Modern Trapping Methods 
On Fooling the Furtive Coyote—Part Six 
ATS off, gentlemen, Mr. and 
H Mrs. Coyote are being intro- 
duced, the slyest creatures in 
God’s great outdoors, creatures whose 
shrewd stunts make the so-called cun- 
ning of the fox look like a snowball 
in the hot place! You men who think 
a New York mink is pert, who believe 
that Reynard from Maine is about the 
wisest thing ever created, come out 
west here and we will make you ac- 
quainted with a furtive four-foot that 
has them all backed off the map. For 
in spite of hundreds of fairly good 
trappers scattered over the west the 
coyote thrives vaingloriously, his in- 
stincts for trap-evading guaranteeing 
him existence when the rest of the 
wild folk have gone the way of. the 
buffalo and passenger pigeon. 
Take the State of Washington for 
instance. Somewhere between ten and 
twenty professional wolfers are hired 
by the government to keep down the 
coyote population. With what result? 
Well, if things get a little too warm 
for our friend in one section he has 
a hundred other ranges to choose from. 
If he has been used to feeding on 
lambs in a sheep country and the trap- 
pers drive him out he will hie for the 
sage lands and give the jack-rabbits 
and cottontails the time of their lives, 
to say nothing of what he does to a 
farmer’s chicken flock now and again. 
He’s a fellow who always has an alibi 
handy and when you’re surest he ought 
to be in one particular spot, where you 
have a nice little party awaiting him, 
in the shape of a steel trap, he’s a 
mile away laughing up his sleeve. 
HE coyote’s a cross between a 
camel and a fasting fiend—in other 
terms, he can live for weeks in a desert 
without water and the leaner he gets 
the harder he travels and the wiser 
he becomes. I have known coyotes to 
den for a month at a spell, in the bit- 
ter cold regions of the Athabasca coun- 
try without a bite to eat. 
Last winter I trapped in the San 
Poil mountains of Washington State. 
I had trapped for years in the wilds 
of Canada and thought I knew coyotes 
to a TNT. But I found them wiser, 
if anything, in the sheep country than 
in untamed wildernesses. I don’t doubt 
for a minute that coyotes in Califor- 
nia and Texas could show me some 
mighty fine tricks in a month or two, 
By RAYMOND THOMPSON 
What I intended to say was this: Last 
winter I met up with one of Uncle 
Sam’s crack hunters. He was in my 
country looking for cougar and I was 
glad to tell him where to go. I asked 
him what he knew about coyotes and 
he grinned. Fact of the matter was, 
this man received a hundred and fifty 
dollars a month from the government 
to hunt cougars with his dogs and I’ll 
bet he would have starved to death 
trying to trap coyotes! He knew cou- 
gars, better than any man I had ever 
talked to, but coyotes were a bugaboo 
with him. Which is another way of 
telling you that, in order to make a 
success of coyote trapping, you have 
got to specialize in that particular 
branch. 
HERE isn’t much about a coyote 
that needs describing. They’ll 
weigh from twenty to thirty pounds 
in the west here and on up to forty, 
fifty and even sixty pounds in the 
north where they are called brush 
wolves. Their fur is a dirty gray 
color which blends admirably with the 
sage of the flat lands and the dull car- 
pet of the forest. They are fleet of 
foot but not so fast as certain breeds 
of dogs, their ears are keen but can’t 
compete with those of the deer, their 
scent is remarkable but is not to be 
compared with that of the moose. But 
they have an instinct, the sixth sense 
in all wild animals, that puts them in 
the front rank when it comes to sheer 
intelligence. These pointers are not 
handed out with the idea of discour- 
aging the prospective wolfer but it is 
best for him to realize what he is up 
against. For the slyest wolf is no 
match for human brains and if one 
man fails to trap a certain coyote 
there is another one who can. Any 
trapper if he practices his trapping 
intelligently, will get a percentage of 
the sly boys. And now for the habits, 
the study of which may spell the dif- 
ference between hit and miss. 
First the coyote is neither nocturnal 
nor diurnal in his habits of travel- 
ing—he wanders day or night, which- 
ever suits him best. He is generally 
satisfied to hunt in the gray hours of 
the morning and the last thing before 
darkness. The time he travels isn’t 
perhaps so important as where he 
travels but it will nevertheless help 
in outlining his goings and comings, 
And we have seen him slip into a 
farmyard, the minute the folks had 
left the place on their way to town, 
and steal a chicken, take it to the field 
and bury it and then return for an- 
other. This in the middle of the after- 
noon. So you can’t always sometimes 
tell. 
fi Bias 3 amount of territory a coyote 
ranges over is well worth know- 
ing. I chased a coyote once in the 
Washington plains country, on horse- 
back and in spite of the fact that he 
was encumbered with a No. 2 steel 
trap, double springed, he went twenty 
miles away before I caught up with 
him. The average coyote range will 
cover from a hundred to three hun- 
dred square miles, depending on the 
amount of food in his territory. And 
during the mating season an old dog 
coyote will wear himself thin, just 
traveling around. I’ll bet if he had 
a pedometer strapped onto his off hind 
leg the thing would be worn out com- 
pletely at the end of the first week. 
But he’s easy to trap at that time, 
comparatively speaking, and might 
get tangled up with a pair of steel 
jaws wrapped around his feet. The 
time required for the covering of his 
entire range will vary from three days 
to a week, except in extreme cases of 
severe weather. You might run across 
a home-loving coyote, maybe one that 
had lost its mate, that wouldn’t stray 
more than a half dozen miles from his 
hangout. Under such conditions as 
this you might expect to find him any- 
where,. anytime. 
PECULIAR trait about John 
Coyote is this: he will learn the 
approximate range of the high-pow- 
ered rifle of the trapper and then take 
pleasure in appearing now and again 
just beyond this range. - But they 
make mistakes, or a man couldn’t fool 
even the crazy ones. I remember once 
of a coyote who thought he could dodge 
bullets out on the glassy surface of a 
frozen lake. He succeeded, for a time, 
but finally dodged the wrong way and 
a whizzing bullet ended his career. 
The coyote has a _ preference for 
meat freshly killed but when he gets 
lazy and no trappers bother him he 
will feed often from the most rotten 
of carrion. Ever kill a coyote on a 
hot day in midsummer just after he’d 
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