The Trouble With Coyotes

Hunting among Suburban sprawl.

- Jason Brooks

Patches of snow revealed a set of fresh coyote tracks leading through the tall sage on a knoll overlooking a golf course; the short, manicured grass and sand traps were now dormant and blanketed with snow until spring arrived. Half-million-dollar homes sat all dark with the exception of a few lights in the early morning. Residents were about to start their day – some already angry over the loss of a family pet, either a house cat or a small designer dog. Others still couldn’t understand why people were so mad during a community meeting a month earlier, when the outrage over the loss of pets revealed that this group of homeowners had a coyote problem.

Word spread throughout my small hometown, a resort area that caters to tourists in the summer and produces some of the largest apple crops in the Pacific Northwest each fall. But in winter the town drifts into a cold slumber, quiet and safe – until the coyote “problem” came about. I had just finished working for the Forest Service fighting fires all summer and now was enjoying the early winter as a time to sit back and reflect. Less than a year out of the Air Force, where I was primarily stationed at Mt. Home AFB in southern Idaho, this was my first winter back home, away from the scablands where I learned to hunt coyotes for Bennet Mountain Fur Company.

Hearing the rumors spreading around town of the coyotes plaguing the homeowners at the nearby golf course, it didn’t take long to grab my .223 Remington out of the gun cabinet. The hills above the golf course were still undeveloped and covered in sagebrush with many small coulees for the coyotes to den in and knolls to howl from. It was one of these knolls that I sat perched on, tucked into the sage as the pair of coyotes ran toward my rabbit-in-distress calling.