Short Stories

The Set Up

September 23, 2018 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments

Ben got the call on his cell phone on Saturday morning, the first week in March, as he and Sam fly cast for bream from a Jon boat on a pond at Mossy Swamp Plantation. “Mr. Sam, we been set up.” The caller was Andy Ames, a young pointing dog handler just turned pro. Ben could detect the fear and anguish in his voice. “Who is ‘we’ Andy?” Ben said from instinct. “Me and Mr. Harold,” Andy replied. Read more

The Last Dream

September 13, 2018 | Short Stories | Comments

It was a dream he had started hundreds of times but never completed. Before now, the dream had always ended with his waking to reality. He was a pointing dog trainer-handler, one of hundreds that had since the 1870s eked out a living taking young dogs and molding them into useful workers for their owners, bird hunters or field trialers who as amateurs ran them in trials for amateurs. But what he aspired to was to find and mold a dog that he could handle as a pro to win major open field trials, including the ultimate, the National Bird Dog Championship, held each February at the Ames Plantation at Grand Junction, Tennessee. Read more

The Secret Fund (Sequel to The Last Summer)

August 10, 2018 | Ben Reach | Comments

Readers will recall that in The Last Summer a lad named Jimmy got his bearings thanks to a summer of hard outdoor work with a bird dog trainer on a ranch in Montana. A year later Jimmy’s grandfather, who had financed that summer, called Ben Reach’s office and asked for an appointment. “Can you make it at about four on a Friday, and ask Dr. Sam to join us?” “Of course,” Joanne said with a smile. She suspected that the purpose of the grandfather’s appointment would be a reward to the curmudgeons for what the Montana summer had done for Jimmy in helping him become a man instead of an adolescent. Read more

The Last Summer

July 19, 2018 | Ben Reach | Comments

Bill Culp was sad. He had just retired, at age sixty eight, from his job as dog trainer on Mossy Swamp Plantation. For the first time in forty years, he would not be going North July 6 to train bird dogs on the prairie. In the earliest years he had gone as a helper to an all-age for-the-public pro handler, then as a pro handler himself, and the last twenty years as the trainer on this South Georgia shooting plantation. He told himself he had nothing to be sad about. He knew he was fortunate, was financially secure, unlike many who had “followed the dogs” and ended up at his age with nothing but arthritis from horse falls or worse. But the thought of not spending July, August and three weeks of September, his favorite part, on those limitless lands, not seeing the glorious sunrises and sunsets, not feeling the ceaseless winds on his face when they finally changed from blow torch to cool, then crisp at dawn, and again at the long day’s end, depressed him. Read more

A Reversal of Fortune

June 29, 2018 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments

When Ben Reach heard Bill Bain had gone to work as dog trainer on Twisted Pine Plantation, he cringed. Bill had for many years been a for-the-public-over-the-road trainer-handler of all-age pointing dogs. He’d given it up to take the plantation job for the usual reason — economics. He’d found it impossible to make a living any longer, for his expenses had overwhelmed his revenue. He’d had bad luck of several sorts — best customer quit the game, two best dogs sustained disabling injuries, two others were taken from him by their owners who sensed his operation was collapsing. That had been the last straw for Bill. He’d sold his horses at the last trial he attended, returned the rest of his string of dogs to their owners, dropped off his horse trailer at the dealership that held the lien, done the same with his dually. That left him with only a ten-year-old midsize Dodge pickup and two sets of tack, which he took with him to Twisted Pine. Read more

The Reformation

June 18, 2018 | Short Stories | Comments

Charlie Eanes had a weakness. He was obsessed with owning a National Championship winner. He had for thirty years campaigned all-age dogs with Fred Barnes who had come close to delivering a National Champ for Charlie, but never quite. He and his scout Booty Blevins worked hard each season to get Charlie’s all-age contenders qualified (on average Charlie sent monthly checks for three all-age and one or two derbies). Currently they had all three of Charlie’s all-ages half qualified, and they had high hopes of putting another first on two of them. This year’s derby also seemed promising, though like most derbies, inconsistent. Read more

The Redemption

June 4, 2018 | Short Stories | Comments

Billy Culp had tried the circuit and failed. In his third year his principal customer, for whom he had two all-age and two derby dogs, declared bankruptcy, leaving Billy unpaid three months’ fees plus more than a thousand in entry fees advanced. Billy had been forced to return to their owners the rest of his string and to surrender his truck and trailer to the lien-holding finance companies. Deeply humiliated, he hired on as assistant dog trainer on Bubbling Branch Plantation east of Thomasville, recently purchased by a newborn billionaire of the technology world who had just sold his unicorn to Amazon, Jake Barnes. Read more

What To Do

June 1, 2018 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments

Billy Cole was in his second season as a for-the-public over-the-road pointing dog handler on the all-age circuit. Based at Leesburg, Georgia, he trained in summers in North Dakota, then after competing in prairie trials drifted South week by week, arriving at home in time for the piney woods country’s opener, the Lee County Trial. He was holding his own, if barely, with two of the eight dogs in his string consistent threats whenever put down, a statistic common to those plying his trade. Read more

Once Upon a Time

May 26, 2018 | Short Stories | Comments

Readers have often accused me of false labeling non-fiction as fiction. There may be some occasional truth in the accusation, for all fiction is born of a true story, observed or heard somewhere and bent by an author like a red hot horse shoe by a farrier. So I begin here with a confession. This story is all true save for names. It happened many decades ago. So I begin here with a confession. This story is all true save for names. It happened many decades ago. Read more

A Wise Dog Man

May 21, 2018 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments

Ben Reach and Sam Nixon MD again found themselves at a funeral, this time a graveside service on Bentover Pine Plantation outside Thomasville. The ashes being buried were those of Bentover’s owner Hiram Prichard of Cleveland, an old-money heir to a coal baron fortune. The curmudgeons found themselves standing by Ralph Eanes, a bird dog trainer their age from Camilla. In his day Ralph had campaigned some good ones, but he’d figured out the economics of the road didn’t work for him, and thereafter stayed on the farm his father had left him, raised a few pups and broke them for plantation wagon dogs or personal gun dogs for shoe-leather bird hunters, a shrinking constituency. Read more