My hunting partner could not attend the PM Hunt and needed to bail 2 days before the convention. I did not have time to find another person to carpool with so I drove to Las Cruces, NM from Utah by myself. I made arrangements to share a room at the Comfort Suites with Jason El Paso who was driving in from Texas. I only knew Jason El Paso from the forums and had never met him in person before. Normally I would not plan to room with someone I had never met, but from my experiences attending past PM Hunts, I was pretty sure the type of people there would be good folks. I checked into the motel the day before Jason arrived.

I hunted by myself on Thursday since everyone else was paired up. I had no luck. Jason and I hunted together on Friday and this is how it went.

We left the motel and headed toward El Paso. We stopped to get gas at a truck stop about 15 miles south of Las Cruces. The area along the east side of I-10 looked interesting, but neither of us had hunted there before. We checked the GPS unit and discovered there was a strip of BLM land between I-10 and the Dept of Defense lands. We decided to check it out and explore some new country. We used the GPS unit to stay within the BLM lands and played the wind to determine which way to travel. We discovered some great looking country and the tracks on the ground looked like we found coyote city.

I setup my FoxPro to call the first stand. My e-caller would not work. It worked perfectly yesterday. Jason had his e-caller handy so he used his and called the first stand. Nothing came in. We go back to the truck installed new batteries in my e-caller and it still did not work. Could not find the problem in the field so I put it away to trouble shoot it later.

The next stand looked good, but the wind was blowing the wrong way. Jason said, "Lets try it anyway to see if we can beat the odds." Jason puts his e-caller out and then his e-caller does not work. We both shake our heads. Jason gets out a hand call and uses that. It sounds good and about 10 minutes later Jason jesters that he sees a coyote coming in. A couple minutes later I see a coyote. It stops about 100 yards away in the open presenting a frontal chest shot. Jason does not see it. I take the shot, the coyote falls, it gets up, and starts spinning. Jason had been watching a different coyote that had hung up in the bushes and took off running after I shot. Neither of us knew he had called in a double. Jason then sees my coyote spinning and watches me miss the second shot. The coyote walks off and disappears in the bushes. We then get up to find the coyote. It only went about 10 yards and died.




The skull from the coyote will be cleaned and donated to a public school to be used as a teaching aid for biology classes. The tail was almost used as an antenna ornament to wave to the protesters.



Here is Jason El Paso with 1 of the 2 coyotes he hand called in.



We made a third stand and had no luck. The wind picked up so we called it a day and headed back to the motel to look forward to the dinner and guest speakers at the convention.

Nice story!! Sounds like you had a good time.

It was a great time hunting with Fursniper I cant wait till we hunt again!

what was wrong with the callers

It was great to meet fursniper, I do regret that we didn't get to hunt. maybe next year in Tucson...

Jason's e-caller just needed new batteries. I discovered later that mine did not work because I had some corrosion on the contacts in the battery holder. I cleaned the contacts off, replaced the batteries, and its working fine now. The contacts corroded because of my past mistakes. Several months ago I forgot that I swapped my rechargeable batteries out with alkaline and put my e-caller on the charger with alkaline batteries in it. The batteries burst and leaked gooey stuff in the battery holder. So far my FoxPro has continued to survive my screw ups.

The PM Hunt was a good time and meeting the people on the forums was a hoot. Looking forward to seeing everyone again next year and making more new friends. Tucson should be a blast.