Having seen both extremes--from pups under four months of age being taken hunting, to youngsters approaching two years before getting their first experience on wild birds--we asked a few trainers for their opinions on when (and how) an owner ought to introduce his pup to the world of hunting.

You Can't Go Strictly By Age

"You really need to evaluate the dog's physical abilities, rather than just looking at age," said trainer Jon Zunkel of PhD'Z Kennels in Madrid, Iowa. "The dog needs to have the stamina and the ability to go through cover. And for a young dog, it needs to be a fun experience. Some owners tend to push a young dog hard. They don't put the pup up soon enough, he gets worn out, and this can be bad for him, both physically and psychologically."

"Generally speaking, I think a dog has to be about a year old if you're really expecting him to do things right," suggested Zunkel. "He certainly will have to have had some obedience work--come reliably when called, for example--as well as bird work. Often, dog owners will want to take a pup born in the winter on through late spring out hunting right away, and this is probably too early unless they've responded really well to both yard and bird work."

Roger Buddin of Big Country Kennel in Albany, Texas, emphasizes both human contact and bird work early on.

"Lots of pups just don't have enough contact with people," said Buddin. "Just take them for walks, play with them, and work them on simple obedience training, like 'come'. Get them used to a collar and a lead."

I've seen Buddin walking around with packs of his pointer pups following him, and I've seen these same dogs pointing quite nicely at around four months old or so. Things can happen early, but they don't happen all by themselves. Much depends on what the owner/trainer does with the youngster. The surprising thing, perhaps, is that pro trainers--working with lots of dogs, and perhaps several litters of their own pups--can have a dog ready to hunt by age one or a bit before. The hunter/owner, giving his attention to just one pup, should certainly be able to do the same thing.

"Exposure to gunfire is really critical for the young dog," said Steve Grossman of Little Moran Hunting Club in Staples, Minnesota. "I know of young dogs taken out on opening day of pheasant season with several guys blasting away around them, and the result usually isn't good."

Both Zunkel and Buddin agree that early exposure to birds and guns is the key to getting off to a good start.

"You can't expect a dog to hunt aggressively unless it's already been exposed to quite a few birds," said Zunkel. I've watched Jon use pigeons extensively when working with youngsters. Roger Buddin has access to a lot of ground in Texas, and uses johnny houses to establish coveys of "wild" bobwhites. I've seen his pups working these birds before they reach the age of six months. And by the time he sells his year-old youngsters, they're pointing and backing reliably, and have been force broken to retrieve.

Match Expectations to Dog's Abilities

If you have a youngster like those I've seen Buddin and Zunkel turn out at age one, there's no doubt you're ready to go hunting. In fact, your dog may well outshine many older performers, depending on just how many birds they've seen.

But as Grossman points out--and let's face it, this is all too often true of the dogs we amateurs train ourselves--you also need to be prepared for the dog to lose it.

"That young dog may work just fine when the birds are holding tight," he said. "But what if you're hunting pheasants, and it's one of those days when they're all running? That can cause problems, and one thing you want to avoid with a young dog is creating problems you're going to have to correct later."

In other words, try to put a young dog in situations where his chances of success are higher. And if he starts to mess up, don't hesitate to put him up.

My own current youngster, a big shorthair named Donner, was a late bloomer. It simply took him longer to mature, both physically and mentally, than it had his dam, over whom I'd been guiding when she was about 16 months old.

Donner didn't do much the year he turned one, and some surgery slowed his progress as a two-year-old. Thus, when I did put him on wild Iowa pheasants, I tried to select cover where his chances of finding birds--and their holding--were good. Just one good day, during which he made half a dozen nice points and had three roosters shot over him, was enough to turn him into a decent and very eager ringneck dog. Age and experience sort of came together, and that proverbial light switch came on. Although it should have happened sooner with him, there's nothing more satisfying for an owner than to see a young dog put it together like that.

In addition to gunfire in an unprepared dog, another situation about which you may want to think twice might involve a puppy tangling with a wing-tipped bird--especially if it happens to be something big and nasty, like a rooster pheasant.

"A crippled rooster and a young dog can lead to another one of those problems you want to avoid," said Grossman. "You might have to work hard to get that pup retrieving again if he gets kicked or spurred."

Both Grossman and Zunkel agree that hunting a young dog with a check cord attached isn't a bad idea.

"The young dog should be used to working while dragging a check cord around," said Grossman. "Eventually, when it comes off, he won't know it's not there. But you need to use a cord that doesn't tangle and get knots in it, and one that slides through cover. Otherwise, both you and the dog are going to get frustrated."

"I think a check cord is a good safety device, especially if the dog isn't 100 percent reliable on the 'come' command," agreed Zunkel.

Some pointing dog owners might expect their youngsters to lock up consistently every time they locate birds, or if not, to at least respond reliably to the 'whoa' command. According to Zunkel, this isn't an absolute necessity.

"From a standpoint of safety and convenience, yes, it's much better if the dog is whoa-broke," he explained. "But to give the dog its introduction to hunting, it isn't totally necessary. In fact, if you haven't exposed your pup to a lot of birds but are willing to tolerate some chasing, he'll probably whoa-break himself on birds when he figures out that he can't catch them."

Hunting As Training

For the really young pups--for most people, probably those under six months old unless they're real prodigies and have had an unusual amount of exposure to birds--there's another way to look at hunting. It can be considered as part of your training program, as long as you don't have unreasonable expectations of what your pup is going to do.

"If a dog is very young and has had little or no bird work, you can still take him along hunting," suggested Zunkel. "The difference is that you shouldn't expect him to really hunt. This is just a fun experience for him, getting used to the hunting environment and maybe chasing a few birds."

Obviously, if you intend to shoot around a really green youngster like this, he needs to have been introduced to the gun previously. Also, you're almost certain to want that check cord attached, and to have done a fair amount of work with him on 'come'.

Both from my own experience and from the recommendations of trainers, I'm a big believer in keeping a young dog's first season just between him and his owner. Even if a dog has been introduced to gunfire, too many guns, or shots taken too close to the dog, can result in semi-permanent gun nervousness, if not outright gunshyness.

Other hunters also may not understand what you expect of them around a young dog. If you want to reinforce staunchness by only shooting properly pointed birds, the last thing you need is someone shooting at wild flushes, or even worse at birds that your dog has bumped, either intentionally or by accident. That can set your training back significantly.

Other dogs can also cause problems. I've hunted youngsters with old veterans, and this sometimes works, especially if they're acquainted ahead of time. In fact, youngsters will sometimes learn faster with an experienced dog as 'tutor'. But there is also the possibility of competition, the youngster forgetting his manners and busting birds the older dog points, and a number of other situations which will lead directly to more of those problems Steve Grossman says we should work hard to avoid. All in all, keeping the first year to just you and your pup, and showing your buddies your brag dog the following season, is probably the best way to go.

A young dog's first season can be fun or it can be frustrating--and is likely to be some of each. But one thing for sure: giving your dog its best chance at a good start will mean a lot to both of you over the years to come.

   
Studying maps is a sure way to make yourself miserable. Those two-dimensional representations of our multidimensional world have a way of igniting wanderlust and overexciting the imagination.

Follow the meandering blue line of a river into a sprawling blue maze of lakes, and you can easily slip into an idealized version of the place. "I want to be there," you whisper. And there, and there. And when you have finished exploring that irresistible shoreline and climbing that tantalizing promontory, you want to go there. Soon you are so exhausted that you can't muster the strength to go anywhere at all.

The best maps for this exercise in futility--and the best for down-and-dirty navigating in the real world--are topographic or quadrant maps. They allow you to see hills and marshes, flat water and rapids, roads and trails, and even cabins, and, because they are presented in large-scale formats and blocked off in square-mile grids, they make it possible to tally an accurate mileage count.

Topos also make a genuine effort to illustrate the third dimension. This is accomplished with contour lines, those superimposed jangling lines you see echoing across the page. The more closely the lines are drawn, the steeper the terrain. Likewise, the more frequently the lines cross a river, the steeper its gradient.

Counting the contour lines--or, more to the point, counting the intervals between them--makes it possible to measure elevations. If the contour intervals are set at 20 feet, and the map shows 10 contour lines crossing a river in 10 miles, the total descent for that stretch is 200 feet, or 20 feet per mile. Such information can be priceless.

With a little practice, you can study a topo map and see the lay of the land--the heights of hills and mountains, the steepness of canyons, the dimensions of swamps and meadows. You can follow the course of a river and determine whether the banks that flank it are 200-footers impossible to climb or 2-footers topped by wetlands. You can see at a glance if the river is sluggish or a raging boat eater.

Such details are possible because topo maps are based on aerial photographs. Most of the photos were taken in the 1930s and 1940s and in the years since have been periodically updated and revised. Revisions, however, are incomplete. The Kiernan, Michigan quadrangle I just pulled at random from my files is drawn from aerial photos taken in 1944 and field checked in 1945. New photos were taken in 1955 and again in 1975, but they were never field checked for errors. Topos might be the best maps we've got, but they're not foolproof.

Craig Date and I learned that lesson one August day on the Brule River on the Michigan-Wisconsin border. In the morning, studying a topo spread on the hood of Craig's truck, we decided to end our trip at a bridge called Scott's Landing. The plan was for our buddy Mark Wilkes to meet us there with the truck at six o'clock and we'd all go to dinner.

The day promised to be hot, so Craig and I put on swimsuits, T-shirts, and sneakers. We tossed a quart of water and a couple of apples in the canoe. Mark kept the map.

We spent most of the day drifting lazily with the current and watching wildlife. But as the afternoon ended we became uneasy. We had not kept track of landmarks and had no idea how far we had come. Each time we rounded a bend we expected to see the bridge at Scott's Landing, with Mark standing on it with a bag of sandwiches and a six-pack of beer. But one bend followed another and no bridge appeared. Six o'clock came and went. Then seven o'clock. We began paddling to a racing cadence, trying to beat the sun. Eight o'clock, and still no bridge. Then it got dark.

At first it was easier to keep going than to stop. The Wisconsin shore was dense with cedar swamps, and the Michigan shore rose in a wooded bank a hundred feet high. Even after dark we pushed on, certain the bridge was beyond the next bend.

The Brule is not much challenge in the daylight, but at night its Class I and II rapids are daunting. We paddled until we could see standing waves only in the periphery of our vision. For awhile we navigated by sound more than sight, avoiding the obvious turbulence, seeking channels that Craig, in the bow, would steer us toward. Once we went up on an unseen rock and spun broadside against it. We hung there for a long moment while the river tried to bury our upstream gunwale. Somehow we worked in unison, leaning downstream, applying pry strokes that turned the canoe and let us slide free.

Finally, when it was stupid to continue, we dragged the canoe up the bank and left it on a ledge. Climbing higher we came to an abandoned railroad bed. The stars gave just enough light to reveal a corridor of darkness running parallel to the river. We built a tripod of dead branches to mark the location of the canoe and began walking in what we hoped was the direction of Scott's Landing.

We walked for hours. It's impossible to know for sure, but it seemed as if we walked at least 10 miles before we spotted the distant glow of yard lights. It was certainly past midnight when we entered a village of a dozen darkened houses, each guarded by a barking dog. At the only intersection in town we turned toward the river and descended to an abandoned and rusting iron bridge that dead-ended in a wall of woods on the Wisconsin side. In the pocket of my swimsuit was a book of paper matches that had somehow remained dry. We gathered deadfalls and built a fire.

At some point, very early in the morning, while we huddled close to the fire, headlights danced in the trees and a truck crested the hill. The lights went off. A door closed. Mark walked down the bank and squatted next to the fire. He poked it with a stick.

"Been wondering where you guys were," he said.

"Is this Scott's Landing?"

"Not even close."

We had gone too far. Miles and miles too far. Mark had looked for us at every bridge and access site on 50 miles of the Brule.

"How did we miss it?"

"Easy," said Mark, in his best nonchalant drawl. "According to some guy at a gas station, Scott's Landing washed out in a flood in 1957 and the bridge was never replaced. Seems that out-of-towners are always getting lost looking for the damned thing."

This essay is adapted from From a Wooden Canoe: Reflections on Canoeing, Camping, and Classic Equipment, published in February 1999 by Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press.