On a Perfect Day

By Jay Nelson

Photos courtesy of Jay Nelson

I daydream of sitting on the beach of an island in the Snake River in southern Idaho. I rest against my little two-man raft as the late-October sunshine warms me and my old setter, Jo Bones. His head is in my lap after helping me eat the bologna sandwich I had packed in my shooting vest. A limit of fully matured rooster pheasants lies colorfully in the sand next to my double-barreled twenty-gauge shotgun.

The first time this idyllic scene returned to me was when I participated in a meditation session in my younger days. The meditation leader instructed us to recall a time and place that were especially enjoyable, and I thought of a day five years earlier, in 1975.

I had arrived at that actual moment after buying my first bird dog when I was living on a trout farm adjacent to the Portneuf River. Jo Bones was an English setter, like the one in the paint-by-numbers image my older brother had left behind when he went into the service. I brought my puppy home to the trout farm and immediately took him hunting ducks and pheasants on our hundred acres. We floated the river between two farms in my little raft and shot ducks or fished for trout. We floated mountain lakes on backpack trips. On the farm, we spent all my free time running around together.

Jo was a natural. All I had to do was put him on wild birds and he figured out the rest. If he wasn’t focused and if he screwed up, which was rare, it usually happened because I was distracted by the company of other hunters. My buddies who lived there and worked with me had Chesapeake and golden retrievers. We built blinds beside a pond close to the river and left decoys out during duck season.

The author as a young man with Jo Bones.

Jay (right) and Michael McNabb with Bones, 1979.

Jay recently with his new dog.

A shadow box for Joe Bones.

When Jo was a pup I didn’t force him to retrieve, but we played fetch at home a lot. He sat next to me and watched the other dogs retrieve from the water for half a season. One evening, just the two of us were sitting in the blind at the pond. A baldpate drake came up the river and turned into our decoys. I shot and the duck hit with a splash, followed by a second splash. I stood in disbelief as my pup swam out and returned with the widgeon. He was a reliable retriever from then on, unwilling to just watch.

A year later I was living in Rupert, where I had come to hunt pheasants first and make a living second. Back then, pheasant season was a big deal in that part of the state. Under the trespass law of the day, if it wasn’t posted, you could hunt it. The locals welcomed hunters and the businesses thrived because of it. The first two weeks of the season, you couldn’t get a motel room or a barstool. Other than pheasant season, the only culture we had was agriculture.

In 1881, thirty ringneck pheasants from China were introduced to Oregon’s Willamette Valley. In 1903, thirty such birds were transplanted from Oregon to Idaho. By the time I moved to Rupert, pheasants had spread across the United States and Canada and were established and thriving in the Magic Valley.

In the 1930s, the Minidoka Project created farmland with irrigation ditches and small fields with plenty of cover. My grandfather moved there and homesteaded. My uncles ended up with some of that farmland, and I was lucky to hunt it. The farmers were used to hearing shots and most of them hunted as well. We used lead shot for everything, and I usually picked up a teal or two as well as my roosters. My buddy, the late Phil Blomquist, once gave me a box of twenty-gauge Imperial three-inch copper-chilled five-shot shells, which always proved effective on roosters. I also shot Hungarian partridge, although most of the other hunters passed on them.

After four seasons of driving past the island in the river that I later dreamed about, curiosity got the best of me. I decided to check it out. I’d never seen anyone on the island. Most guys were happy to chase the plentiful birds on dry ground. One morning I inflated my raft, put it in the back of my old pickup, made lunch, and loaded my dog and gun in the front. When I arrived at the launch site, I surveyed the island to make sure no goose hunters were set up on it. The place looked deserted. The sun was up and the wind was calm. The river had some riffles, but the two hundred yards to the island looked like smooth sailing. Jo knew his spot in the raft, hopped in, and rested his head on the bow so he could see where we were headed. The paddle over was uneventful, and as we neared the island, four mule deer swam off the far side. We had the place to ourselves.

We landed and I secured the boat as Jo waited for me to give him the word. When I grabbed my gun and slipped two Imperials in, he knew this wasn’t just a pleasure cruise and started dancing around with delight. We worked through the willows up to the flat cheatgrass, wild roses, sagebrush, and bunchgrass in the heart of the island. There were no structures to be concerned with, and the place was ours. We started walking toward the lower end of the island, and Jo instantly got birdy. A big rooster tried to escape out the back end, and I shot. It fell in the water and Jo had it back to me posthaste. I marveled at the concept that any rooster in any direction was my shot.

As we hunted upstream on the island, Jo continued to show bird until, as the outdoors writer and humorist Ed Zern would say, he was “locked up tighter than the Bank of England at midnight.” When an old rooster tried to fly out the upper end, I was ready to validate Jo’s point. At the shot, Jo broke point  and quickly picked up the winged bird. Jo had a soft mouth and as he returned, I could see the ringneck was still kicking and scratching. As he got close, another ringneck gave me an easy pass shot that Jo saw. He fetched the live bird and took off for the other without a prompt from me. By the time I had dispatched the bird and put it in my bag, Jo was back with the last one of my limit, just as pretty as you please.

Folks might say I play loose with the facts as far as my wing-shooting ability, but that day, in that setting, my aim was true. At least that’s how I remember it. During the walk back to the beach, the weight of the three birds felt nicely heavy in my game bag.

I field-dressed the birds and sat down to eat lunch. As Jo and I munched on the sandwich, I looked across the river to a land that seemed fifty years away. Modern farming practices have taken away the glory days of pheasant hunting in this part of the country, and my launch spot is now posted and developed. Still, I sometimes return to the island with my long-gone beloved birddog to fill an easy limit one more time, if only in my mind.