king' s outdoor world - Index

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

wouldn’t straighten out. I skinned it
out going down the backbone. The
coyote had scar tissue on both sides
of its back and two vertebrae looked
like they were nothing but scar tissue
and muscle. We thought that maybe
it had been creased by a bullet across
the back in front of the hips and had
crawled down into a hole and curled
up to heal, because its hind legs
were tucked up against its stomach.
It had to have healed this way. The
hair on the bottom of its hind legs
was rubbed down to the skin, it was
calloused, and the underside of its
tail was also hairless. No one will
know for sure, but I do know that
neither I nor the pilot had ever seen
anything like it before nor have we
seen anything since.
I have called in and shot
several coyotes that have had broken
legs. As the bones were offset, the
broken leg would heal and scar over
with one leg ending up permanently
shorter than the other. While
watching these coyotes come into
the call, they showed no signs of
being crippled or of having any
problem of getting around
through the sagebrush.
Upon skinning these
coyotes, one could see
how the leg bones had
attached themselves
together and scar tissue had formed
around the break.
I called in a coyote in Idaho
that seemed to be using all four legs
but, after I shot it and went to skin it, I
noticed that one front leg was drawn up
and was unmovable.
I skinned the coyote and found
the shoulder had grown to the rib cage. I
cut the front leg from the chest and, after
dissecting it, I noticed that the shoulder
blade was nothing but scar tissue. It
appeared that it had been shattered,
as if a hollow point bullet had hit the
shoulder blade and exploded, leaving
only fragments of bone. The scar tissue
went from the bottom of the shoulder
blade joint to the coyote’s back. There
was no way that this shoulder could
move.
Another time, while running a
trap line, I found that I had a three-legged
coyote in one of my sets. The one front
leg was missing from just below the
elbow joint down. It was completely
healed up and, after skinning out the
leg, I found scar tissue had grown
around the end of the bone.
The coyote had used this
stump to get up and down with and
crawling in and out of her den. The
end of this stump was calloused
from use. The hair was worn off
about a half-inch all the way around.
This coyote was a female and was
sucking pups. I opened her up and
checked her horned uterus, she had
had ten pups. I waited for four days
and then started using my siren. I
got a response from the pups about
a mile and a half from where I had
trapped the female. There were nine
pups at the den. The rancher’s lamb
losses stopped for a while as I dug the
den and caught a dog coyote within
a quarter of a mile of the den.
If there’s one thing that I’ve
learned from my lifetime of hunting
coyotes, it is that this animal has an
amazing will to live…
December/January 65