BREAKING AND ENTERING. 



great experience and tact, and therefore the ordinary sportsman, 

 however ardent he may be, can scarcely expect his dogs to attain 

 this amount of perfection ; but by attending to the following in- 

 structions, which will be given in plain language, he may fairly 

 hope to turn out a brace of dogs far above the average of those be- 

 longing to his neighbors. One advantage he will assuredly have 

 when he begins the actual war against the birds in September ; 

 namely, that his dogs will cheerfully work for him, and will be 

 obedient to his orders ; but at the same time he must not expect 

 that they will behave as well then as they did when he considered 

 their education complete in the previous April or May. No one 

 who values " the bag" above the performance of his dogs will take 

 a young pointer into the field at all, until he has been shot over for 

 some time by a man who makes it his business to break dogs, and 

 who is not himself over-excited by the sport. It is astonishing 

 what a difference is seen in the behavior of the young dog when he 

 begins to see game falling to the gun. He may go out with all the 

 steadiness which he had acquired by two months' drilling in the 

 spring ; but more frequently he will have forgotten all about it, 

 unless he is well hunted in the week previous to the opening of 

 the campaign. But no soonor has he found his birds or backed his 

 fellow-pointer, and this good behavior has been followed by the 

 report of the gun, heard now almost for the first time, and by the 

 fall of a bird or two within a short distance, than he becomes wild 

 with excitement, and, trying to rival the gun hi destructiveness, he 

 runs in to his birds, or plays some other trick almost equally 

 worthy of punishment. For this there is no remedy but patience 

 and plenty of hard work, as we shall presently find. I only men- 

 tion it here, in order that my readers may not undertake the task 

 without knowing all the disagreeable as well as agreeable things 

 attending upon it. 



Assuming, therefore, that a gentleman has determined to break 

 a brace of pointers for his own use, without assistance from a 

 keeper, let us now consider how he should set about it. 



In the first place, let him procure his puppies of a breed in 

 which he can have confidence. He will do well to secure a brace 



