Hunting dog training in summer is hot time for canine and human

The other day, raindrops dimpled already wet grass as I walked into a field with four Labradors. This was in the middle of summer, and there were months to spare before autumn, when ducks fly and pheasants flush. Still, deadlines focus effort, and anyway, year-round, where others see empty skies, I imagine mallards over decoys and bluebills arrowing south. Other ducks, too, and gaudy roosters, wings flapping.

When I was a kid in North Dakota, my dad would come home from work and on summer evenings, as meadowlarks sang, we'd run Boze, our Labrador, alongside our car on gravel roads outside the small town of Rugby. The car had no air conditioning and with its windows down it plumed dust as far as the eye could see. Boze needed exercise before training, dad would stay, and the big Labrador used up country like a deer, his fore legs reaching and back legs following as he splashed from marsh edge to marsh edge, crickets sing-songing amid the evening's lengthening shadows.

So, like many others, I come by summertime dog training honestly.

Years ago, in June, July and August I buddied up with an old boy, Ted Langford, a onetime fieldtrialer who had lost his zest for competition but still wanted to get the most from dogs in his charge. Not long after sunup on cool midsummer mornings and sometimes on hot afternoons we'd throw dummies for each other's Labradors, hoping to see little by little the improvements that cumulatively define a trained animal.

Ultimately, the goal of these sessions is less to mold a finished dog than to develop for the trainer something more than a bar-napkin philosophy about how to get things done. As in life generally, for some dogs, A can lead to B, with C following. For others, C is the better starting point, a conundrum that keeps everyone on their toes. Knuckleheads who attempt to fast-track this process with a heavy hand usually are disappointed. A dog's tail, after all, is meant to wag.

Bob Wolfe, a retired 3M executive who lived in North Oaks, relished as much as anyone matching wits with retrievers. During his long life, Bob owned many Labradors, or they owned him, and he knew the best ones punched above their weight from the get-go, quick to the bird and back, no monkey business. But, as with people, the plusses of these talented animals sometimes appeared from nowhere as minuses, and at precisely the wrong times. A trainer friend of mine wears a T-shirt that says, "Huh. He never did that before," and everyone understands.

My dad was a stickler for sportsmanship, but in late November when mallards cycloned out of Saskatchewan he'd sometimes set his decoys in a cut cornfield maybe a hundred yards from a refuge. I was along on one of these hunts, perhaps 5 or 6 years old, cozying up to Boze to stay warm, with my galoshes buckled and parka hood pulled tight around my face.

Between dad's intermittent volleys and Boze's retrieves, I asked what would happen if a wing-shot duck sailed into the refuge.

"I'd leave it," Dad said. "The refuge is off limits."

"Could Boze go?"

Scanning the leaden sky for greenheads, Dad mulled the question before splitting hairs.

"Dogs sometimes have minds of their own," he said. "So he might decide to retrieve the duck."

Years ago, Bud Grant and I were driving back to the Twin Cities from northern Manitoba. We had been hunting ducks and geese and were overnighting at a Winnipeg hotel. As Bud commonly did, he left Annie, his Labrador, crated in his Suburban. As I commonly did, I snuck Sage, my dog, into the hotel.

Overnight, Bud's vehicle was broken into and his guns were stolen. But Annie remained where Bud left her the night before, no worse for the wear.

"I don't care about the guns," Bud said. "But I wouldn't have left here without Annie."

Throughout his adult life, like other hunters before, during and after his time, Bud appreciated sporting dogs that understood keenly, not only by training, but by something akin to intuition, what their human partners wanted. Rarer among people, the intent of these animals was, and remains, to satisfy their partners' expectations, in return for which they hope only for a pat on the head or to hear a sincere "Good dog" — reward inequities that wouldn't pass muster in any other relationship.

Jeff Barbour was a good retriever trainer and an interesting guy. He and Jeff Shie and a bunch of us would gather on summer evenings to train at Jeff Barbour's place, Duck Pass Kennels in Hugo, or at Kelley Land and Cattle, also in Hugo, and recently sold to the state for use as a wildlife management area.

These were mostly water sessions, and until dusk we'd send our dogs into ponds or marshes, hoping they'd take direct lines to "blinds" (hidden birds) or race without hesitation to "marks,'' meaning dummies or frozen pigeons or other birds we would throw. At the end of these outings the dogs stunk in ways that quietly thrilled us, dogs and people alike, and while Jeff, Jeff and I sat on pickup tailgates, cool drinks in our hands, and while our crated dogs groomed themselves, the setting sun flamed the western horizon in hot-weather hues of orange, coral and tangerine.

The other day, the four Labradors with me were Rowdy, Fella, Bayou and Flynn. They didn't know anything about dogs that came before them. They knew only that when I fired a dummy launcher, arching a small canvas cylinder into the sky that somersaulted to the ground about 50 yards distant, and then fired it again in an opposite direction, they were supposed to wait their turns before returning the objects to me, one after another.

They were happy enough with that, and so was I.