II
Your true setter is born, not made. The instincts of his craft are a part of his birthright. Nevertheless they must be guided and cultivated and developed. There are men whose profession it is to train bird dogs, or as the phrase goes, to break them. With some of these men it is a breaking indeed, for they carry a lash into the field, nor spare to use it. Others work more gently to a better end. But any man may make his dog what he will if he have patience coupled with the gift of teaching the dog to understand his wishes.
Chet decided to train Job himself. He set about it when the pup was some six months old, at a season when winter was settling down upon the farm and there were idle hours on his hands. He had kept as trophies of the gunning season just past the head and the wings of a woodcock. These he bound into a ball of soft and woolly yarn and on a certain day he called Job to his knee and made him sniff and smell this ball until the puppy knew the scent of it. Job wished to tear and rend the pleasantly soft and yielding plaything, but Chet forbade this by stern word, backed by restraining hand, till the pup seemed to understand.
Then he looped about the dog’s neck a stout cord and he held this cord in his hand, the pup at his feet, while he tossed the woolen ball across the kitchen floor. The pup turned and leaped after the ball.
Before he could make a second jump Chet said sharply, “Whoa!”
And he snubbed the cord he held so that Job was brought up short in a tumbling heap, his toe nails scratching on the floor.
Chet got up and crossed and picked up the ball; he returned to his chair, called the pup to his knee, tossed the ball again. Again Job darted after it and again Chet said, “Whoa,” and checked Job with the cord. At which the puppy, with the utmost singleness of purpose, caught the cord in his mouth, squatted on the floor and set about gnawing his bonds in two. Chet laughed at him, called him in, fetched the ball, and tried again.
After Chet had checked him half a dozen times with voice and string the pup sat on its small haunches, looked at Chet with his head on one side and wrinkled its furry brow in thought. And Chet repeated slowly over and over:
“Whoa, Job! Whoa! Whoa!”
The lesson was not learned on the first day or the second or the third. But before the week was gone Job had learned this much: That when Chet said “Whoa” he must stop, or be stopped painfully. Being a creature of intelligence, Job thereafter stopped; and when he was sure the pup understood, Chet applauded him and fed him and made much of him.
One day in the middle of the second week, Job having checked at the word of command, Chet waited for a moment and then said, “Go on!”
Job looked round at Chet, and the man motioned with his hand and repeated, “Go on, Job!”
The pup a little doubtfully moved toward where lay the woolly ball. When he was within a yard of it Chet said again, “Whoa!”
When he stopped this time he did not look back at Chet but watched the ball, and Chet after a single glance threw back his head and laughed aloud and cried to himself, “Now ain’t that comical?”
For Job, a six-months’ puppy, was on his first point. Head low and flattened, nose on a line toward the ball, legs stiff, tail straight out behind with faintly drooping tip, the pup was motionless as a graven dog—a true setter in every line.
And Chet laughed aloud.
This laughter was a mistake, for at the sound the pup leaped forward, the cord slipped through Chet’s fingers and the dog caught the woolly ball and began to worry it. Chet, still laughing, took the ball from him, caressed him, praised him and ended the lesson for that day. And by so doing he permitted the birth in Job of one fault which he would never be able to overcome. The pup supposed he had been applauded for capturing the woolly ball and that notion would never altogether die in his dog brain. Job would break shot, as the gunners say, till the end of his days.