Then he told, in his own peculiar fashion, how he started with the puppies, teaching them to retrieve objects such as sticks and balls, and later dead birds that they must learn to carry gently without using their teeth.
"Never let 'em think it's just a romp they're havin'," he continued. "I like to play with puppies as well as anyone, but when I'm breakin' 'em I let 'em understand that it's business. Never let 'em have their own way if they want to do the wrong thing, and never give 'em an order without seein' that it's carried out if it takes all day. That's where the patience comes in. Teach 'em to obey, and you can do most anything with 'em."
"Do you whip them if they don't obey?" asked Ernest.
"Never whipped a dog in my life," said Sam, decidedly, "except a fox terrier I had once. They're different. A whipped setter is a spoiled setter, and if you can't make 'em do what you want 'em to without whippin' 'em or bribin' 'em, you'd better get out of the business. Of course, I sometimes give a puppy a piece of cookie or something to show him he's done what he ought to, but I never use the whip. There's other kinds of punishment that work better and don't break their spirits. Just keep 'em from havin' what they want, and tease 'em into wantin' it awful bad, and you can make 'em do most anything."
He then went on to explain his method of teaching a young dog to hold his point in the field. He used a long rope tied to a stout collar, and led the dog to a thicket where a dead bird lay. When the dog got the scent and started to dash in, a sharp jerk on the rope restrained him, and in time he was thus taught to stand rigid when the scent came strong to his nostrils.
"That's one way to teach a dog not to chase chickens, too," he added. "But a puppy born of trained parents gets the pointin' habit almost by instinct, and retrievin', too. The main thing is to make him understand that he's got to do the trick and not something else that happens to pop into his head. After that, you can teach 'em to answer your whistle or a wave of your hand and hunt just where you want 'em to."
"Aren't they afraid of a gun at first?" asked Jack, who had never learned not to jump when a gun went off.
"Some of 'em are," said Sam. "If a dog is gun-shy he's got to be broken of that before he's any good in the field. Some folks say you can never break a dog that's really gun-shy, but I never seen one yet that I couldn't cure."
"How do you do it?" asked Ernest.
"Well, one way is to give the dog something he wants every time you shoot off a gun. You can shoot over his dinner, and not let him have any till he comes up to where you and the gun are. Keep at it, and after awhile he begins to connect the sound of the gun with things that he likes. Always take a gun when you go out for a walk with him, and after awhile he will bark and act happy every time you take it from the rack. The whole idea of breakin' a bird dog is to make him think that the thing you want him to do is the thing he wants to do, and never let that idea get away from him."