with Fred Carter, a bird dog trainer-handler worried about getting sued. He’d said an owner had dissed his scout, and that was maybe the cause of the incident that could get him sued by the owner. Later that day, Ben drove to Fred’s little farm to get more facts. He was greeted by ten kennel runs of barking bird dogs. Fred and his scout, Benny Blevins, were cleaning runs and preparing the evening’s feed for the dogs. Read more

Burn or Bury (A deadly serious story)

June 15, 2022 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments

Ike Slapp died after surviving two wives and leaving two daughters, one by each wife. Ben was fishing in Montana with Sam when Ike bit the dust, literally and figuratively. Ike’s older daughter took the bull by the horns and arranged Ike’s funeral and burial without consulting Ben or her sister. When Ben got home he found Ike snug in his coffin, buried in a local cemetery with (literally) his first wife. Read more

Long Leaf or Concrete

April 27, 2022 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments

It was a dread but familiar problem. How to solve it and satisfy long-waiting heirs and at the same time save a landmark of unique natural beauty was the challenge. Fred Fulton had owned Leaning Pine Plantation fifty years, bought it with the proceeds of his early and first big business deal. He had stewarded it lovingly since, even as urban development approached it relentlessly. Read more

Whatsleft Plantation

March 22, 2022 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments

Whatsleft Plantation enjoyed a special place in the hearts of Ben Reach and Sam Nixon MD. It lay on the edge of Thomasville. It had been in the family of its owner Frank Atkinson since 1880 when his great-grandfather discovered it while escaping Cleveland’s ice and snow and lodging at a fashionable Thomasville resort hotel, that day’s equivalent of The Breakers in Palm Beach. Read more

The Hand Off

March 21, 2022 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments

Fred Fox and Benny Carr had been partners thirty years. They had traveled the circuit each year, starting in Canada (later South Dakota), where they trained, in late August, then drifted south week by week. In December they’d begun the winter piney-woods season at the Georgia Open All-Age and Derby Championships, then worked the Florida, the Continental Derby and All-Age... Read more

The End

February 23, 2022 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments

It was at the Quail Championship Invitational, at the West Kentucky Wildlife Management Area, that lonely expanse of gently rolling neglected agricultural land surrounding a scary nuclear energy gaseous diffusion refinery and a coal-powered TVA electric energy generating plant on the bank of the Tennessee River, on the outskirts of Paducah, Kentucky. Read more

End of a Partnership

February 9, 2022 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments

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

February 2, 2022 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments

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