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Short Stories & Tall Tales by Allen Russell
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Allen Russell is a native Tennessean, voice actor, videographer, and a cowboy at heart. He has traveled extensively, hunting big game all over North America, as well as Australia and New Zealand. He spent more than a dozen years as a professional hunting guide in Montana and host of an outdoor adventure program. He has recently accepted the position of Creative Media Director for Rodeo Bull TV in Reno, Nevada. Currently, he produces and hosts the “Split Rail Outdoors” and “Lonesome Trails N’ Cowboy Tales” programs for Rodeo Bull TV.
His non-fiction work has appeared in North American Hunter, Tennessee Outdoor News, Country Extra, Good Old Days, The Magnolia Quarterly, and several southern anthologies. He has self-published “Mule”, a collection of award winning non-fiction stories dealing with life in rural Tennessee from the Civil War up to the 1950’s. He was recently awarded the Joe Margrave Award for non-fiction at the 2011 Tennessee Mountain Writer’s Conference in Oak Ridge.
Allen had done voice-overs as well as on camera appearances for commercials and two feature films. He has produced four hunting videos as well as “Freedom Isn’t Free” a fund raising DVD project for the Veterans Association in Tennessee.
His fiction projects include, “The Reno Kid: The Beginning”, coming soon from The Reno Kid Publishing Group in Nevada, and “Crow Feather” available soon from Solstice Publishing.
As a result of his association with Rodeo Bull TV, he plans to relocate to the Black Hills of South Dakota in 2012. As a storyteller, his favorite subjects lie in the rural hills and hollers of the south and the wide open spaces of the Old West.
The Midnight Rider
Allen Russell
It was cold and blowing snow that afternoon in Sheridan, Wyoming. Christmas Eve 1879 had blown up a blizzard and Zach O’Connell was worried. He had been delayed by the brutal weather while making his way home from Colorado. Now, Christmas was only hours away.
Zach had been working cattle on a big ranch near Durango during the fall roundup. Work was scarce in Wyoming and he needed the extra money to keep his small ranch going for another year. He owned two thousand acres that straddled the border between the Wyoming and Montana territories.
Zach rode the train to Sheridan, but that’s where the rails ended and he would be on his own from there. Zach’s faithful old saddle horse had ridden the train with him and now they faced forty miles of bleak, frozen trails to make it home by Christmas.
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Do Unto Others
Allen Russell
A rush of cold air preceded the weary old cowboy across the threshold. Without conscious thought, he hung his hat on its customary peg beside the door. After unbuckling his chaps and hanging up his coat, he took a seat at the kitchen table. His thinning gray hair was unkempt. His whiskered face reddened by the bitter wind. The old man’s movements were cautious, almost feeble, as if the weight of the world was on his shoulders.
“Well, Martha, that’s the last of them,” he said
A younger woman poured a cup of coffee from the pot on the stove and set it down in front of him.
“I hated to see them go,” she said.
“I know…we had no choice.”
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The Wine Connoisseurs
Allen Russell
The sun was already well up on that bright summer morning, as Mavis Hardy stood in the sunroom of her palatial home, surveying her vast acreage and finishing her second cup of coffee. Mavis was the middle-aged and portly wife of Quentin Hardy, patriarch of the sprawling Bar H Ranch.
Mavis was watching Quentin as he drove his custom built golf cart down their long cobblestone driveway to retrieve the mail from the box. The cart got quite a bit of use around the ranch, as neither Mavis nor Quentin were fans of strenuous exercise.
Quentin parked his golf cart at the end of the drive and walked over to their opulent fieldstone and wrought-iron mailbox. If they ever decided to stop using it for mail, they could easily install a port-a-potty and turn it into a highway rest stop.
Mavis was just about to go back to the kitchen when she saw Quentin start throwing mail up in the air. Completely bewildered, she rushed toward the door as he began tearing pages out of a magazine and jumping up and down on them in the middle of the highway.
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Wyatt Earp
Allen Russell
The late afternoon sun cast a golden glow as Bronco Bigrivers sped toward the small town of Buzzard Gap, South Dakota. A billowing dust cloud trailed the pickup across the otherwise pristine buffalo-grass prairie. Bronco was on an errand of mercy. His partner, Lester Jiggs, was down with the miseries and in urgent need of medication.
Bronco and Lester owned the Dead Cow Ranch, six deeded sections of paradise, just east of the Black Hills, and twenty miles south of the Buzzard Gap Exit off Interstate 90. They were lifelong cowboys, confirmed bachelors, and certified short-end-of-the-stick holders. In spite of being just shy of Medicare eligible, Bronco and Lester were still quite a bit more than a handful. After you got to know them, it didn’t take long to figure out where the name of their ranch had come from.
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The Condo Troll
Allen Russell
Recently, I was vacationing in the beautiful Black Hills of South Dakota with part of my family. After breakfast on our first full day, everyone split up into groups to pursue similar interests. My son-in-laws were going golfing, which I don’t do. My darling wife and the daughters were going shopping for new western outfits, which I also do not do.
I informed them I planned a quiet morning, sitting by the lake and possibly catching up on some reading.
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