We set up in our first tree line along the Salamonie River and it was obvious that my eyeglasses weren’t going to cut it. It was just after dawn and my every breath rose with its heat, mixing with the 20-degree air and fogging my lenses. So off came the glasses. I’d just have to deal with less-than-perfect vision as we sit and watch for coyote to come out of the surrounding tree lines into the fields in front of us.
I sit with my back against a bare maple, the tree masking my outline. Mike is thirty yards to my right, and begins calling to the coyotes. Rifle across my lap, I let him do all the work.
Mike wears a braided paracord necklace that carries a half dozen coyote calls, each made of wood or antler or bone, each with its distinctive sound: The chittering call of a ground critter that sounded, even to my ears, like something fat and juicy and good to eat. A “distressed prey” call: the pitiful wail of a wounded rabbit or deer – also tasty and low effort. The yips and howls and yelps intended to lure curious coyotes that might be thinking, “Hey, where’s the party?”
As Mike works through a sequence, I scan the fields and lines of trees in front of us, watching for a predator to show its triangular head or rangy body. I look to the farthest line of trees, maybe 150 yards to our north, and try something. I think to relax my eyes into seeing more clearly, to bring the distant trees and scrub into focus. After a few minutes of practice, a strange thing happens. The far trees do seem clearer, more defined.
Was it a trick of perception? Or was my vision actually sharpening? I considered whether the body might actually respond to being in the woods, in pursuit of prey. Maybe it flips some evolutionary circuit breaker: “You’re hunting now? Okay, better tune up your senses. Stand by one moment….”
In a weekday workplace without walls, it’s a matter of survival to restrict one’s senses. To mask an incessant buzz of conversation, you might screw in a pair of foam earplugs or don headphones tuned to Pandora or a “white noise” web site. You’re provided with helpful tips that recommend you keep your head down and “avoid making eye contact” if you don’t want to be disturbed. A neighbor may decide to lunch on last night’s chicken tikka masala or grandma’s leftover sausage and sauerkraut; if that’s the case, you may as well pack it up and move to the next building.
In the 10,000 wooded acres that surround Salamonie Lake, the contrasts were stark as Mike and I hunt coyote in late February.
In between his sequences of calls – wails, yips, and howls – there is the silence. Or what seemed like silence until you slowed down. Rather than restricting your senses, here was the place and time to widen them. And a quiet symphony emerges.
The icy breeze makes a gentle hiss past your ears. The bony white limbs of nearby sycamores carry the few dry leaves that had refused to drop in November, and these now rustle in the breeze. Crows caw at each other as they waft overhead, black silhouettes against low clouds. Squirrels high in the branches of white oaks cluck a rapid “kuk kuk kuk,” either arguing with other squirrels about whose nuts are whose, or warning each other about us. A dog barks in the far distance. The rhythm of your own breath sifts through your camouflage face mask.
We sit hidden in our southern tree line, feeling the breeze coming from the north and we sniff the air for anything that might smell canine, just as we assume the coyote is sniffing for anything foreign in the air.
As we move from spot to spot, we watch the ground and follow their tracks in snow that had fallen fresh the night before. From the size and definition of the prints and the texture of the surrounding snow, we judge an animal’s size, where it had been, its direction of travel, and where it might be holed up now.
The day passes in this manner. We move locations by the hour: ridge lines, the edges of dormant bean and corn fields, river banks and woodland clearings. We see not a single coyote. But it doesn't seem to matter.
We spend days in a world that demands you ratchet back your senses, lower the blinds, draw the curtains, and turn down the volume. Build seawalls to hold back a sensory tsunami.
Here in these 10,000 acres of woods and fields in northern Indiana, it is a different drill. You sit. You wait. You listen for the crunch of snow or the snap of a branch or the yip of a coyote responding to a call. You taste the air and feel it move across your face. You scan for movement and expect the reddish-gray form of a predator to show itself from behind a tree.
You pull back the curtains that shroud your senses, throw open the doors and windows and find yourself in the woods.
********
Other stories by this guy: http://joejansen.blogspot.com/
I sit with my back against a bare maple, the tree masking my outline. Mike is thirty yards to my right, and begins calling to the coyotes. Rifle across my lap, I let him do all the work.
Mike wears a braided paracord necklace that carries a half dozen coyote calls, each made of wood or antler or bone, each with its distinctive sound: The chittering call of a ground critter that sounded, even to my ears, like something fat and juicy and good to eat. A “distressed prey” call: the pitiful wail of a wounded rabbit or deer – also tasty and low effort. The yips and howls and yelps intended to lure curious coyotes that might be thinking, “Hey, where’s the party?”
As Mike works through a sequence, I scan the fields and lines of trees in front of us, watching for a predator to show its triangular head or rangy body. I look to the farthest line of trees, maybe 150 yards to our north, and try something. I think to relax my eyes into seeing more clearly, to bring the distant trees and scrub into focus. After a few minutes of practice, a strange thing happens. The far trees do seem clearer, more defined.
Was it a trick of perception? Or was my vision actually sharpening? I considered whether the body might actually respond to being in the woods, in pursuit of prey. Maybe it flips some evolutionary circuit breaker: “You’re hunting now? Okay, better tune up your senses. Stand by one moment….”
In a weekday workplace without walls, it’s a matter of survival to restrict one’s senses. To mask an incessant buzz of conversation, you might screw in a pair of foam earplugs or don headphones tuned to Pandora or a “white noise” web site. You’re provided with helpful tips that recommend you keep your head down and “avoid making eye contact” if you don’t want to be disturbed. A neighbor may decide to lunch on last night’s chicken tikka masala or grandma’s leftover sausage and sauerkraut; if that’s the case, you may as well pack it up and move to the next building.
In the 10,000 wooded acres that surround Salamonie Lake, the contrasts were stark as Mike and I hunt coyote in late February.
In between his sequences of calls – wails, yips, and howls – there is the silence. Or what seemed like silence until you slowed down. Rather than restricting your senses, here was the place and time to widen them. And a quiet symphony emerges.
The icy breeze makes a gentle hiss past your ears. The bony white limbs of nearby sycamores carry the few dry leaves that had refused to drop in November, and these now rustle in the breeze. Crows caw at each other as they waft overhead, black silhouettes against low clouds. Squirrels high in the branches of white oaks cluck a rapid “kuk kuk kuk,” either arguing with other squirrels about whose nuts are whose, or warning each other about us. A dog barks in the far distance. The rhythm of your own breath sifts through your camouflage face mask.
We sit hidden in our southern tree line, feeling the breeze coming from the north and we sniff the air for anything that might smell canine, just as we assume the coyote is sniffing for anything foreign in the air.
As we move from spot to spot, we watch the ground and follow their tracks in snow that had fallen fresh the night before. From the size and definition of the prints and the texture of the surrounding snow, we judge an animal’s size, where it had been, its direction of travel, and where it might be holed up now.
The day passes in this manner. We move locations by the hour: ridge lines, the edges of dormant bean and corn fields, river banks and woodland clearings. We see not a single coyote. But it doesn't seem to matter.
We spend days in a world that demands you ratchet back your senses, lower the blinds, draw the curtains, and turn down the volume. Build seawalls to hold back a sensory tsunami.
Here in these 10,000 acres of woods and fields in northern Indiana, it is a different drill. You sit. You wait. You listen for the crunch of snow or the snap of a branch or the yip of a coyote responding to a call. You taste the air and feel it move across your face. You scan for movement and expect the reddish-gray form of a predator to show itself from behind a tree.
You pull back the curtains that shroud your senses, throw open the doors and windows and find yourself in the woods.
********
Other stories by this guy: http://joejansen.blogspot.com/
