I had almost given up three different times. I had used every predator-calling trick in my book. My legs had fallen asleep a long time ago. The tingling was beginning to drive me crazy. And yet I had hung in there. My companions, Gary Howey and Bill Christensen, both of Hartington, Neb., were hunkered down in front of another cedar tree to my left. I knew they must be wondering why I had not called an end to this fruitless stand.
But the land we had permission to hunt upon was not very large. At best we had two, maybe three, stands to cover it all. Patience, when calling predators, can be a virtue.
We were at the edge of a cornfield and the elevation gave us a good view of what was below. To our left was a large ravine choked with trees which were in the process of being strangled by invasive cedars. The ravine played out into the cornfield and a grassy hill splayed across a hundred yards to the next ravine on the right. That was where the movement was.
My gun, nestled on my bipod, somehow, had slowly reached my shoulder and I ducked behind the scope and picked up the animal. It was the ugliest looking coyote I had ever seen. It was heavily infested with mange and had lost at least 90 percent of its fur. It had a tail, but it was simply bones covered with dark skin.
Through the scope, I watched the animal walk across the base of the hill toward the ravine on our right. I thought it would simply duck into that ravine and disappear forever. But, it was looking right at me from time to time.
As it trotted in, it dropped out of sight below a small ridge in the cornfield. It's always a nervous time when that happens. But I knew where it should appear and I waited.
Within seconds the coyote crested the little ridge and continued to lope in, its tongue lolling out the side of its mouth. It was less than a hundred yards out now and I had it in the scope. It was trotting so slowly that I thought Gary or Bill would shoot. Nothing. It was really close now, almost too close. Maybe they were waiting for me to stop it. I took a breath to do a bark, but the coyote stopped and quartered away from me, looking directly at Bill and Gary.
The coyote flinched. It's that little move they make just before they turn and run. They crouch just a little, and then they turn and are gone.
I had already taken up most of the trigger pull on the .243. It was more a matter of will that the gun should go off. And it did. The crosshairs of the scope centered just behind the front leg. The 58-grain ballistic tip left the barrel at 3,750 feet per second and smacked that pathetic facade of a coyote.
"We didn't see him until he was right on top of us," Gary said. "He saw us move and that's why he stopped. I saw you looking through your scope and I thought, 'That looks serious,' so I knew something was out there."
I stepped it off. One hundred feet. The animal had almost no hair. It's face and neck had not yet been ravaged by the burrowing parasitic mites that cause this disease. I was amazed the animal had lived through the recent cold weather. Coyotes in this bad of shape die of the disease, usually a pathetic death of exposure to the elements.
You don't want to handle coyotes showing symptoms of mange. It's very contagious for the coyotes, but humans can pick it up too, although it is not as serious. Usually a rash for a few days and then it's gone.
Our next calling area consisted of several tree-filled canyons emptying out onto the flood plain of the Niobrara River. It would have been a great spot if the wind had been out of the north, but the southeast wind complicated things.
Colorful works by some of local artist collective hob’art’s hardest hitters are currently on display in their exhibit “Archeology of Color.”
The show, which opened Jan. 13, focuses not just on color, but on how each artist approaches it, said curator Willie Baez.
“Some people use their senses to work on whatever project they’re working on and their colors are spontaneous like children when they paint, they just paint, they’re not worried about anything,” says Baez. “But because we’re grown and more intelligent, some feel that intellectuality comes into play all the time.”
Some of the most spontaneous artists in the show are Liz Cohen and Ibou Ndoye, who both create paintings inspired by the native art of various non-Western countries.
“Liz is more child-like in her world of creativity and is in love with primal things. She loves African art, South American art and the simplicity of it,” explained Baez. “Ibou is also a spontaneous guy. He mostly uses primary colors and rarely does any mixing.”
The curator says that most abstract painters are more spontaneous because they’re not concerned with form or realism. One exception would be Meredeth Turshen.
“When I first saw her painting, I didn’t think it was a landscape, but she said it has to do with sunlight . . . she was looking out a window in Paris, saw fields and then started painting. The act was really spontaneous, but she did think of where to put the color and what exactly she was painting,” said Baez. “She told me, ‘I intentionally did this. I didn’t do it in a trance.’ ”
In between the two extremes are photographers like Don Sichler, who looks for his colors on the street.
“He finds colorful mirages or images on the street in water, puddles, and uses that to color his photographs,” said Baez. “It’s a little more spontaneous and not really thought about. He just sees them, catches the light, and boom!”
Other participating artists include Pauline Chernichaw, Constance Ftera, Janet Kolstein, Roslyn Rose, Starr Tucker-Ortega, Tom Egan, Ann Kinney, Erich Heinemann and Howard Berelson.
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