The other day I had one of those experiences that come to every coyote caller sooner or later. I had set up during the last 45 minutes of light at the end of the day, looking east, with the Johnny Stewart call about 50 yards in front of me. There was a light breeze blowing from the east across an open field, and thick mesquite to the north with a dirt road to the south.

It was my placid expectation that a coyote would trot in from the north, break free of the brush into the open, and receive a bullet behind the shoulder for his efforts.

As a result, I was both surprised and pained when I glanced back toward the call and discovered a coyote standing in the big open about 75 yards away to the east, looking over the top of the call directly at me.

He had apparently come across the open field into the mesquite and stopped to survey the situation. The sun had gone down behind the mountains to the west, so there was no low light in his eyes, and I was pretty sure from his posture that he had made me.

My rifle was across one knee, though, and I only had to shift slightly to bring the crosshairs to bear on his chest. As they settled, I touched the trigger, and as the sear broke I saw the coyote begin to whirl through the scope. A half-second later, and he never would have started; a half-second more and I would have been able to hold the shot.

The bullet slapped him and knocked him behind a mesquite, and when I started to stand he re-appeared (briefly) and dove into the heavy brush.

I stood there and cursed quietly for a moment, then went over to the spot where the bullet hit him and took a look. There was a hat-full of long, silky hair from the tail or the flank, a patch of blood the size of a softball, and claw-marks across the hardpan where he had dragged both hind legs.

With only about five minutes of usable light left, I trailed him off into the mesquites a couple of hundred yards, hoping that the little 22 gr .17 bullet had found the femoral artery and bled him out, but no such luck.

Lost coyote, right?

Wrong answer.

At first light I was back at the same spot, with my running shoes and Miss Tina.

Miss Tina is an artist, one of those rare examples produced when natural talent combines with inclination and training to produce a superior result. She could trail a bug over slickrock if she wanted to, and she usually takes a wounded coyote en passant , so to speak.

Tina only has a couple of "holes" when it comes to this kind of a job. Because she has an artistic and refined sensibility, she scorns the rough-and-tumble, snapping, snarling, barroom brawl kind of thing that it sometimes takes to hold a coyote at bay once you've run him down, so you have to run a more workmanlike dog with her, one that will not hesitate to press a coyote hard if he still has some run left. I found this out the hard way when I ran her alone after a few, and was still running (well, moving forward on my hands and knees, anyhow) five miles later.

She also has a nasty habit of giving tongue right up until she finds a coyote dead, when she turns off like a switch and starts looking for other entertainment, like a jackrabbit. This is not well if you happen to be down the backtrail a couple of miles, with no clear idea exactly where the dog is.

I'm bringing along an Airedale Terrier * as a calling/decoy dog, and between the two of them she and Miss Tina have managed to hold a few at bay, even though Micky (The Evil DogToad) is still a couple of months shy of her first birthday, so there is hope for the future. Anyway, to make a long story short(er), the dogs gathered that coyote up a few miles off, still full of fight, even though that bullet had made a sorry hash of his left ham and broken the femur to boot.

The Toad being brave. She went into the bush after this coyote, and came out again immediately with an entirely different attitude.

Miss Tina and the Toad on another one.

The Evil One in her role as decoy dog, in deep conversation with a loose-foot coyote.

Without the dogs I would not have had a prayer of recovering that coyote, leaving it to either die slowly, or to recover and most likely develop a sweet tooth for chickens, cats, calves, and whatever else it could still catch, seeing that jackrabbits and such would never be an option again.

No hunter likes to think that he wounded anything and failed to recover it, especially if he knows that he hit it hard enough to cripple it, or kill it slowly in the brush somewhere. I related this to a friend of mine once, and he told me that I displayed a fine sense of ethics in that regard.

Huh.

I don't know if I got ethics, (My buddy Greg would say "I got 'em once, but the Doctor give me that yella soap, and they went away") but I do know this: I have a dogged determination to recover any animal that I touch with a bullet. Too often hunters make an ill-placed shot, shrug, and go on about their business. With coyotes in particular, their philosophy seems to sometimes be that he'll bleed out somewhere, and he's just vermin to start with anyhow.

There are two problems with that philosophy. The first is that, as mentioned elsewhere on these pages, coyotes are tough beyond belief. If you don't turn one off by hitting him in some vital spot, he'll survive incredible trauma on a regular basis.

Any trapper who has worked on coyotes will tell you stories of coyotes maimed, scarred, crippled, and broken up by bullets, traps, automobiles and whatever other hazards they encountered that were going about their business as well as they might when they stepped in the steel, and if they had not found that trap there is no telling how long they might have gotten around.

The second problem is that a crippled coyote just naturally turns to whatever he can catch for his groceries. He may learn to scavenge at the local landfill, he may learn to subsist on road kill or move from carcass to carcass across the country, but he may (and does) learn that lambs and calves and chickens and chihuahuas and cats are easier to catch than anything out there in the brush.

I don't know about you, but that scenario does not play well with me.

I realize that not everyone has access to a trail hound, but in many areas there is an old boy somewhere or other who has a hound or three for something or other, and most any hound dog will take to a blood trail. Don't be shy; go to that fella and tell him what happened, and he'll most likely give you a hand.

If you have any kind of a breed of dog with a nose (figuratively, not literally), take that dog to the spot and throw it down on the blood, or wherever the coyote was when you last saw him. Lots of dogs will trail, even if they won't chop or bark at all, and if you watch closely that dog will sometimes help you work out the track, by going to the places that the coyote stopped and possibly bled, or rested, or fell down.

Make it a matter of stubborn pride, and when you do fringe one (and fellas, I'm telling you, it'll happen sooner or later) you have one more tool to recover him.

Be like Fletcher, in the Clint Eastwood classic movie "The Outlaw Josie Wales", when he says, "I don't want to HEAR Wales dead. I want to SEE Wales dead."

*This link to the Airedale Terrier Club of America is included in this page because it has lots of good information on Airedales, breed history, etc. I don't know if the Club wants to be associated with a bloody-handed devil like me, who actually uses the dog to do what it was bred for, seeing that they prominently list this disclaimer on their page:

That, of course, is the club's business, but I'm here to tell you that, based on my limited experience to date with one dog, Teddy Roosevelt was right about Airedales, and I don't recollect ever reading that he used them to bark at coons in cages.