OK Jimmie, let's talk some set-ups. I'll throw something in that Rich mentioned too.
Follow me on this hunt as I screw it up. It's early March, cold, windy, and crusty leftover snow cover on the ground. Dad and I park at a U.S. Forest Service gate and climb steadily up through the timber to get on top of a long ridge which winds for about six miles before it cuts across a blacktop county road. It's still forest ground on the other side of the blacktop too, but this area is six miles long roughly by 12 miles wide to another blacktop county road. Pretty good chunk of forest ground trapped between these blacktops. Enough to scout for coyotes within. The added bonus of this spot is that on this end of this section of forest there are a few farms scattered around. Farms mean dogs, cats, calves, pigs, chickens, ect... After the coyote makes his raid on the farm he can retreat into the big timber to escape. Pretty good area.
Anyway, Dad and I find quite a few tracks, scat, and piss post scratching along the ridgetop. We decide after several hours of hiking the ridgetop that we'll scout some of the hollows and work our way back toward the truck. We had noted two spots on the ridgetop that the tracks left the ridge and dropped off into a large hollow. One was through a saddle, the other down a spur ridge. In this one particular hollow we find a fresh den site. This hollow has a year round spring running down it and we follow the spring branch. It leads us out to a rare find. An actual field! Fields are few and far between in the Ozark's Mark Twain National Forest around my area. This field had a decent pond along one side of it. The pond was about 250 yards from the big timber and surrounded by brushy cover from the spring. This spring branch flows down from the head of the hollow where the den site is, through the big timber, and through the field to the pond. At the spot where the spring branch enters the field the Forest Service had cut away a bunch of cedar trees and made some large brush piles. The branch is a cutout from the topography of the field and has some brushy cover and a scattering of trees along it all the way to the pond.
As I said above the pond is 250 yards from the brush piles and area where the branch enters the field. But, the pond is only about 50 yards from the timber along one side of the field. There is a kill of a duck of some sort along one bank of the pond by an owl. Coyote tracks all around in the snow. Dad and I decide to come back and call the area in a week or so after our intrusion is forgotten by the resident coyotes.
A week later we sneak into the pond from downwind, just at dark. Actually, the wind is a strong crosswind, blowing from my left to my right at about a 90 degree angle. The only problem was this, occasionally it would switch ever so slightly so that it was actually blowing at about a 45 degree angle from BEHIND ME, left to right. I reasoned that really wouldn't matter all that much. The coyotes would approach from the upper left, down the spring branch and it's cover to the call. Even if the wind switched on me, so what, they'd be nearly to the pond before the scent stream would collide with them. By that time I would have them flattened in the snow. Dad decided to cover the bank of the pond nearest to the timber since it was a blind spot.
After we settled in and let things quiet down some, I hit the first smallish screams from the Arizona Predator Calls Fox Call. This is a honey call for me with just the right amount of rasp. The muted down screams floated over the field and into the dark woods across the long side of the field. After a minute or so, I played my tune again, just a bit louder. In the middle of my screaming this second time, I saw them. Two coyotes literally racing each other to the call. Hard chargers! I did a no-no, I stopped in mid scream. The first coyote kept coming, the second coyote began to check up and stopped. The second was a larger coyote, probably the male of the pairing. When the first coyote realized the second one had stopped it began to quarter to the right, away from the stream bed cover and into the field.
Now is when I also realized things were coming apart. The field had seemed pretty bare just glancing across it, especially with the snow. However, the field was grown up with scattered clumps of tall yellow foxtail and buffalo grasses. Tall enough and yellow enough to make getting on a moving, yellowish colored coyote at 150 yards or so, and at dark, just a bit tricky. Murphy reared up and decided to make a wind switch about this same time and I felt the cold wind hit the back of my neck and side of my face.
Both coyotes were quartering from my left to right, working into the wind. I was struggling to get a shot when I ran out of field. They disapeared into the timber on the right side (straight downwind now) of the field. Yeah, I picked up the call and tried a couple more quiet desperation cries. Nothing. As dark pitched in on me I replayed those two hard chargers and rethought my strategy. It was a cold, dark, joyless hike out of the woods that night.
The next year I was back in the same spot. This time at the crack of dawn on a grey cloudy, cold morning. Yeah, the prevailing winds were just about like the year before. No snow, so visiability was actually worse. Sounds like I'm not so bright huh? You'd think I'd learn my lesson from the year before.
Well.......This time Dad wasn't behind me on the back side of the pond. He was 150 yards above me and to my right, tucked into a brush pile just off the side of the timber. There was a slight roll of ground that lead away from the spring branch and right to his brush pile. He was just slightly higher than the surrounding ground, and he was seated on a standing cedar stump with a crown of brush around him to conceal his outline. Seated like this gave him an excellent view out into the field, branch, and terrain features around him.
I hit the Sceery AP-6 with some bird type distress sounds. After about 3-4 minutes I thought I saw a flash of grey across the field, and seconds later Dad's rifle boomed once. We finished the stand out and after thiry more minutes or so I stood up and began walking across the field to Dad. By the time I got to him he had retrieved his prize, a big old dog coyote with worn down teeth and a great saddle on his pelt. Dad was wearing a nice broad grin.
