National Bird Dog Championship

Going to Ames

February 10, 2022 | National Championship, Poetry | Comments

So your dog is qualified And you’re going to Grand Junction To run in The National Championship The one and only To run on the Ames Plantation Where for a century and a quarter The continent’s best bird dog has been yearly crowned And where bird dog stories true and fiction abound Read more

End of a Partnership

February 9, 2022 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments

John Ford had worked as an over-the-road-for-the-public-all-age pointing dog handler his last twenty years. For the last ten he had partnered on the road (“helpin’ each other,” the system was called) and for summer prairie training with Billy Green, whose career had mirrored John’s, the difference being John hailed from Georgia, Billy from Alabama. Each was forty-three, married with two teen-age children, and with a hard-working wife, John’s a nurse, Billy’s a sales rep for internet business services. Read more

The Qualification of Reb

March 29, 2021 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments

For Billy Kell, it seemed the worst possible day of his life. It did not turn out that way. This is the story. It was 2004. Billy was an up-and-coming bird dog pro, age twenty-eight, a trainer-handler of pointing dogs for field trial competition. He’d grown up the son of a quail plantation manager near Thomasville, Georgia, who earlier had been the plantation’s dog trainer and hunt manager. Read more

A Quiet Withdrawal

December 23, 2018 | Ben Reach, Fiction, Short Stories | Comments

Ben Reach went to the National Championship only when someone close to him—a handler or dog owner—had an entry in contention. Still, with all Ben’s connections to the sport, he found himself riding at the Ames Plantation for a half-day every few years. This was one of those years, and Ben was enjoying it. The friend and client with a dog qualified and ranked high in the Gossip Rankings (the only rankings save Purina Points) was a client from Thomasville with a private jet who invited him along. Ben loved to fly thus, and hated to fly commercial. 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

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

The Test

April 20, 2018 | National Championship, Short Stories | Comments

Carl Dean slept little. He was up as usual at five. He and his partner Fred Archer were living for the duration of the National Championship in a former tenant house on a farm ten miles east of the Ames Plantation. This was the trial’s last day, and Fred Archer’s sole entry, Arkansas Andy, would go down in the afternoon brace. Carl would scout. His inability to sleep last night 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

A Rivalry

February 16, 2018 | National Championship, National Free-For-All Championship, Short Stories | Comments

It’s the 1930s, times are desperate, the Great Depression has the world in its grip, yet for a few at the top nothing has changed. So it is for Harley Keen and Richard Bain, owners of businesses whose products are still in demand at prices producing a profit. Keen’s is tobacco, Bain’s is whiskey, legal again with Prohibition’s repeal. They are sports, and their shared passion is bird dog field Read more