Most people remember the kill. What I remember is the night.
Twenty-mile-an-hour winds all night long. Mid-August heat that refused to leave even after the sun went down. The kind of conditions most coyote hunters look at and decide not to go.
The drought kept my gear coated in dust. Every step kicked a little more of it into the air. By midnight, my teeth felt gritty from it, like I’d been chewing sand. The only upside was that the gnats and mosquitoes had been blown somewhere else.
Hours passed with the wind in the grass, the song of the X24, and the occasional answer from a coyote somewhere out in the darkness.
Alone under a moonless sky, the world got small. After enough hours, you quit thinking about the clock. Quit thinking about whatever you left behind. You just settle into the rhythm of the night until, for a while, there isn’t much difference between sitting in the darkness and belonging to it.
While recovering downed coyotes, the dust hung so thick in the beam that the green laser became a clothesline stretched across the prairie, leading me back to where they fell.
By the time daylight finally began creeping over the horizon, I found myself standing beside this old John Deere.
I wondered how many mornings it had watched come and go. How many nights of wind and dust. How many Augusts that baked the ground dry. It had been sitting there through all of it, completely indifferent to whether anyone showed up or not.
The coyotes were the reason I came.
Some nights, though, the hunt leaves you with something that has nothing to do with what you killed.
This was one of those nights.
Twenty-mile-an-hour winds all night long. Mid-August heat that refused to leave even after the sun went down. The kind of conditions most coyote hunters look at and decide not to go.
The drought kept my gear coated in dust. Every step kicked a little more of it into the air. By midnight, my teeth felt gritty from it, like I’d been chewing sand. The only upside was that the gnats and mosquitoes had been blown somewhere else.
Hours passed with the wind in the grass, the song of the X24, and the occasional answer from a coyote somewhere out in the darkness.
Alone under a moonless sky, the world got small. After enough hours, you quit thinking about the clock. Quit thinking about whatever you left behind. You just settle into the rhythm of the night until, for a while, there isn’t much difference between sitting in the darkness and belonging to it.
While recovering downed coyotes, the dust hung so thick in the beam that the green laser became a clothesline stretched across the prairie, leading me back to where they fell.
By the time daylight finally began creeping over the horizon, I found myself standing beside this old John Deere.
I wondered how many mornings it had watched come and go. How many nights of wind and dust. How many Augusts that baked the ground dry. It had been sitting there through all of it, completely indifferent to whether anyone showed up or not.
The coyotes were the reason I came.
Some nights, though, the hunt leaves you with something that has nothing to do with what you killed.
This was one of those nights.
