there he will fly. Straight for the 
happy coyote he dives and it’s good- 
bye turkey. 
ERE’S another one: Turkeys wan- 
der afield a mile or more distant 
if not herded like sheep. The young 
ones are easily captured by the coyote. 
He gets out into the field, locates a 
convenient hollow or digs one to suit 
himself and lying there, waves his tail 
back and forth. Turkeys too are in- 
quisitive and the young ones, seeing 
the waving brush, will wander over 
toward the marauding rascal and, 
pronto, the feathers are flying! 
Good sets can be made by taking a 
dead chicken or turkey, burying it in 
soft dirt and setting the trap right 
over the bait. Nor does the trapper 
need to bother with any scent in this 
case, for the buried fowl] will soon stink 
up the ground to a fare-you-well. 
There is always more or less argu- 
ment among trappers as to the rela- 
tive merits of scents. Hardly a fur 
house in the country but advertises 
some conglomeration that is supposed 
to lure animals from amazing dis- 
tances, rob them of their eyes, kill 
their sense of smell and in fact do 
everything but skin the animal on the 
spot. How is the amateur trapper go- 
ing to care for all the furbearers such 
lures will net for him! Why, if they 
were half as good as the concocters 
of them claim, there wouldn’t be a 
piece of fur the size of a two-bit piece 
left in North America! 
Once I sent to a reputable fur house 
for some wolf scent. By return mail 
I received a nice little wooden box 
with a neat screw top. The box was 
about half the size of a small baking 
powder can. When I unscrewed the 
top I expected to see a fairly large 
bottle of scent but there was nothing 
but a little ounce bottle containing 
something that smelled like a drug- 
store although the label on it pro- 
claimed the contents to be, “TRIPLE 
EXTRACT OF BEAVER CASTOR.” 
Now I had never seen or smelled 
beaver castor in my young life and 
had great faith in this powerful dope. 
But it didn’t get any coyotes for me! 
When I went to a beaver country, 
some years later, I discovered that 
beaver castor was as different from 
that stink as rose water is from moon- 
shine! 
RAPPERS class their scent lures 
under just two heads: (A) Scents 
that attract animals through exciting 
their sense of curiosity, and (B) 
Scents that have the sex lure. The 
first are composed of dope that will 
make a terrific stink. Here’s a good 
one for coyotes: liver, blood and beaver 
castor, adding a little alcohol in cold 
weather to keep alive. This stuff 
‘should be bottled early in the season 
and allowed to get “ripe” or if not 
prepared till cold weather sets in may 
be rotted by hanging near the fire for 
several days. 
The second lure is not so good ex- 
cept during the breeding season, usu- 
ally in February, and consists of the 
urine of female coyotes or tame fe- 
males in breeding season, mixed with 
the sex organs. These parts should 
be bottled in alcohol. 
We have used asafoetida with fair 
success on wolves and coyotes but 
beaver castor is hard to beat. There 
is absolutely nothing to the various 
trail scents advertised (you are sup- 
posed to put the seent on your shoes 
and have all the furbearers in the 
community follow you back to camp, 
where the prime ones are selected and 
knocked over the head with an axe.) 
For a trail scent take a good ripe piece 
of meat, put it in a stout sack and 
drag it around; or a fresh bloody 
piece will do quite as well unless the 
weather is extremely cold. Severe 
frosts retard the action of scents to 
an amazing degree. 
HE sex lure should be used by put- 
ting a few drops of it on a bush 
at the edge of a clearing; the male 
coyote will come along, smell of the 
bush and go through the same sort of 
performance a dog would. If your 
traps have been carefully concealed 
you are pretty apt to grab your coyote 
most every time. 
Most every trapper has his “medi- 
cine,” some good, some bad and some 
indifferent. But, if you 
use too much of your 
scent the coyotes will get 
to associate it with dan- 
ger, for if one has had his 
toes pinched in a _ place 
where the scent was pretty 
rife, he’s going to remem- 
ber that and don’t you for- 
get it. If I had to depend 
on scents and was trap- 
ping coyotes for a living, 
about the first thing I’d do would be 
to wire the poorhouse for reserva- 
tions. Use all the scents you like and 
by and by you’ll come around to com- 
mon sense! 
The question naturally arises, “Is 
a coyote naturally suspicious of a steel 
trap?” We answer, “NO,” at the top 
of our voice, and would use a mega- 
phone if there were one handy. Co- 
yotes travel day after day over and 
around steel objects in this western 
country, through barbed-wire fences, 
past steel farm machinery without 
end. I heard a good one last winter: 

An old trapper told me the reason a 
coyote fought shy of a steel trap was 
because of a certain singing noise the 
trap made in cold weather. Can you 
beat that! I know for a fact that 
music attracts wolves, for I’ve had 
them sit out on a lake, a mile or so 
distant, and listen to a harmonica. A 
friend of mine, trapping in Ontario, 
told me a band of wolves came real 
close to their cabin while his partner 
was playing an accordion. Curiosity, 
no doubt. 
le tried this, on foxes and wolves 
both: A few traps were scattered 
along a trail, all set and staked out 
but not covered with anything what- 
ever. Coyotes and foxes both stepped 
over and around them. But when a 
nice little snow came we _ scattered 
some smoked fish about these traps 
and made some neat catches! 
Snaring coyotes is something of a 
difficult proposition and will only prove 
a success in a few instances within 
a given locality before the animals 
will get wise to it. Make a careful 
survey of the grounds, watch where 
coyotes have been passing through tall 
grass or under wire fences. Ordinary 
baling wire makes a good snare and 
the noose should be about sixteen 
inches in diameter, generally catching 
the coyote around the body. The wire 
must be new and not easily broken. 
Better success will perhaps result 
from the use of a woven wire such as 
is used in radio aerials. If you get 
a coyote in a snare without holding 
him he will surely do his bit toward 
wising up all his fellows, that is why 
I say you shouldn’t expect to get rich 
snaring them. But, as a 
last resort, it has fooled _ 
some pretty sly ones. 
Poison has done more to 
kill off furbearers the 
trapper never sees than 
any other single means of 
destruction. Take the case 
of government’ trappers 
for instance. They travel 
around in cars or on horse- 
back, scattering poison. 
They get some coyotes all right, about 
eight a month per man during the 
BEST of the season here in Washing- 
ton. But they kill off innumerable in- 
nocents such as valuable furbearers 
whose pelts are no good in the sum- 
mer time, to say nothing of birds that 
are really valuable to farmers. 
A poison-proof coyote is the smart- 
est thing the Almighty ever let live 
and not one pill in ten is effective. 
Your strychnine pills, or whatever is 
used, will not work on a coyote when 
his stomach is filled with food of any 
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