Short Stories

Some Luck

April 27, 2023 | Fiction, Short Stories | Comments

The year was 1953. They were on the prairie in Manitoba at July’s end, camped twenty miles apart. Jim Chambers was there with a string of puppies, derbies and all-ages for his employer Sid Simon, one of America’s wealthiest men. He had come up from Union Springs by train while his hands had hauled the dogs up in a two-ton truck. The horses they used stayed in Canada year-round. They belonged to Simon but were lent by him, when not in use for dog training, to Canadian farmer-ranchers who in exchange for boarding them, used them under saddle or to pull wagons, slays, cultivators, plows, harrows, mowing machines, rakes, whatever. It was a good deal for all. Read more

Chain Saw Burglars

March 22, 2023 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments

Timber theft was not rare in the forest lands across the rural south. In fact, it was an art form, especially where absentee land ownership was common. It’s practitioners included, among others, unscrupulous timber cruisers, surveyors, loggers and log truckers, saw millers, land dealers and managers, and occasionally lawyers and county officials. Ben Reach had observed them in action, often in concert, over a long career. He had acted to thwart them when he came upon them in time. Read more

A Derby

March 10, 2023 | Bird Dogs, Short Stories | Comments

In the hearts of true all-age pointing dog devotees, nothing is so important as a talented derby. A derby is a two-year-old. What defined a talented derby: potential for greatness as an all-age, or adult, competitor. And greatness in pointing dogs involved many talents. But the one always recognized: excitement, the ability to produce it. Read more

A Prairie Plot

February 9, 2023 | Short Stories | Comments

Willie Green and Alvin Roop had been rivals throughout their careers. Home based a hundred miles apart east and west of the Chattahoochee opposite Columbus, less than that in Manitoba in summer, they competed as handlers on the all-age pointing dog circuit. The year was 1963, and Willie and Alvin were forty years old. Willie’s scout was Booty Blevins, Alvin’s was Sam Williams. Both were black men, ages about the same. They loved their jobs and were good at them. Read more

Scout

February 3, 2023 | Short Stories | Comments

They rumbled into the trial grounds in the familiar old red Dodge two-ton, found a depression to back into. The scout, a black man, eased out the driver-side door and let the tall tailgate down, allowing the four dog horses to walk down it and off the wood-floored bed onto welcome grassy turf. They had driven through the night from the last trial where they’d handled a dog in the final brace, leaving with no share of the purse. They needed a share of this one or they’d be looking for a loan to cover gas (and motor oil) money to get home to south Alabama. Read more

Four Men Two Dogs One Spare Tire

January 25, 2023 | Quail Championship Invitational, Short Stories | Comments

They were two-man teams of rivals. Some thought enemies, but they were not. They were famous, in a very small, obscure world. Each was a trainer-handler or a scout of all-age pointing dogs. Each handler worked with a scout, usually a black man, who traveled with him in a two-ton stock-bed truck they drove from trial to trial hauling the horses they rode to handle and scout off of and the dogs in the string of pointers (and occasionally a setter) they entered in the trials. Read more

A Funeral

January 22, 2023 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments

The day dawned cool and clear, to the relief of Ben and Sam, who would serve today as honorary pall bearers, as they had so many times before. The funereal and burial was that of Alvin Blevins, lifelong employee of Mossy Swamp Plantation, a legend to all who knew him and his long history on the storied estate. Read more

Sallie

January 1, 2023 | Ben Reach, Plantation Quail Hunt, Short Stories | Comments

“Where there is wealth there is envy.” That was a favorite saying of both Ben Reach and Sam Nixon MD, the curmudgeons. In their long years practicing law and medicine in Albany, Georgia, northern anchor of the quail belt that stretched south to Tallahassee, they had seen many examples. Read more

The Worst Injustice

December 10, 2022 | Ben Reach, The American Field | Comments

“What was the worst injustice you ever saw committed in field trials?” Sam asked Ben on a rainy Friday afternoon as Ben poured them drams of The Macallan in Ben’s library-conference room. Sam was looking to hear a lively story to end his depression after a tough week with patients. “That’s easy. It was Bernie Matthys’s banning of Miller’s White Powder and Ferrel Miller from field trials.” Read more

War

December 3, 2022 | Bobwhite Quail, Short Stories | Comments

Wars between son-in-law and mother-in-law are endemic in our culture, perhaps pandemic in wealthy families and especially when son is Dixie-born and bred and mother-in-law a Yankee. So it was between Eloise Crump of Boston and Doug Hall of Thomasville, husband of Eloise’s daughter Charlotte. Read more