Back Cast

The coyote reminds me of my 13-year-old golden retriever who, at this hour, maybe 45 minutes after sunrise, might still be sacked in the bed we bought him off the internet that looks like a bagel cut in half.

Like Ollie, the coyote’s face is white, much lighter than the rest of his coat. An old man face. Or maybe it’s not that at all. Maybe its white face, that nearly glows in this light, is a product of nature, something it was born with, not something it earned by being long in the tooth.

It doesn't matter.

I’ve been watching the coyote through binoculars for a couple minutes and I’ll lose it shortly when it crests the prairie hilltop to my north.

For the moment, at least, we’re sharing a PLOTS tract that bumps up against some state school land east of here. We’re here for different reasons. With the deer gun season a couple weeks out, I’m scouting. The coyote is hunting, doing what it does to survive, participating in a year-round effort that must get more and more difficult as fall slips into winter when temperatures nosedive and the snow piles up.

While the threat of winterlike weather isn’t in the forecast for coming days, big patches of the mostly brown landscape are nearly white from the thousands of migrating snow geese that are here for now, but can pick up, alerted by whatever cues that drive them, and point their pinkish bills south.

The geese are a treat to watch, but a distraction from what I came here for. They are as noisy as they are jumpy, seemingly never at ease with their surroundings. Oftentimes, there are half as many birds in the air getting ready to land as there are geese on the ground. This confusion of unsettledness reminds me of a snow globe that was turned upside down and then placed upright on a flat surface.

It’s not lost on me that I’m watching a species that is legally classified as overabundant – the daily limit is 50 birds – yet I’m out scouting for an animal that, because of an EHD outbreak, had its numbers negatively influenced in some areas, to the point Game and Fish officials allowed hunters with whitetail or “any” deer gun licenses refunds on tags in 22 hunting units in western North Dakota.

Department officials urged folks to talk to landowners in the areas they hunt, or maybe make the effort during preseason to see what they see before forgoing the season.

I’m doing the latter, but it’s something I do every year no matter the forecast. We’ll hunt, most certainly, because we never considered that we wouldn’t.