Short Stories

Turkey Season Dilemma (with Epilogue)

April 15, 2018 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments

As soon as the spring burn was done the turkey hunting would begin on Bent Pine Plantation. Usually Amos King welcomed it, but this year it’s approach brought him dread. He sensed it could bring disaster. Amos occupied unique positions on Bent Pine. Hunting wagon driver, or mule skinner, in quail season, turkey caller in turkey season, boat paddler for spring bream fishing, bar tender at cocktail hour whenever any Read more

A Tale Often Told

April 7, 2018 | Short Stories | Comments

In A Hypothetical, I posted on Facebook about a stolen point and asked readers whether they would confess their thieving dog’s larceny to the judges and pick up, or accept the good luck that their dog’s crime went judicially unseen. That was back in 2016, and recently reposted. Here is a true story on the same theme, involving two of field trialing’s best known characters, John Rex and Robin Gates. Read more

The Lesson

March 28, 2018 | Short Stories | Comments

It was the Masters Quail Championship. Billy White was in his third year as a handler on the circuit, and he had lucked onto a truly great dog, one of the many out of western Kentucky bought as a first year all-age by a very wealthy financier newly fascinating by the obscure sport of field trials. That owner was a throw back to the early years when men like Pierre Read more

A Judging Dilemma

March 20, 2018 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments

As had become almost habitual, Ben Reach was a last-minute substitute for a reporter who failed to show. The stake was an end-of-season all-age qualifier being run on an iconic wild bird plantation near Albany. One of the announced judges had also flat rocked, and when on arriving at the plantation, Ben learned who the substitute judge was he almost claimed a health emergency to get out of his assignment. Read more

A Wise Scout

March 16, 2018 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments

Ben Reach lamented the disappearance of black scouts from pointing dog field trials. They were gone for economic reasons, not because of discrimination. Handlers simply could not afford employee-scouts, electing instead out of necessity to trade scouting duties with fellow handlers. It saved payroll and horse expense, but it had cost much of the heart of the game. Now instead of employee-scouts, handlers scouted for one another. It saved payroll Read more

More About Ben

March 6, 2018 | Short Stories | Comments

In Remembering Ben, I told the story of my favorite pointer gun dog. When Ben was four, we hunted the last day of quail season with Sam Kerr in Appomattox. It was one of those magic days. With a snowstorm coming in from the Southwest, flakes began to fall about two, and quail went on a feeding frenzy. We were in birds almost constantly until dark. A covey was feeding Read more

Remembering Ben

March 5, 2018 | Short Stories | Comments

Like all old bird hunters, I have stored in memory a book of the lives and deaths of the bird dogs which owned my heart over six decades. Most came to me as weanlings, lived with me an average of twelve years, and passed into eternity moistened by my tears. Ben, one of the best, came to me at his age eighteen months, and as one of but a few Read more

The Hole

February 27, 2018 | Short Stories | Comments

“Every dog has at least one hole,” old Field Trial truism. It was culling time on the prairie. Ed Moore and his helper Booty Blevins were conferring after a long day in the saddle. The list on the table was written in pencil in Ed’s nearly illegible hand on the back of an envelope that had held their last pay checks from Harley Keen, postmarked Winston Salem, North Carolina. They Read more

The Secret

February 24, 2018 | Short Stories | Comments

It was the best kept secret in bird dog field trials for a time, and then it was not. Booty Blevins was scout for Ed Moore, who in turn was handler for Harley Keen, owner of a cigarette maker and a Georgia quail plantation known as Knotty Pine. It was the Dirty Thirties, and times were desperate for all but a few, but not for Harley Keen, one of America’s Read more

The Pick of the Litter

February 18, 2018 | Short Stories | Comments

After Mary Muldoon’s win of the National and the Free-For-All the same year back in the Dirty Thirties, her owner Harley Keen decided to breed her to his friend Richard Bain’s Billy Bones, the pointer that won the Free-For-All the year before Mary. Keen and Bain were two rare fortunates of those awful days, at least in material ways. Keen’s company made cigarettes, Bain’s made whiskey, and for those two Read more