No matter how many pups you may have brought up, if you are not at least a little anxious about a gun dog's first hunt, you just don't realize how much harm can come of it. A small mistake can lead to irreversible consequences for many hunting seasons to follow and it is impossible to predict the damage that might result from a major miscue.

One evening, as I was preparing to camp on a point of land jutting into a lake full of ducks and geese, a young lad approached on the two-track leading to the beach. On my way to a prairie chicken hunt, I was tossing tennis balls into the lake for my pointing dogs, hoping they wouldn't opt to swim out to the nearest noisy geese, when the young man spotted me and started to turn around. I motioned him to stay and when he pulled up to the water's edge I saw that he had a golden retriever pup on the seat beside him.

While I put my biscuit-eaters back in their kennel, the lad explained that this was a "shooting tolerance" session for his nine-month old pup, which he had brought along using a 20-gauge and dummies on dry land. He said he wanted to accustom the pup to a real duck and a louder gun over water. The one he pulled from the bed of his pickup was a 10-gauge and there was a freshly-killed pintail back there too. He strode to the lakeshore with the golden in tow, then steadied her on "sit" and tossed the dead duck into the lake. What happened next will likely send chills up your spine. It did mine.

Crouching alongside the pup, who was intently focused on the floating pintail, the young retriever trainer loaded and fired the three-and-a-half-inch 10-gauge with the muzzle no more than three feet from her head and yelled, "Fetch!" It took both of us to prod the pup out from under the young man's pickup and the Chicago Bears could not have pried her tail from between her legs. She wouldn't look at the lake and I had to send my shorthair for the pintail.

Years ago, it was easy to curtail our opening day shooting over rookie pups when we knew there were always more ducks on the way.

"Looks like she may miss the first week or two of waterfowl season," the young lad lamented.

If she didn't miss several entire seasons I'd be surprised. You just can't expect a young gun dog to perform well with its ears still ringing. As previously noted, little errors can be costly. That's where patience and planning come in. By imagining himself in his pup's boots for a moment, the young retriever coach could have guessed how he might respond if a trusted chum unexpectedly touched off a .375 magnum three feet from his ear while he intently glassed a grizzly on a distant slope.

He might not crawl under his vehicle, but he would not be in any mood to drag the guy's grizzly back to it, either.

All it would have taken was to have had a helper fire the shotgun some distance down the shore as the pup saw the pintail for the first time splashing into the lake at the report. Not a perfect setup, but not as traumatic for the pup.