When I was doing it, I found the best way was to start the pup with a old, deer broke, slow trailing but hard treeing dog. For some reasons the pups took better to a old female. We would always try to get the pups real fired up at the tree. Let the pup mouth the coon and get real excited. A lot of times it would'nt take but 2 or 3 trips and the pup would start opening on the tree. If the dog has it, most of the time the trailing part would just come, the more you took it. Sometimes you would go for a month or two, and then one day, it seemed as if, something would just click with the dog, and from then on, it was just a matter of experience. A lot also depends on bloodlines. I have seen 6 month old pups tree harder than some broke dogs. Last time I went, one pup got run over after being at the tree for an hour and was coming back(she was a heck of pup with good prospects and due to terrain, we had trouble getting a signal from the tracking collar), and in the same trip, another broke dog fell 30 feet out of a tree (a big popular had fell into the forks of a huge oak, and the dog trailed the coon right up the laid over tree). I retired from coon hunting after that night.
