Another fun hunt. I headed over to the east side of the state for a couple of days of coyote hunting.
Thursday I couldn’t even get busted. I hunted the same area I hunted two weeks ago , then there were coyotes calling back and forth for as far as you could hear. This week it was totally silent., I couldn’t even get one to howl back at me. Plenty of fresh tracks in the snow, scat in the road but it was as if everything had holed up. It was pretty though and my campsite is really nice so I had dinner a curled up with a book, a glass of decent scotch and had a very relaxing night.
Friday morning I woke to the van shuttering in the wind and it was blowing, 50+mph. I had coffee and read for a while , got on the phone to check on pass conditions and they were expecting two feet of snow and were already at all vehicles needed to chain up. I headed to the resteraunts, thought I’d treat myself to some biscuts-n-gravy instead of a bowl of oatmeal in the van. Next check on the pass and it was closed. A dilemma, I needed to be in Olympia the next day so I decided to hunt my way south to the Oregon border and take the interstate along the Columbia river to Portland and then head north to Olympia bypassing the mountain pass and it only added about 2-3 hours to the trip.
Dry side Columbia river
First stand overlooking a big wildlife area always looks promising as there is a big dairy farm next to it a string of ponds down the middle filled with ducks and geese.. I flushed a big flock of quail on the way in. Interesting stand with the tumbleweed going so fast to just bounced along on the tops of the sage brush. Needles to say that it was a none producer.
Second stand always looked like it had real potential as I had killed a number of coyotes on a private ranch about a half mile away(one of my old hunting partners leased it for upland) and there was a larger Wildlife Refuge with no coyote hunting a mile in the other direction. About a quarter mile hike in along the irrigation canal was what looked like a drained pond about 300 yards across. It has a dike around it about ten feet high and is filled with sage brush I set up on the dike with the wind coming from left to right and put the caller about 20 yards out in front of me up in a bush. I usually watch the dike to see a coyote come over the top and head down into the sage. I was scanning the dike in the distance and not seeing anything glance down at the caller and there was a coyote about 10 feet down wind of the caller just staring at me, I think I was really getting the stinkeye. I tried to slowly move the gun but he spooked and disappeared into the sage. I realized the sage had grown a lot since I had last been there and was over waist deep in the middle of the area. Well I didn’t get busted and it wasn’t a panicked departure so I let the caller play on. About five min later I saw him circling down wind on the far side dike. He stopped about 250 yards away and watched for awhile, then when he moved through the sage I got off my chair down on one knee, into the sticks and turned the scope up to 3x. He popped out at about 200 yards in a small grass opening and sat down again, he was getting pretty close to where I thought he’d catch my scent. H e stood back up and turned to go back where he came from and I decided to take the shot, bingo down he went, I could see him flopping around so I reloaded just as he got up and a hit him again and he was down for good. I was experimenting with 50gr Varmint Grenades out of my 22-204 to see if they had the smack-down yet would be fur friendly, the jury is still out as both my shots were low near the edges and blew out some holes. I will say they made the loudest smack I’ve ever heard when they hit a coyote.
I was pretty disappointed when I got to him I thought I had shot a really dark coyote but he had lost all his winter coat and had just dark wooly under coat. Seeing that I decided to call it a day. I wondered why he hadn’t spooked from my scent when he got to the caller but I think the caller sitting up in the bush with the high wind might have dispersed most of the scent off it by the time he got there.
Dark dog
By now the wind was drifting dirt/sand across the roads making drifts just like snow drifts. Half the cars on the road had tumbleweed in their grills.
I’m home now and the wind is still howling and we just lost our power the battery on this thing is nice to have.
