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It was the first afternoon of my five-day stint as a student at the George Hickox School of Dog Training & Handling, and the moment I'd long anticipated finally had arrived. It was my turn to bring out my dog and do a check run for the expert. What was to come would be a first for us both: my first live lesson in training a dog to be a bird dog, and the dog's first lesson with live birds.

We'd spent the morning cooped up in the clubhouse at the Val Halla Club, a beautiful preserve and training ground west of Corning, New York, receiving an introductory overview while the weather traded between heavy mist and light rain. Now the sun was out, and the heat and humidity were rising quickly for early June. We reconvened a half-mile up the two-track that leads into the woods and fields from the club's buildings. The dozen or so human students gathered in camp chairs at the edge of a large green field, our canine charges secured in our vehicles, parked in the cool forest shade.

We'd seen several other students' dogs first, as George had chosen them at random, gotten rundowns of the dogs' training statuses, watched the dogs and trainers work a little, and then quickly laid out first tasks. I trotted to my truck to bring out Wicket, my eight-month-old black Lab. I had no idea what he would do in George's evaluation, but I was as eager as the pup to do what we'd come for. I clipped Wicket's check cord and let him out of his kennel, and he pulled all the way to where class was gathered. George likes to say that a dog lives in the moment, and my mind was just about as happily blank as Wicket's: I had few expectations and preconceived notions about what would come next, but I was excited as hell to see how it would turn out. I was prepared to be humbled for my previous lackadaisical training — and I was prepared to learn. Through no fault of his own, Wicket was only now going to discover his reason for being.

Unless you're more accomplished than George Hickox — who has more than 100 field-trial placements and five consecutive Canadian national high-point champion springers to his credit — there's a pretty good chance he could teach you a thing or two about training bird dogs. He's been training upland dogs professionally for more than 30 years, and he is, of course, SSM's Hunting Dogs Editor, writing six columns a year explaining training, health and nutrition, dog gear, and how to understand and direct the canine psyche. Since leaving the competitive circuit, George has become the quintessential entrepreneur, successfully marketing just about every aspect of the experience that the trialing world prepared him for.

I work directly with George and his writing, and whenever a question comes up, it's clear that he's a busy man. (I invariably reach him on the road driving a truckload of dogs from one job to the next.) In many years of hustle George has written a training book, produced excellent and thorough training videos, and written for other magazines as well. He's been teaching the George Hickox School of Dog Training for 15 years and has had an estimated 1,500 students — many of whom return for repeat sessions; he runs a kennel of setters, pointers and Labs that he breeds and sells as pups as well as started and finished dogs; and he has hunted his dogs from Alaska to Saskatchewan to Georgia as a high-end upland guide. This year he's offering 11 five-day schools in locations around the country, even as he gets his kennel operations settled at new training grounds in Tennessee.

As much as I wanted the education of a week at George's school, I knew full well that I'd been remiss as a trainer in Wicket's six months in our household, starting with his lack of bird exposure. We'd brought him home at the start of winter; we were in the final throes of a year-long homebuilding project — I had plenty of good excuses. Wicket was happy and well adjusted, had taken to his kennel and house training quickly, rambled boldly through snow-covered meadows at night, and had showed the potential to live up to the best breeding we could justifiably afford. We'd covered the basics of obedience, but Maine in winter doesn't offer a lot of easy access to birds. Still, a small investment in pen-reared birds in the spring would have put us closer to real training tasks. George had heard all of this on the phone and told me that Wicket and I could come to school and learn, anyway.

There are two keys to understanding George's schools. First, any pride or regret you may feel about your dog's training progress really only matters inasmuch as you can work toward an honest evaluation of where you and your dog are in training and develop a strategy for moving forward. Your dog might find and flush or point birds in fine, biddable style but has stalled out in learning steadiness to wing & shot. Or it might be at the proverbial Square One, as Wicket and I were. You will not impress or disappoint George, who lives in a different world of dogs — in many ways simpler than mine and probably yours. His dogs are not companions for 90 percent of the time and working dogs during brief windows of training and hunting. When George or a member of his staff puts a dog on the ground, it is for a reason; there are few opportunities for unintended associations that distract from the directed tasks of a bird dog. In short: Forget about it. You're not going to school to be judged; you're going to school to learn. Some students learn the hard truth that they don't have the time, commitment or access to training grounds to supply what their dog needs. That's disappointing but invaluable.

Next, George's school is about teaching you to become a better bird dog trainer using your current dog's repertoire as a starting point. It is not about training your dog in the five days that you and the other students are attending school. What you should expect is a broad education in dog training based on a foundation of how dogs learn. Students watch and listen to George's evaluations of all of the dogs and their trainers and are shown demonstrations of training techniques with several of George's dogs as well as those of the students. It is an investment in your long-term knowledge as a trainer — for your present dog and those that follow. But the information gleaned from watching another's pointing dog learn "Whoa" are easily translated as lessons in "Sit" for the owner of a flushing dog.

There's an interesting breakdown in the tuition cost, which this year is $1,295 for students with a dog and $595 for students without. Couples often attend together with one dog between them, which makes excellent sense to anyone who has struggled with family members who think dogs are like little children trapped in handsome fur coats. But the price to attend sans Spot is simply a screaming good deal in learning the skills of training bird dogs. It would have been a great idea for me, for example, before I bought Wicket. With the introductory class time on canine fundamentals and another session on health, nutrition, conditioning and first aid, the class offers a solid four days in the field in which George presents ideas, demonstrates with dogs, observes and corrects students, and offers up every tip and tool he has at his disposal.

In our class at Val Halla I had the opportunity to see several owners with German shorthairs, a Lab that had been bought from George's kennel (formerly called Grouse Wing, now George Hickox Bird Dogs), a Brittany, a setter and a vizsla, all at varying levels of confidence and finish. Each dog had a lesson to present for the class every time it was before us, and we became familiar with where each was in its progress. More importantly, George takes every opportunity to make a "teachable moment" for the trainers-probing the thinking of the student whose dog is out, and bouncing that off to the rest of the students in class.

Not surprisingly, there was a lot of remedial problem-solving going on to decipher where the trainers had skipped steps or moved too quickly, leaving the dogs incapable of responding consistently at the levels the owners expected. And when George wanted to show a training progression work flawlessly so that we could see it done right the first time, he and his talented assistants, Carol Brown and Tom Perry, would bring out one of his dogs.

Far more than wishing for more personal attention for Wicket and me, I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information that came at me every day and regret only that I don't have the whole thing on videotape so that I can recall details and nuances months later.

But those first moments out with Wicket are etched in my memory as a watershed in his puppyhood and in my adolescence as a trainer. After discussing our status with George in front of the assembled class, Tom brought George a pigeon from the crates and George showed the simplicity of locking back its wings. With Wicket at "Sit," George waved the bird in front of the dog, tossed it out into the grass perhaps 10 yards and, when it was down, gave me a simple cue: "OK." Wicket, son of a derby-points-champion sire and a master-hunter dam, charged with all that those genes told him was right. He stutter-stepped in the last yard, continued forward — in what I read as a puppy tight end out-juking his victim — snatched up the bird and commenced a victory scamper. With praise and cajoling and some check-cord tugging, he brought in his first soggy bird. Success!

George saw it a little differently. "He's got some fear of that bird that we've got to work on," he said matter-of-factly, instantly deflating my joy. "Did you see him hesitate?"

"No, I didn't see fear," I shot back. "I saw him get the bird."

George confirmed his view with the class and then quickly said, "OK, let's do it again, Ed."

I brought Wicket to "Sit," and George tossed the lock-wing and said, "OK." This time Wicket showed a full moment of hesitation in the last yard before rushing in on the bird. It was just a moment, but a moment made clear by the teacher's experience. Ah-ha!

Wicket, three pigeons in a box, and I were sent off to the far edge of the 40-acre field to work. I threw out a lock-wing until Wicket was charging clear through time after time. College-age Tom Perry came out to check on me, declared that all looked fine and offered a few tips. It was just enough reinforcement to know that I was doing things right.

Next was a clipped-wing bird that could flap well but not fly, and Wicket gave an unrestrained charge that was full of passion with nothing held back. We repeated that until the bird went limp. I pulled some feathers from the third bird and launched it down a slope toward a stand of sparse, skinny trees in a young orchard. The pigeon went down with Wicket charging full-throttle, and then got up just in time and continued downslope through several flushes before reaching the safety of the trees. This was a success!

Not bad for the first afternoon — not bad at all!

Wicket and I were the example dog and trainer a few more times during the course. Compared to the remedial efforts that had to be practiced on some of the other students' dogs, I felt some small pride that my intuition had told me, across Wicket's first hectic winter, something like the George Hickox Hippocratic Oath: "Preventive medicine ahead of time is easier than surgery after the fact."

George teaches extensively on the introduction and use of the electronic collar, and it was here that many of my fellow students had done some real harm prior to school. With the most basic yard-training task — the "Kennel" command-as context, we progressed through some click-and-treat practice and on to a demonstration with one of George's dogs of the first steps with e-collars (see Hunting Dogs, p. 46).

The students presented dog after dog that complied with "Kennel" but then flinched, balked or outright refused at the first collar stimulation. Charlie, a shorthair owner from Massachusetts, admitted later that as a novice he had perhaps used his collar inconsistently. In class his dog could not work through the initial "pre-cue/cue" stage, when George attempts to teach the dog that it can turn off stimulation by complying with the command it already knows. Charlie's dog — otherwise reasonably advanced in some skills — assumed a motionless, stiff grimace and withstood increasing stimulation from the collar until George dragged it by the check cord into the kennel. Another shorthair had been off to a "professional" trainer and had some skills with birds but a quiet — even meek — demeanor. She lit up like a cartoon character in George's demonstration, attempting every possible escape — flight, fight and fakery — in a whirlwind of animation that lasted almost 20 seconds until she was tugged into the kennel. It was a stark lesson in making no mistakes with e-collars.

Wicket had lived in his kennel since the day he'd come home, and I had used an e-collar only for him to wear around and to test his recognition level. Given both (and a Lab's motivation for anything that starts with click-and-treat), I wasn't surprised when he jumped in his kennel from "pre-cue/cue" and needed very few reminders. What did surprise me was his capacity for learning new tweaks on the old trick, as he would run straight into the kennel from 25 feet out after just 15 minutes of repetitions.

Wicket and I had shown up as virtually blank slates. I'd read a little, and he'd run a little. Amid watching other students' dogs and George's lessons, we chased pigeons, overcame Wicket's early reluctance, busted through coveys of planted quail and, importantly, got through an introduction to guns in a silky-smooth progression of bird chasing and ever-louder bangs that he ignored.

After graduating from George's school, I managed to improve the human element of Wicket's gundog life during the summer-doing obedience work in the yard and buying a weekend's worth of pen-raised chukar just before the opening of bird season.

This past fall Wicket retrieved ducks off of the water as per a Labrador's natural calling, and he found and flushed late-season grouse with a passion and natural close-hunting eagerness that made my heart absolutely soar, full of belief in his potential. He'll see plenty of birds in our training this year, and hopefully his second hunting season will bring many more.

I would love to believe, as I write this in a hard-crusted winter with another storm bearing down on us, that Wicket and I might even get another shot with George at his schools-if not this year than the next . . . .