Short Stories

Revenge of the Cat Woman

May 28, 2024 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments

Ben Reach had seen some strange rifts on the theme of inheritance greed since in 2011 “Portability” had come into the federal estate tax law. Under “Portability, “a dying spouse could leave the surviving spouse his or her unused estate tax exemption, for the survivor to use against future gifts or bequests. Because of “Portability,” some children were now encouraging single parents to marry poor (preferably penniless) candidates in questionable health in hopes of inheriting the benefits of their estate tax exemptions. Read more

Suspicion Unconfirmed

May 6, 2024 | Short Stories | Comments

Fred Barnes was a watcher. Little got by him. For the last two years he had been watching John Payne, a professional pointing dog handler, and his scout, Willie Blevins. Fred judged field trial’s a lot. Why? Because he had horses and a truck-trailer rig to haul them, and if he committed, he showed, and he appeared to be without favorites among handlers or owners, pointers or setters. He was pleasant enough, stayed sober in daylight hours. Accepted only gas money to judge. He watched constantly the dogs under judgment. Did not chat or gather wool while judging. Rode every brace at the same pace. Read more

Should We?

March 30, 2024 | Short Stories | Comments

Hurricane Hattie had requalified with a third place in the last qualifier of the season. Should they enter her was the question occupying her owner, Sam Slade, and handler, Mack Bain. Both were ambivalent and unsure of their judgment on the issue. Hattie was nine years old. She had won the National Championship as a four-year-old. Could she go the three hours now was the issue. Both Sam and Mack judged she could, but they worried about the toll it might take on her. Neither wanted to shorten her good years left. She had won four major all-age championships for them and the Purina All-Age Dog-of-the-Year Award the season she won the National. Why stress her? both asked. Read more

Leaving the Circuit

March 25, 2024 | Short Stories | Comments

Harley had recognized he had a problem soon after he regained consciousness. Lying on his back, he felt first the warm breath of Chester, his favorite dog horse, on his face. Opening his eyes, he looked up into Chester’s big kind ones. Slowly, his mind cleared. He had no memory of hitting the hard North Dakota prairie. Perhaps Chester had stumbled, but he seldom did. His ability to see and avoid holes of all kinds had endeared him to Harley all their decade together, that and his smooth gaits, flat walk, running walk, fox trot, slow lope, canter. Chester had been a good—no, a great, dog horse. Read more

Rained Out

March 11, 2024 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments

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

February 29, 2024 | Short Stories | Comments

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

Last Trip to Grand Junction

February 4, 2024 | National Championship, Short Stories | Comments

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 Derby

January 6, 2024 | Short Stories | Comments

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

The Farrier

December 30, 2023 | Short Stories | Comments

He knew many, was known by few, known deeply by none. None knew his home place, for he had none, save his truck, adapted by him for his craft as an itinerant shoer of horses. Where he was depended on the calendar: spring and summer on the small-town rodeo circuit in the west, early fall through March on the pointing dog field trial circuits (all-age and shooting dog). Read more

A Christmas Fix

December 24, 2023 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments

Ben and Sam were brainstorming on how to help their old friends, the handler Jim Heath and his helper Booty Blevins, with their problem, brought on by old age. Jim was seventy, Booty seventy-two. The Curmudgeons had considerable experience, much of it first-hand, with problems brought on by old age. But they had been fortunate to avoid Jim and Booty’s problem, LOF (lack of funds). Jim and Booty still had the will to work, indeed loved to work. Problem was, age had robbed them of an asset essential to their craft, eyesight. Jim had macular degeneration, Booty glaucoma. What could they do with their skill sets to make a buck, that was the question the Curmudgeons were pondering as they slowly sipped end-of-day-end-of-week drams of The Macallan 12 in Ben’s library-conference room. Read more