…Or maybe that’s a decoy. Or a “dummy” lock box.
Oram spent most of the next trial scouting out sites near the farms the coyotes had been bothering. From his reading and asking around, the hunter decided that the best sites to hunt around would be meadows, especially ones that had been recently mowed, or recently partly mowed. And there would be plenty of meadowland wherever cows were raised.
Oram went around the farmland looking for tracks and scat, and finally found some along a promising approach. One problem with the location, though, was the lack of any cover for himself. Hunters sometimes constructed stands they could hide in, but Oram didn’t have time to do that, nor did he think the farmers would be too keen on the idea. The best chance for cover under the circumstances would be a windrow. Oram picked one reasonably close to a path along which he had seen coyote tracks and set up there.
He wore his recently acquired duplicity suit, setting its color scheme to match the greens and gold of the summer meadow he wished to blend into. He took his old straw hat and festooned it with a bit of extra hay, as well. The still-damp hay in the windrow was soft, and Oram lay atop it, his crossbow in front of him cradled in his forearms. From there, it was a matter of waiting. And mooing. And feeling like an idiot hoping no one was watching.
Luck was not on the traveler’s side this first trial. One coyote came, and Oram made the mistake of making his call when it was already close. This had the effect of making the animal suspicious. It stopped at the edge of the meadow, looking around. The canny canine got suspicious, then turned and left.
A second coyote arrived a break or so later, and it surprised Oram by coming down the other side of the windrow, towards which his feet faced. Swearing, the hunter had to sit up, stirring a pile of hay, to get his crossbow into firing position. This alerted the coyote, which previously hadn’t seen Oram, well-camouflaged as he was by the duplicity suit, and it turn and ran just as the hunter fired. The bolt hit, but only a graze on the rear flank. The coyote yelped, but still ran, bolt in its rump.
Swearing, Oram rose from his stand and tried to follow its trail. It did bleed a bit, but it obviously hadn’t been badly hurt enough to go down. It had probably made it all the way back to its den with Oram’s bolt stuck in its butt, whereupon it had most likely gnawed the bolt free and was now using it as a chew toy.
It was time, the hunter decided, to call it quits, at least for this site. He spent the next couple breaks riding the area on Mule, picking out a few more spots with the telltale tracks and scat, and selecting another site. This one was on a different farmer’s property, so he called at the farmhouse to ask permission to hunt coyote on his meadow. The farmer was, as it turned out, only too glad to be rid of the creatures, and to let Oram hunt them as long as he promised to stay out of the way.
Oram found another meadow with windrows, and picked out another stand for the following trial. When next he set up, he would do a couple things differently. First, he would lie along the length of the windrow, not across it. That way he wouldn’t have to scurry and stir up a bunch of hay should a coyote approach along the “wrong” side of the row. Second, he would try a decoy. The traveler had initially been skeptical of the idea that coyotes could be fooled or attracted by a decoy, but it occurred to him that it had a slightly different function: it gave the animal something to look at when it heard the call. So he would want a decoy that resembled a calf.
He wracked his brains for ideas of how best to make such a thing; he had never done so before. He would want some sort of pelt, maybe a wool blanket, and a white cloth for the head. But he would also want a frame to put these things on, something that would give it an animal shape. He did not trust his woodworking skills to bang together a suitable frame in one trial, and the sawhorses and other things he might borrow didn’t seem fit for purpose. Until he remembered Rocky.
“Rocky” was what Oram had named the stone horse that Saoire had gifted him on the same occasion as his duplicity suit. It could magically turn into a normal-sized horse that could be ridden and everything. But for his present purposes, Oram would use Rocky in its resting statue form. Thus, it was the right size and shape for a calf decoy. Once he had the idea of using Rocky, the rest of Oram’s decoy plan fell quickly into place, and he found himself picking up the pace as he rode back to the Ranger Headquarters, eager to test his idea while there was still light to work with.
He had remembered the somewhat mangled cougar pelt he had harvested so awkwardly in the Scalvoris mountains an arc ago. He still had it, and may have finally found a good use for it. It was just about the right size to cover Rocky in suitable-looking fur, and its chewed-up appearance might actually prove an advantage: perhaps a coyote seeing it would think it was an *injured* calf. Oram also put a bit of light-colored sacking over Rocky’s head. The final result did not look to Oram like any creature he would want anything to do with; it resembled a calf in appearance about as convincingly as Oram’s call did that of an actual cow. Yet he was satisfied that he had done as well as he could with what he had. Perhaps it would work, after all.
