rancher pulls out of a pasture behind me and comes over to talk. I explain and he is pleased we are trying to kill coyotes. But the jig is up and we head on to other opportunities. On the final stand of the night we hear coyotes all over. For whatever reason they didn’t want to come out and play that night. Or maybe they did and we just didn’t see them. Monday, February 13, 2011
Our host must leave and go back to Michigan. He en-
trusts us with the lodge and says we can hunt another day or two. It was our choice. The past days’ activities are catching up with us and we’re getting tired. We drove over a thousand miles. Every morning we are up at 5:00 a.m.. We take our food and water with us most of the time and don’t return until after dark. The estimation is we put on seven miles a day up and down the hills. On the first day there was at least a foot of accumulated snow. Our faces are red and noses are peeling from sunburn, windburn, or frostbite. We’re not sure. It’s the last day, it’s warm and windy, it’s no time to
quit. Our morning is not successful but we are back to the valley where Jeff killed his first coyote of this trip. We sit along the south fence by a boundary marker. The FoxPro caller sits on top of the marker and plays distress sounds but no coyotes come. I switch the call back to screaming puppies. The sound
echoes through the draw for only a few minutes. I anticipate a coyote coming down the bottom of a draw to my left and watch patiently with a shotgun. Jim sits higher on the hill with his rifle to catch a ’yote sneaking in. Without warning there is a ’yote circling the boundary marker. It is looking for the puppies and I’m anxious that it will cross my scent trail left by placing the caller. It crosses the trail but doesn’t seem to have smelled it.
Its head is on a swivel though it is not retreating. Instead, it comes to nearly a dead stop. At less than 25 yards the shot- gun barks and the ’yote lies down. We are grateful to have another coyote. On our next stand we are getting into position when Jim
whistles quietly and waves me over. As I was setting up he noticed two coyotes lying on the rocks below. Jim was trying to find a bullet path through the brush when they noticed me setting up. Close but not quite. We call the valley for 20 minutes but no luck. Our final stand was a mockery. As soon as we started
calling, coyotes started barking at us from everywhere. We figure they watched us walk in and set up. We were busted big time. To mess with them a little Jim played the Mountain Lion In Heat. It worked. We didn’t hear a peep for the rest of our walk back to the van. In the evening I met up with Kansas Natural Resources
Officer Ryan Walker to get a tag for the bobcat. We talked for a while about ’cats and I told him I took a picture of what appears to be a very large ’cat track. He asked and I have forwarded the picture to them. They have replied and say the cat track is a bobcat and not a larger cat like we thought. Both bobcats and coyotes seem to be plentiful in this area. In the evening we spent awhile cleaning the lodge and
made every effort to leave it in better shape than we found it. As we pack the van and shake rugs, coyotes are barking at us across the lake. Altogether we killed six coyotes and one bobcat. Not a large number but likely to save one trophy buck
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