I’m tired of sitting in front of a computer, so I’ve decided I’m going to go hunting today. I’ll have to use a vacation day, because my birthday isn’t a national holiday.
I spent most of last week trying to decide what I wanted to hunt today. I’d love to take the dog out, so I looked into going after chukars and huns. But I’d have to drive a long way to get to where those critters live, and I didn’t have the luxury of leaving yesterday. Any hunt I take today had to be within a couple hours’ drive.
So I thought about going elk hunting. I know of an area that’s not too far away that has leftover cow and calf licenses, and the season runs through the end of the month. But it’s all private land, and I’ve never hunted there before. The guy I know who has an in with one of the landowners couldn’t go today, and I think the landowner would feel more comfortable if the first time I hunted on his land, I did so with someone he already knows.
Then I thought about taking advantage of the second-to-last day of the goose season. There are a bunch of geese moving right now, and I know of several places the dog and I could maybe lure them close enough for a shot.
But I just keep coming back to coyote hunting. Coyote numbers seem to be up this year. That’s a very unscientific observation, but I’ve seen more this year than I’ve seen in quite a while. At the same time, I’ve noticed a downturn in the rabbit populations, at least in southeastern Wyoming, so the coyotes that are out there might be pretty hungry. They could come to the call a little more readily than they have for a while. It’s also bone-chilling cold, and it seems like the colder it is, the better the coyote hunting is. So I’ll be out in the back 40 today, squeaking on a dying rabbit call, hoping I don’t freeze my fingers off. I can’t think of a better way to celebrate turning a half-century old.
