TWIN BRIDGES (AP) -- The way Tammy Totten sees things, her husband Bill has never worked a day in his life. Sure, Bill Totten has been employed, or self employed, all of his adult years. He's tied fishing flies for a living, worked as assistant manager of a sporting goods store and managed a duck hunting club.

And for the past 19 years, he's professionally trained gun dogs. It's hardly work for someone who loves dogs, loves the outdoors and loves Montana.

''She's told me 'You've never had a job, you get people to pay you for what you love to do,''' Bill Totten, 51, said of his wife recently at the family's Nightwind Training just south of Twin Bridges. ''This has been a dream of mine for a long time.''

It better be, because Bill Totten's career is all-consuming. He said training and caring for gun dogs on the family property near Twin Bridges is like owning a dairy farm -- you can never leave it. Lucky for him, he doesn't want to.

The 210 acres of wetlands and pastures are the perfect environment to train gun dogs. And having that training ground out the back door has helped Bill Totten turn out some of the top Labrador retrievers on the fiercely competitive national field trial circuit.

''He's one of the better trainers in the country,'' said Steve Bechtel, former chairman of Bechtel Group Inc., a San Francisco area construction company and a Nightwind client.

One of Bechtel's dogs in the past included the late Dust Devil's Shoot the Moon, a black Labrador retriever that finished second in the all-time points list for field trial retrievers.

Bechtel said of all the trainers throughout the country, he chose Totten because of his ability to understand a dog, work with its strengths and focus on praise rather than punishment.

''He reads the dogs very well, and he's a little softer on the dogs than some of the other trainers,'' Bechtel said.

Bill Totten was born in Butte, but the family moved several times, following his father's career as a television producer. Despite leaving when he was only 12, Bill said, Montana never left his heart.

''If you want to take a male child out of Montana, you better do it before he has the time to realize that Montana is a paradise,'' he said. ''Unfortunately my parents didn't do that early enough.''

He bought his first hunting dog, a Brittany spaniel, at the age of 17 and was hooked. Totten eventually became more interested in waterfowl hunting, got a Labrador retriever and started competing in field trials with his dogs.

A former college swimmer, Totten said field trials are a natural outlet for someone who's competitive like him.

He met his future wife Tammy, who coached high school swimming, and they were married when she was 18 and he was 21. Their daughter, Sara, 22, now helps train the dogs.

Bill Totten started training professionally as a way to help pay for his own field trial habit. But at that time, he didn't like the harsh methods trainers were using on dogs, which he said made it difficult to watch a field trial.

''They were under a lot of mental pressure,'' he said of the dogs. ''They were skittish, they ran slow, they were tentative.''

That's because trainers couldn't correct a dog immediately for bad behavior. Bill Totten said although he uses them sparingly, electronic shock collars help correct a dog right away, which is crucial for a dog to understand what it's doing wrong. Tammy Totten saw patience in Bill and encouraged him to pursue dog training as a full time profession, which he did in 1987.

''I could just tell that he was good at it,'' Tammy Totten said. ''He had a way of being able to communicate with the dogs.''

Bill Totten always wanted to get back to western Montana. As his training business grew, he began looking for property in the southwest part of the state to establish a home base.

Real estate agents kept calling him about prime farm and ranch land, but Totten kept telling them he wanted something else.

''I said 'Look, you guys aren't getting it, I'm looking for a worthless swamp that no one else would want,' '' he said.

In 1995, he found it. The land along Highway 41 has plenty of cattails and willow patches, as well as a section of the Beaverhead River.

They've built ponds and flood-irrigated the fields to add to the wetlands and improve it for training.

The Tottens also renovated the old farmhouse there and have built a new kennel building. There they board roughly a dozen clients' dogs that are in full-time training, as well as their own dogs.

About half a dozen of those dogs stay with the Tottens all year, seeing their owners only during field trials or for a few hunting trips. Other dogs are in and out throughout the year.

They take their clients' dogs along on the roughly 40 field trials they travel to throughout the year. The dogs also come to California in the winter, where Bill and Tammy spend the winter training.

Their fee for full-time training and boarding varies, depending on a number of factors, and top out at $650 a month.

But for people who compete in field trials, it's worth the money, said Mike Heard of Butte. He drives down several times a week to train with his dog, Thunder.

He said Totten has helped train not only his Lab Thunder, but also himself to better handle his dogs.

''He corrected all of my bad habits,'' Heard said. ''Now I have a better understanding of how to read my dog.''

Training days at Nightwind involve the whole family. They load the dogs in a trailer, drive out to the field and spend the entire day.

Tammy and Sara Totten toss a dummy, or a dead farm-raised duck, at a distance of several hundred yards while Bill handles the dogs.

His key to training a dog is first and foremost remaining patient. That means never flying off the handle when a dog misbehaves because it can ruin a dog's trust in its owner, he said.

And dogs are naturally eager to please. He said a dog's owner provides food, shelter and medical care, so the dog sees its caretaker in nearly divine terms.

''We're almost like God, so why would they want to do something to make us mad?'' he said. ''If we're correcting them and they don't know why, that causes confusion, and if you get angry at the same time that causes fear, and you don't want fear.''

His approach to training has drawn numerous clients who want to compete on the national level and will settle for nothing less.

Bill Totten said what they look for in a trial champion is its natural ability to find birds, level of desire and trainability. He tries to gauge all of that in an initial two week evaluation to test a dog's personality and aptitude.

''You start throwing some marks and see how natural it is for them, because for field trial dogs, retrieving is an obsession,'' he said.

At the same time, a dog can't be so focused on retrieving the mark that it tunes out its owner.

He's had to tell many owners that their dog simply doesn't have the full package to compete nationally. But that's part of the business, and an owner needs to know what upfront before they spend thousands of dollars.

''Essentially the field trial dogs are the brain surgeons of hunting dogs,'' he said. ''You have to recognize the fact that not every dog is going to be a field trial champion.''