A hunt I’ll never forget
Posted: Mon Dec 18, 2006 2:23 pm
I’ll try and make this short, but it warrants a few words in order to get the desired effect. For those of you who are more of the get to the point type I’ll label that as such below so you can skip right to it.
While hunting coyotes with Scootertrash, he mentioned that he normally has better luck hunting in the evening. Since I have a lot of evening meetings for work I’d been doing all of my coyote hunting in them early morning hours.
Well Sunday afternoon I got all my honey-do’s done with a 2-3 hours of daylight left. So off I went. I drove about an hour south to an area around Cripple Creek that I wanted to try.
The road that I was planning on taking started out pretty steep with packed snow, and I really didn’t want to get stick out there after dark, so I chose another road that was much shorter, but ended right at the start of the public land. The road ended right on the side of a very large hill ( it’s labeled a mountain on the map but I wouldn’t label it more than a large hill). On the other side of the road was fenced in PRIVATE land with all sorts of threats of prosecution if I dare to set a foot across the boundary.
The POINT starts here
The boundary between the private land and the public hill is also were all of the trees stared (on the private land), the public hill was all brown grass with a shrub stuck in here and there. Well it was very windy Sunday night so if I climbed up the hill were I could get a good view of anything coming in I’m pretty sure that the calls would get blown right back in my face. So I decided to set up about 30 feet up the hill beside one of the shrubs, which didn’t give me much of a view but was sheltered from the wind enough that I felt I wasn’t wasting my time.
After about 30 mins of calling I stopped to blow the spit out of the call, and when I looked up I say a head about 100yards out which is about as far as I could see in any one direction. I don’t have to tell you how the heart speeds up and the adrenalin kicks in. I slowly raised my Handi-rifle and looked through the scope. But what I saw was not the next coyote to fall to the 204 ruger, it was a mountain lion. Let me tell you at 100 yard and 6X mountain lions look really big.
Well we looked at each other for 3-5 mins and I’m pretty sure I heard his stomach growl at least twice in that time (OK I know I couldn’t hear it even if it was growling). What I did next I’m sure many of you will think me a fool, but unless you’ve ever been in a similar situation you can’t know what foolish thing you will do. I’m telling you this not to try and impress you with my lack of common sense, but in hoped that if you are every in a similar saturation you might think better of what you do next. So I gave a couple of cottontail calls just to see what he would do. Looking through the scope all of a sudden he was gone.
So I gradually got up on my knees to have a look around and he wasn’t gone he was in stalk mode. He was low to the ground and had moved to within ~75 yards of yours truly. Well I had no intention of becoming his next meal but also didn’t want to spook him too much because I might decide to come back next mountain lion season. So I stood up and calmly told him to git I wasn’t his dinner tonight. After about the 3ed git he stood up and trotted off the other way.
Now I’d like to continue on with the story and tell you how I sat back down and bravely called in a coyote, but lying leaves a bad taste in my mouth and always has. The truth is I packed up and calmly walk back to the truck looking over my shoulder the whole time.
While hunting coyotes with Scootertrash, he mentioned that he normally has better luck hunting in the evening. Since I have a lot of evening meetings for work I’d been doing all of my coyote hunting in them early morning hours.
Well Sunday afternoon I got all my honey-do’s done with a 2-3 hours of daylight left. So off I went. I drove about an hour south to an area around Cripple Creek that I wanted to try.
The road that I was planning on taking started out pretty steep with packed snow, and I really didn’t want to get stick out there after dark, so I chose another road that was much shorter, but ended right at the start of the public land. The road ended right on the side of a very large hill ( it’s labeled a mountain on the map but I wouldn’t label it more than a large hill). On the other side of the road was fenced in PRIVATE land with all sorts of threats of prosecution if I dare to set a foot across the boundary.
The POINT starts here
The boundary between the private land and the public hill is also were all of the trees stared (on the private land), the public hill was all brown grass with a shrub stuck in here and there. Well it was very windy Sunday night so if I climbed up the hill were I could get a good view of anything coming in I’m pretty sure that the calls would get blown right back in my face. So I decided to set up about 30 feet up the hill beside one of the shrubs, which didn’t give me much of a view but was sheltered from the wind enough that I felt I wasn’t wasting my time.
After about 30 mins of calling I stopped to blow the spit out of the call, and when I looked up I say a head about 100yards out which is about as far as I could see in any one direction. I don’t have to tell you how the heart speeds up and the adrenalin kicks in. I slowly raised my Handi-rifle and looked through the scope. But what I saw was not the next coyote to fall to the 204 ruger, it was a mountain lion. Let me tell you at 100 yard and 6X mountain lions look really big.
Well we looked at each other for 3-5 mins and I’m pretty sure I heard his stomach growl at least twice in that time (OK I know I couldn’t hear it even if it was growling). What I did next I’m sure many of you will think me a fool, but unless you’ve ever been in a similar situation you can’t know what foolish thing you will do. I’m telling you this not to try and impress you with my lack of common sense, but in hoped that if you are every in a similar saturation you might think better of what you do next. So I gave a couple of cottontail calls just to see what he would do. Looking through the scope all of a sudden he was gone.
So I gradually got up on my knees to have a look around and he wasn’t gone he was in stalk mode. He was low to the ground and had moved to within ~75 yards of yours truly. Well I had no intention of becoming his next meal but also didn’t want to spook him too much because I might decide to come back next mountain lion season. So I stood up and calmly told him to git I wasn’t his dinner tonight. After about the 3ed git he stood up and trotted off the other way.
Now I’d like to continue on with the story and tell you how I sat back down and bravely called in a coyote, but lying leaves a bad taste in my mouth and always has. The truth is I packed up and calmly walk back to the truck looking over my shoulder the whole time.
Just in case!