When I left the house about and hour later, the snow was coming down pretty good. I drove out to where I wanted to start the morning in a very heavy snowfall. I got my gear and headed down to a big creek bottom I wanted to set up on with a big CRP field to the south (upwind) and open field in front of me and to my right. The walk was a little over ½ a mile and was neat walking in the falling snow. It made me feel like I was a kid again and it was the first snowfall of the season. I got set up overlooking the bottom and it didn’t take long for the snow to start piling up on my rifle.
I did some howling but didn’t get any takers. I didn’t do any distress calls because I like to visit this area a lot and don’t want to over call it and wise up the coyotes. I looked at my cell phone and saw time was getting away and I didn’t want to make us late for church so I started heading back to the truck. I made my way south along the tree line in the bottom and then cut up a wooded hill to a big open hay field where I had shot a coyote last Wed. Just as I crept up to the edge of the field, a coyote came into the field about 175 yards to the south (upwind). I looked at it through the scope and saw it had something wrong with its hide. I couldn’t take the shot because the coyote was on the horizon of the hill and no backstop in case I missed the shot.
I watched as the coyote looked around and then started heading my way about 10 yards off of the fence line. I slowly knelt down out of site of the coyote, dropped my shooting sticks and turned the power back on the scope for a close shot if the coyote kept coming. I rose up just enough to watch the coyote and when it went into a small dip in the field in front of me, I shouldered my gun and was looking over the scope for the coyote. In a few seconds, the coyote appeared 39 yards in front of me and stopped on the rise. It looked around and didn’t have a clue I was there in the edge of the brush with me in my snow camo and crosshairs on its chest. I shot and the coyote spun around and tried to run but didn’t go very far before piling up. It had mange and was sure to have a cold winter ahead of it. I shot this one within 300 yards of where I shot the other mangy one last Wed.
Around 2 pm or so, Lucas called to see what I was up to and I told him I was getting ready to go out coyote hunting and he said to hold on and he’d be up shortly to go with me. With the wind still out of the south, I wanted to set up on the north end of the CRP field and do some serious calling in hopes of calling in a coyote for Lucas. I placed the FoxPro in a sapling in a small drainage ditch out in the field and had Lucas sit where he could cover anything coming from the south and I was about 30’ north of him watching down wind. I started off with a couple series of female howls on the FoxPro, waited a bit and then played some male howls, then waited a little bit and started in with a rabbit distress. Nothing happened so I played a jack rabbit for a bit and waited. We were about 10-12 minutes into the set when I had just looked to the south and then back to the north when Lucas’s Rem. 700 in .243 shooting a 65 gr. V-Max went off followed by the distinct whack of a bullet hitting its target. The coyote had come up out of the creek and was walking when Lucas shot it at 126 yards and it dropped on the spot. It was a nicely coated big male weighting about 35 lbs. The bullet entered the near shoulder and broke the other shoulder without exiting.
