have known coyotes to tear a sack up 
containing a jack-rabbit which I had 
purposely thrown down beside a trail 
but he circled around a jack hanging 
on a barbed wire fence. Again, cu- 
riosity. 
E original with your sets, and by 
that I mean don’t practice the 
same methods as the old timers of 
your section. Let me illustrate. One 
winter I stayed with an expert trap- 
per in a good fox country. He said 
the foxes were getting scarce, yet, 
though a young fellow with but a few 
years’ experience, I knew enough about 
tracks and signs to figure there were 
twenty foxes ranging within five miles 
of our head camp. I caught six of 
them the first month, the old timer got 
two. Did that signify I was the bet- 
ter trapper? Not by a jugful! The 
secret of my success was this: the 
foxes didn’t recognize my sets because 
they were different. There’s real in- 
formation in this last paragraph if 
you can get what I mean. Every trap- 
per, if he doesn’t watch himself, will 
get into a rut and where he once gave 
promises of being an expert he will 
gradually subside into mediocrity. 
These western ranges are largely 
given over to sheep men for grazing 
purposes and afford ideal coyote trap- 
ping. The stockman will give you the 
glad hand whenever you appear on the 
grounds and he will be your godfather 
for the rest of your unnatural days, 
if you can trap the pesky coyotes with 
any degree of success. 
Your degree of success, granting 
you know something of the game, will 
also depend on the particular brand 
of coyotes. If they’ve been trapped 
a lot you’ll have some trouble right 
from the start. Try them first with 
dead baits and if that don’t fetch them 
you’ll have to depend entirely on blind 
sets or a combination of the two. Now 
and again a sheep that is sure to die 
sooner or later, especially old weak 
ones, may be staked out near a spring 
for a night or two. This is the best 
kind of a lure. But don’t make the 
mistake of setting traps too close to 
such a lure. Hide several of them in 
the runways and trails approaching 
the spring from various angles, and 
at a good distance, say a hundred 
yards. 
OYOTES don’t become suspicious 
of such a set until fairly close 
while a bait set excites their shrewd- 
ness the moment they can see its gene- 
ral makeup. They have come to know 
through bitter experience that meat 
_ doesn’t grow on bushes and that un- 
usual scents must be approached with 
the utmost caution. They know that 
sense and scents don’t necessarily 
gibe. 
A bunch of coyotes will hang around 
a band of sheep all summer and until 
the latter are driven to their winter 
feeding quarters. If you can borrow 
a horse to ride your lines with, it will 
pay you big. You can carry a sheep- 
skin along with you, spreading it on 
the ground where you dismount to set 
your traps. Whatever scent is left 
on the traps won’t last long once the 
steel is buried in the ground so don’t 
distress yourself as to whether you 
should use gloves or not. If it eases 
your mind, do so, if not use your bare 
hands and forget such notions. Use 
iron pegs, or better yet, steel such as 
is used in rake teeth, for staking down 
the traps. The less chain you use the 
better, for it gives the animal less 
chance to escape. Good strong chains 
with free-working swivels are abso- 
lutely necessary. A coyote will fight 
to the finish and in his desperate 
efforts to escape, exerts surprising 
force for so small a creature. 
OME sort of a drag will work all 
right, in place of staking, certain 
trappers claiming this method results 
in less escapes. Personally we like to 
find our coyote right where he first got 
acquainted with our trap, not a mile 
or so distant. Up north we knew a 
big coyote to swim a river with a hind 
foot attached to a heavy drag via the 
medium of a _ steel trap. 
And, if the trap . comes 
loose from the drag, you’ll 
never see John Coyote 
again, unless you’re work- 
ing in the plains country 
and can ride him down 
with a horse or follow his 
trail with an auto. 
Whenever it rains or 
snows, the average trap- 
per considers he has earned 
a right to sit by the fire 
while, as a fact, it would 
pay him big to be out in 
the storm making new sets 
or rearranging old ones. 
Either rain or snow will 
do more in a short time 
toward erasing all amateurish sign 
around trap sets than anything we 
know of. 
In making any kind of a set for 
coyotes always aim to leave the spot 
looking as natural as possible. If you’ 
went downtown some morning and dis- 
covered the schoolhouse resting where 
the post-office should be your curiosity 
would surely be aroused, and, if like 
the coyote, you were in the enemy’s 
country, you would be mighty suspi- 
cious and probably expect to run into 
poison gas or some kind of a trap. Or, 

let’s give another example: If you 
were walking along a paved road and 
came to a spot where the pavement 
was all broken up you would be apt 
to walk around this spot while if there 
was a big hole dug underneath and 
the surface all smoothed over to ap- 
pear natural you’d be very apt to step 
on the weakened structure and tumble 
through. In the one instance your 
suspicion was aroused and you avoided 
what had the appearance of being un- 
natural while in the latter instance, 
being totally unsuspicious, you fell 
into a trap. 
UPPOSE you wish to make a set 
on a mound. Don’t hack the sur- 
face all up, digging here and there for 
dirt to cover your trap. Don’t leave 
a big hollow where you hide the trap 
or a hump either. Probably the very 
coyote you wish to trap has stood on 
that very mound a thousand times and 
if it doesn’t look perfectly natural 
when he visits it again you can bank 
on his being suspicious and a suspi- 
cious coyote is mighty hard to trap, at 
least near the spot where his fears 
were excited. The only remedy, once 
his suspicion is aroused, is to get him 
into another set when he’s least ex- 
pecting it. It’s like feinting with the 
left for the stomach and landing a 
knockout with the right to the point 
of the chin. 
bet! 
An illustration? You 
Last winter we trapped 
for some pretty wise old 
coyotes in a certain valley 
among the mountain 
ranges. We stayed with 
an old prospector who had 
done some trapping now 
and again and from him 
we first learned the va- 
rious methods which had 
been practiced on _ the 
“night students” of the 
section we wished to trap. 
Now there were men in 
that country who were old 
in experience but most of 
them had got into the rut 
we spoke of before—they 
used the same old sets time 
and time again and once in a while 
they’d get a weak-minded coyote. The 
old prospector told us we’d have a 
hard job getting any coyotes around 
there, since the men who lived there 
weren’t having much success. But we 
got busy. : 
Dee: on a bench just above the 
West Fork we hung a skunk, un- 
skinned, up in a bush about four feet 
from the ground. At the base of the 
bush we set two traps, just in the way 
(Continued on page 117), 
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