
N the wheat country of central 
Washington coyotes flourish like 
the proverbial green bay tree. I’ve 
been plowing in the summer there, 
with from six to ten horses on two or 
three-bottomed gangs. A coyote would 
saunter out and follow the furrow be- 
hind me, picking up a mouse or ground 
squirrel now and again, rodents which 
had been turned out of their homes 
by the plow. I’ve had the rascals fol- 
low me at a distance of fifty feet and 
never pay any attention to me as long 
as I acted naturally. And I’ve got 
even with them in the fall, for treat- 
ing me so disdainfully. It is a prac- 
tice to plow out the corners of each 
field, leaving, in the case of a square 
field like a quarter section of land a 
half mile each way, two dead furrows 
running diagonally across the field, 
say from the southeast to the north- 
west corners and two more running 
from the southwest to the northeast 
corners. When the plowing is fin- 
ished the ground is soft everywhere 
except in these furrows so Friend 
Coyote travels down the straight fur- 
row that points in the general direc- 
tion he wishes to travel. It isn’t much 
of a job to place traps where they will 
intercept one of the sly rascals. 
A farmer asked me for advice as 
how to catch a certain sly one who 
was making nightly inroads on his 
small flock of turkeys. The approach 
to his farmyard, from any direction, 
was of such a nature that not even 
an expert trapper could hazard a 
guess as to where a trap should be 
148 
This chap’s sheep-killing days are 
over 
placed to get this particular coyote. 
I looked the ground over carefully 
and was stumped for some _ time. 
Finally I “stumped” the farmer by 
asking him to rig up his “foot burner,” 
name for a walking plow. 
We got out the plow, hitched a team 
of slow gentle horses to it, and hang- 
ing four steel coyote traps and neces- 
sary equipment for seting them, by a 
sack to the plow handles, I started 
across the field directly away from the 
farmyard, leaving a shallow furrow 
in our wake. When I had got a hun- 
dred yards distant I stopped the team, 
and without moving from my tracks, 
made the cutest coyote set in that fur- 
row you ever saw, staking the trap 
solid and leaving everything looking 
as natural as possible. Then I went 
on and a few yards farther repeated 
the performance and a third and yet 
a fourth time placed a trap in the fur- 
row at my feet. When this job was 
finished I turned the plow out and 
made a circle back to the farmyard. 
Before I had started, the farmer was 
frankly dubious but he knew coyotes 
and their tendency to travel a fresh 
furrow and when we unhitched the 
team and put the plow away he said 
there’d be a coyote bounty to collect! 
F course there was, for it was a 
sure-fire set. The man scent was 
still in my tracks along that furrow 
but the sly boy figured it was per- 
fectly natural, having followed a walk- 
ing plow many times. 
If you want to make a coyote genu- 
Modern 
Trapping 
Methods 
Further Notes on John Coyote 
—Part Seven 
By RAYMOND THOMPSON 
inely suspicious, skin a critter that 
has died out in the pasture. Unless 
he is starving he won’t go near it for 
weeks and even months. Why? Be- 
cause nine farmers and ranchers out 
of ten, after they skin a critter, will 
slop down a few steel traps, tieing 
one with haywire to the neck, one or 
two by the legs within the space en- 
compassed, one at the rump and an- 
other at the back for luck! 
ET result, one crazy coyote per 
season and about forty old birds 
made a little wiser. Now if these 
farmers had the gumption to scat- 
ter a few traps around, say at dis- 
tances of twenty or thirty yards, they’d 
hook one of the sly ones that had come 
over to sympathize with the trapped 
pup. 
If you’d ever tried to raise turkeys 
in this western country your admira- 
tion for the coyote would have devel- 
oped to the bursting point. These lit- 
tle stunts may seem fictitious to some 
but not to a person who knows coyotes. 
Just because a turkey is roosting fif- 
teen feet from the ground (remember 
a coyote can do most anything but he 
can’t fly or climb trees) is no sign 
that he is safe. John Coyote slips 
around and when Turk starts to cran- 
ing his neck and stretching out until 
he is fairly overbalanced, old fourfoot 
begins to trot round and round the 
tree. The poor fool of a turkey gets 
so dizzy trying to keep track of the 
coyote’s movements he finally overbal- 
ances and, wherever he is looking, 
