Texas 'yote

Woody said I should throw this up on the board, so here goes.



You guys (and gals) can pick all you want, I have a tough hide.

O.K. I was down in Texas for about 6 weeks working, and had the opportunity to do some hog reduction shooting on a hunting lease in West Texas. To make a long story short, I didn't kill any hogs, but I did whack a coyote.
The coyote wasn't the first thing that I killed. The first morning, I was getting clothes out of the duffle bag and this guy popped his head up from further down in the duffle bag, wondering what the heck all the commotion was about.


I couldn't let him run around in the tent, so I grabbed him and made him pose for the camera. I honestly don't know where he came from. He must have crawled into the tent during the night and thought my duffle bag made a good home. Nothing was chewed up, so he couldn't have been in there for long.

First day I was wandering the lease with my .243 sneaking up on all of the deer feeders that they had out, looking for hogs. My buddy was sneaking around on the other end of the lease doing the same thing, while the guy who leased the property slept in. No hogs to be found, but LOTS of sign from cattle. Turns out the lease owner also leased the ground to a rancher to run cattle on it. 150 head is a LOT for the 320 acres of the lease, there was one grassy field, but the rest was XXXXXly pear and mesquite. I don't know what they will look like in August when he pulls them off. Little rainfall there, and the local lakes are 20'-30' low.

Here's what most of the lease looked like:


Anyway I got tired of working my way through the cactus, keeping an eye out for snakes, so I decided to take a look at the grassy field. I snuck to the edge near where the tent was, and looked. I didn't see a thing, so I grabbed the binoculars and looked again. What's that?? There's 3 coyotes on the other side of the field that looked like they were eating something relatively large that was in the grass. Hmmmmmmmmmmm.......... Too far for my .243 but I had just the ticket back in the truck, about 300 yds away. Hoping that they'd stay there, I took a yardage reading with my rangefinder, got back to the truck and dug out the long range gun.



I know long range shooting isn't for everyone, but I enjoy it and I practice a bit. This gun has an appetite for powder, so I practice with a .22 lr shooting 60g Aguilar Subsonics and a .308.

I fired up the palm pilot, took all the atmospheric data readings, and plugged the data into Exbal. The gun was still zero'd for the elk hunt in Colorado (6500' elevation, 39°F) but plugging in the current data it told me to come up 10.0 moa from my zero. Thinking back, and remembering that the gun shoots 1.5 moa higher with a clean cold barrel, I came up 8.5 moa and walked out to the edge of the field. Laying down, looking thru the scope, the coyotes were still there, but there was just 2 of them now. The wind was blowing a bit, so I took a SWAG at how much the bullet would drift and sent one. As the gun came back down from the recoil I saw the bullet hit, then heard the "whop". The other coyote ran off, but not 10 seconds later came back because it had no idea what the heck just happened. The muzzle brake on the gun directs a LOT of noise backwards, so I doubt that it even heard the report of the gun. I chambered another round and sent it, but in my haste I neglected to dial back in that 1.5 moa, so it was a clean miss. The bullet kicking up dust and dirt just under and past the coyote made him think twice about staying there, so he lit out for the next county. I gathered up the rifle and stuff and headed back to camp, when I heard 5 shots ring out from the distance. It turns out that my buddy Bob was over that way, and he whacked the male 'yote on the run at around 300 yds. His first shot missed, so he kept on shooting until he was out of bullets. It turns out that he hit it 3 out of 5 shots - shooting a .338-06. He's pretty happy with his shooting, as he very well should be. I doubt that I could have shot that 'yote!

Here's his coyote:

When I got back to camp, Bob was there with the guy that leased the ground for hunting. He just woke up and was wondering what the artillery was going off for.

We walked out to the edge of the field and looked at where I shot my coyote at, and where Bob shot his at and Andrew said "there's no way I'm walking out there, we'll take the truck."

When the cattle heard the truck, they came over, thinking that we were going to feed them. We had to shoo them away far enough to take a picture of my coyote.

We walked around the rest of the day, playing hide and seek with the cattle. Bob had brought some marinated venison loins for dinner that night, so we cut up some mesquite and threw them on the grill.

They were good!!!!

Oh, my coyote? It was 17 yds shy of a half mile away when I squeezed the trigger.  The 180g 7mm Berger VLD left a sizeable exit hole.....  Impact velocity was around 2300 fps.