king' s outdoor world - Index

king' s outdoor world - Hunting Illustrated Magazine Dec/Jan 2008 - Coyote Crazy! - Index

56
presence. About fi fty yards over
the horizon and towards the base of
the hill, there was a prairie dog hole
with a mound of dirt that extended
all the way around the hole. I put
my seat cushion down in the hole
and sat right down in the hole. My
brother sat down higher on the side
of the hill so that his vantage point
could be higher due to running a
video camera. “We stick out like
a sore thumb,” was what my mind
was telling me, but I have done
this many times before with great
success. After sitting down and
securing my bipod legs on my rifl e
and laying the shotgun over my lap,
I took a quick minute to scan the vast
open plains for any suspicious form
that might represent life. Hardly
a blade of grass, this endless sea
of wide open prairie is what really
gets my heart pumping. Why, you
might ask? Because I know that
they are out there, that is why! I
brought the hand call to my mouth
and played the exact same cadence
on my predator call that I have done
thousands of times before. I didn’t
blow as hard as I could my fi rst
series, but since I could see hardly a
clump of sagebrush out past a mile,
I blew again a few minutes later as
loud as I could. As I picked up the
binocs to make a quick scan of the
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vast prairie from right to left, Jeff said,
“Les, Les.” I was still scanning, so I
knew that Jeff had spotted something
that represented the ol’ prairie ghost.
As my binocs quickly moved left,
there was the white dot that Jeff had
seen with his naked eyes. Indeed, it
was a coyote working our way from
well over a mile away. Jeff muttered,
“It must be an antelope.” I turned and
said that it was indeed a coyote and he
was coming. The coyote took his own
sweet time coming in, but his pace was
steady. Several times he would stop,
listening for the sound of that dreadful
animal that was making those distress
cries. Several soft moans would again
fool his ears and keep him shortening
the distance. As the coyote approached
the 200-yard mark, there was a slight
depression in the land in which I knew
that I could set up whenever he crossed
below his line of sight. I had made sure
to keep inching my rifl e and bipod to
face his approach so it would be ready
should I have the opportunity to rifl e
this coyote. Normally, in all of my
experiences, when a coyote approaches
slowly, he is more attentive of his
surroundings and can sometimes bolt at
the slightest of movements or anything
that can cause him to be uneasy. This
coyote, however, went through the draw
and showed no sign of slowing down as
he trotted right towards me. His senses
already told him exactly where I
was, within a few feet. I laid back
so that my body looked as if it was
a fi xture on the Wyoming prairie. I
clenched my shotgun as the coyote
hit fi fty yards. The coyote paused
for a second to look my way. I never
made a peep. He defi nitely knew that
my body was something unusual,
but he still wanted to get a closer
look. Now the coyote was glaring
right at my position, but he still
came directly towards me. I began
to ever so slowly point my shotgun
in the coyote’s direction. I already
had my shotgun to my shoulder, but
I was reclined backwards in such an
awkward position that you would
never know that I was ready to shoot
at any time. Once the coyote hit 35
yards, he stopped again and began to
throw his nose into the air and bob
his head, knowing that something
in his realm of the desert was out of
the ordinary. My bead at the end of
the smoothbore was leveled on the
coyote’s head. I could sense that he
was ready to leave due to the body
language that I was reading from
him. At the report of the shotgun
blast, his body slumped over and hit
the ground. He was in coyote heaven
before his body hit the ground. We
barely had time to fi lm any kind of
narration of what had transpired
before the snow squall had totally
engulfed us. Jeff and I each took a
leg of this magnifi cent specimen of
a predator and took him to join his
six other fallen comrades. Instead
of having to make a 300-yard shot
at a skittish coyote, my concealment
with the proper camoufl age helped
me to take a much easier shot on this
beautiful Wyoming coyote.