BREAKING AND HANDLING. 225 



quartering. It would be just as reasonable to suppose that 

 an inexperienced man could learn wing shooting by simul- 

 taneously shooting with a crack shot. There are certain 

 things which both man and dog must learn from their own 

 individual experience. 



When the dog is reliable, he may be run with a brace 

 mate which is equally so. Here a variety of complexities 

 may arise that could not appear when working singly. One 

 or both may be inordinately jealous, and may flush or 

 chase as a consequence; one may defer entirely to the other 

 and follow him about constantly, which act spoils the brace 

 work completely; one may be a much faster or wider ranger 

 than the other, which also impairs the value of the brace. 



A brace should work perfectly independent of each other, 

 and theoretically their parallels must alternate, hence each 

 must take wider parallels than when working singly, so that 

 they will not be closer than their noses can command. Or 

 one dog must quarter on the right side, the other on the left 

 side of his handler, a line ahead of the latter in the direc- 

 tion of his course being the point at which the dogs turn. 

 Theoretically, the dog does it to mathematical accuracy; 

 practically, the handler should only strive to approximate to 

 it; if he can do so he does well. 



In quartering, as in ranging, the dog may develop a va- 

 riety of idiosyncracies; he may take a short cast on one side 

 and a long one on the other; he may turn up wind at one 

 end of his cast and down wind at the other; he may come 

 to his handler at regular intervals, perhaps at every cast; he 

 may in the middle of a cast take a turn to the rear of his 

 handler and repeat it regularly at each cast or at one par- 

 ticular cast; in fact, there are a great variety of whims 

 which he may exhibit, but the aforementioned are the most 

 important. 



As mentioned under the head of Ranging, one should be 



