But one of the curious things about growing older is that, although my memory is about shot, I can clearly remember how much I dislike chasing my dogs all over creation. So I made the decision two years ago to steady up the ground troops.

The pro-steady guys, a group that in my experience seems comprised almost entirely of people who hunt and trial their dogs, have several justifications for feeling the way they do. In the "maybe, maybe not" category is the rationale that a steady dog is much better at marking multiple falls. My question is, what multiple falls? I can't remember the last time I shot a multiple anything. Okay, so I'm not the world's best shot, but this still sounds to me like a reason the pointer folks appropriated from the retriever folks, whose dogs are of necessity more in tune with multiple retrieves.

On the other hand, a quite valid reason is that low-flying birds can be dangerous. Case in point: A couple years ago, a friend brought an acquaintance to our training session at a local preserve. The man was new to shooting and new to bird dogs, and wanted to warm up on preserve birds before the season opened. Fine.

But the morning dawned gray and drizzling, and the pheasants we had bought were drenched from the wet grass and poor flyers, making feeble hops of 10 or 20 yards before fluttering back in again. This was more than my young setter could take, and every second or third bird she'd bolt and give chase.

I'd warned the newcomer not to shoot at low fliers, but the temptation to shoot--he'd paid for most of the birds, after all--proved too great, and finally he let fly 15 feet in front of my setter's nose. In that instant, years of theoretical arguments both for and against steadying went out the window, and the one undeniable advantage of a steady dog became crystal clear.

Firmly in the anti-steady camp are bunches of people who claim they want their dog on a wounded pheasant the moment it hits the ground. I give a certain amount of credence to this viewpoint, particularly if you're a dyed-in-the-wool roosterhead. A few years back, for instance, Rabbit, the setter I owned then, charged across an overgrazed cow pasture and stuck a rooster under the eroding bank of a creek. The bird flushed straight up through a tangle of snowberries and wild rose, and to the amazement of passersby, I managed to hit it. But I didn't hit it hard, and it did a cartwheel into the cropped-off grass 30 yards downwind, thrashing around in the dirt just long enough to get its bearings.

It was clawing for traction when, out of the corner of my eye, I spied a black and white blur. Rabbit came hurtling by, slammed into the bird at full speed, and the ensuing battle reminded me of nothing so much as the 1960s-era cartoon of the whirling Tasmanian devil I used to watch as a kid. When the dust settled, Rabbit had the still kicking rooster in her mouth, some well-earned scratches on her muzzle and a defiant look in her eye.

But pheasants are one thing; almost every other game bird is another. Most birds will run if they're wounded, but I've rarely found that such behavior presents a serious problem. Instead, if a bird is obviously wing-tipped, I give my dogs an immediate command to fetch, and the delay amounts to seconds at most.

So how do you decide what is best? I couldn't decide either until I had a talk with Randy Setzer, a friend who has trained springers and Labs for years.