Coyotes in Comanche CountryBy Steven LaMascus
©Copyright 2009, The Varmint Hunters Association, Inc.
I gazed up at the little juniper-clad, canoe-shaped, red clay knoll with barely concealed emotion. I am a romantic at heart and a history buff of the worst kind, and this place was absolutely awash with romance and history. In the saddle between the two higher ends, a level spot maybe 20 feet long, 6 feet wide, and 15 feet above the surrounding terrain, was the burial place of a Comanche warrior. It was chosen so he could look out over his hunting grounds and watch the sunrise in the east each morning. The body had been found and removed long ago, but the mystique of the place was still strong. I thought if I could I would pick just such a spot for my last resting place, and I wished that the warrior had never been found. I don’t know what happened to his body, but as we stood there I could almost feel his spirit guarding his last resting place, and I hoped his soul really was wandering the Happy Hunting Grounds, as he had believed. I was thinking these thoughts as we climbed the knoll and took up positions to call the coyotes that were thick in the area.
The author called in this coyote using one of his homemade calls that he fashioned when he was a teenager.
To the south lay the Salt Fork of the Brazos; north was the South Wichita River; west was the Caprock and the beginning of the Staked Plains; and east stretched the Rolling Plains of Texas. This was buffalo country in the 1860s and ’70s, but is cattle country today. It was settled slowly and at the expense of many lives, as the encroaching settlers clashed with the Comanche and Kiowa. Not too far from here is the spot on the Pease River where Cynthia Ann Parker was recaptured. Farther west and north is Palo Duro Canyon, on the Prairie Dog Fork of the Red River, where Charlie Goodnight founded his ranch and where Colonel Ranald McKenzie finally ran down the Quahada Comanche led by Quanah Parker and fought the battle that forced them onto the reservation. It still is a thinly settled area and the wild heart of the frontier is just barely concealed beneath a thin veneer of civilization, waiting to spring free at the smallest opportunity. My memories of this area are centered on the little town of Benjamin, my hometown, the county seat of Knox County. It is my home, where I grew up, and I still miss it, even after 40 years of living in other places.
Today this area is renowned as a hunting destination. Quail, geese, ducks, deer, hogs, and doves abound. When I was a boy there wasn’t much game there. It all had been hunted out during the Depression and the era of the frontier. There were no deer, except in one small, closely guarded area on the old League Ranch. There were no hogs, either, then. There was a large prairie dog town just west of town, but it was poisoned into oblivion in the 1970s. Not a single prairie dog survives there today. My father hunted quail and doves, as did I, but the primary game here were coyotes and jackrabbits. This is where I learned to call coyotes, a sport that I still love more than any other.
This predator call was made by the author from a plastic screwdriver handle. The sound is claimed to be as good or better than any commercial call.
There were very few commercially manufactured predator calls back then, in the mid-1960s. Instead, we made our own calls. While cow or goat horns, wood, or other materials were used, I made most of mine out of the plastic handles of my father’s screwdrivers (Yes, Dad, that is a confession). I would heat the metal blade until I could pull it out of the plastic. Then I would drill a hole through the plastic and cut down one end until it was shaped rather like the mouthpiece of a saxophone. A thin piece of hard plastic served for the reed. I would scrape the plastic reed with a piece of glass or a sharp pocketknife until it produced just the right sound. The result was very much like the commercially made open reed calls of today, such as the Johnny Stewart Crit’R Distress call or the old Tally-Ho calls. These homemade calls were astoundingly effective.
Today, although other game has repopulated the area, it still is the best coyote calling territory I have ever seen. The large cattle ranches have helped keep the coyotes from being exterminated, such as happened in other places where sheep and goats are the primary livestock.
These coyote tracks were found in damp sand near a spring in the badlands of the Texas Panhandle.
I had returned to Benjamin from my current home in southwest Texas for a visit with my old grade school buddy, Wyman Meinzer. The trip was timed to coincide with a hunt that was being hosted by Browning Firearms, Winchester Ammunition, and Hunter’s Specialties. I was meeting Gerald Stewart, of Johnny Stewart Game Calls, also a friend of Wyman, and we would go together to Woodward, Oklahoma, where the hunt would take place. But before heading to Oklahoma we were going to spend a couple of days at Benjamin, accompanying Wyman on his bobcat trap line, calling coyotes, and generally catching up.
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