Short Stories

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

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

The Agency

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

Ben Reach and Sam Nixon, MD, ran a secret agency. It was sometimes an employment agency and sometimes a housing agency, and often both, but its customers and patrons never realized it. They thought the curmudgeons just by coincidence ran across opportunities to help folks, their friends, sometimes clients, sometimes patients, sometimes strangers, sometimes a combination. They did not charge for their services but gathered much personal satisfaction from rendering them. Read more

The Moment

October 26, 2022 | Field Trials, Short Stories | Comments

There comes a moment in every good field trial bird dog’s life when it realizes its purpose: to win field trials with its handler. To that moment, it may understand its handler’s desire to have it do his or her will, but not the purpose of the handler’s desire. But the moment a dog comes to understand what it and its handler are trying to accomplish together, is the magic moment. Read more

New Professions

October 11, 2022 | Short Stories | Comments

Thanks to Booty Blevins’ smart planning, he and Ike Eanes were now employed on Bent Pine Plantation, Ike as Manager and head dog and horse man and huntsman, Booty as Ike’s assistant. They were replacing others who had accepted similar positions on other Yankee quail plantations in the Spring Shuffle of 2024. Richard Brammer had one unfulfilled ambition, to gain membership in the Georgia-Florida Field Trial Club, an exclusive by invitation club for owners of quail plantations between Albany and Tallahassee. Richard had great influence in financial circles everywhere, having led leading venture capital and private equity firms based in Boston before his retirement. But in two years living retired at Bent Pine he had yet to gain membership. He was recently told by a sage of the quail belt that his best chance at admission lay in a large contribution to Tall Timbers Research Station and Land Conservancy Foundation for its endowment. Read more

Bound to Happen

October 5, 2022 | Ben Reach, National Championship | Comments

After Ben Reach read it on the internet he said to Sam at Breakfast next morning at Millie’s Diner, “It was bound to happen eventually. I wonder if it has happened before and no one ever knew.” The “it” was this. And the “it” has a long and short version. The short one: the National Champion bird dog of 2023 was discovered to be an impostor. Read more