Black Hills
Ammunition
Gun
Collections Wanted
Phone: 605-341-5211
Fax: 605-341-0431
strum@rapidcity.net
First Stop Guns 701 Main Street
Rapid City, SD 57701 Sightron Sport Optics Headquarters
or a rancher’s calf or two. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2011 It’s 3:30 in the morning Michigan
time and we are headed out. It’s been a lot of fun and we hope to return again. We discuss our trip and feel that we will do much better another time now that we know the land. Perhaps each of us is a little quick on the trigger and needs to wait for better shooting. As much as we want to use our rifl es the guy on the caller needs to use a shotgun. Most of the ’yotes came in on a dead run. The rifl e I used on the trip was
a .243 Winchester on a Ruger action. A Ramline stock and a Douglas bar- rel replaced the original because I was fortunate enough to wear them out. The scope is a 4-12x Swift that gets dual duty between this gun and my elk rifl e. Re- loads are made of Nosler Custom brass and 42 grains of Ramshot Big Game for a velocity of a little over 3,100 feet per second. Primers are CCI 250 and
70-grain Speer TNT bullets fi nish out the business end. For a shotgun I chose my Mossberg 500 with a Carlson Dead Coyote choke tube and Dead Coyote shotshells. To lure the coyotes, a FoxPro
Fury carried the music while the Mojo decoy twitched beside it. Comfort is a must to remain quiet and undetected. A raincoat goes down on the ground fi rst and a stadium cushion goes on top of the raincoat. All the items except the guns go in backpack or strap on the backpack. Not shown is a large piece of venison sausage, cheese, crackers in a protective container, and an old pop bottle full of water. The mouth calls go around my
neck on every predator hunt. They in- clude the Sceery closed reed three-piece call set for making prey distress sounds. The Primos Lil Dog is good to mimic coyote sounds. I used these to call in two coyotes the one afternoon. I like to have
them as a backup if needed. Jeff provides lodges for his hunt-
ers and we were able to use one of them during our stay. It was very comfort- able with a complete kitchen, three bedrooms for two hunters each, and a roomy bathroom. Outside, the lodge overlooks a
lake of about 20 acres. Every night there were coyotes howling on the other side. Rolling hills, brushy draws, and
pastures are typical of the terrain in the area. I speculate that the coyotes liked hunting the roads for rabbits as they were everywhere when you drove from point A to point B. Maybe that is why scat was so common on the roads. The picture I made of the cat track
(see page 162) I submitted to the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks. The cartridge used for reference is a .243 Winchester with an overall length of 2.67". Jim saw a bigger track and trail on the property we hunted the second day. We wanted to do more hunting and did not go back for pictures. The ranchers said they have been seeing big cats, and this is pretty convincing evidence that plenty of cats are around. On page 162 is a photo of a bound-
ary marker, and these are common in the area. In the middle of the day we set the FoxPro on top of this marker. A coyote came from on top of the hill at the left and, according to Jim, was running to the call. It paid no attention to the distress calls but arrived only a minute or two after the caller switched to the coyote puppy screams. Within a minute of making the shot a rancher showed up to check the water supply for his cattle. Had he arrived a few minutes earlier this set would have been a bust. We did get lucky on this one.
Rolling hills, brushy draws, and pastureland are typical of the terrain in the area where the author hunted predators in Kansas.
Page 166 October — December 2011
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164 |
Page 165 |
Page 166 |
Page 167 |
Page 168 |
Page 169 |
Page 170 |
Page 171 |
Page 172 |
Page 173 |
Page 174 |
Page 175 |
Page 176 |
Page 177 |
Page 178 |
Page 179 |
Page 180 |
Page 181 |
Page 182 |
Page 183 |
Page 184 |
Page 185 |
Page 186 |
Page 187 |
Page 188 |
Page 189 |
Page 190 |
Page 191 |
Page 192 |
Page 193 |
Page 194 |
Page 195 |
Page 196 |
Page 197 |
Page 198 |
Page 199 |
Page 200 |
Page 201 |
Page 202 |
Page 203 |
Page 204 |
Page 205 |
Page 206 |
Page 207 |
Page 208 |
Page 209 |
Page 210 |
Page 211 |
Page 212