Here's my entry for the spam union competition:
That morning I woke up thinking that it would be another day of disappointment and bad luck, but I couldn't have been more wrong.
I was in Lassen National Forest with my dad hunting coyotes. We had been out there for about a week and we had yet to have any luck. We heard them howling at night, but when we were out there actually hunting them, we never heard a thing.
I woke up that morning to the smell of steamy oatmeal and sausages. If it wasn't for this wonderful smell and my dad's persistence, I would have just plopped right back down and fallen asleep. I sat down at the table, listening to him talk about how he had heard howling last night. Of course I thought nothing of this; since it had happened every night we had been out hunting. We quickly ate up our breakfast and loaded up our guns. As soon as everything was ready, we went outside the camper to get dressed. Since coyote's have a very keen sense of smell we had to get rid of our scent, which meant leaving clothes out in the dirt at night. The temperature was probably about 45 degrees out there and the clothes were cold and damp. Not an enjoyable experience.
After we were dressed we went back into the camper to put on face paint. We did this to take away the brightness of our skin and to blend in more with our surroundings. Finally we were done getting ready, and prepared to hunt. I grabbed our GPS as we walked out the door. The GPS was very important to us because you can't see a whole lot at quarter to five in the morning.
We started hiking back into the woods, instead of just walking down the road, so we would be out of sight of our prey. We hiked for about a mile until we reached out hunting spot. Luckily, the night before we had set up everything, so there would be less to do in the morning. As my dad was walking down the side of the hill to set up the "wounded rabbit," I took out the spotting sticks and set them into the loose ground. Both of these items are very helpful in hunting coyote and serve a good purpose. The "wounded rabbit" gives out a distress signal which catches a coyote's attention and lures him in. Spotting sticks on the other hand, are used for keeping your rifle steady when hunting animals at a long distance. I watched my dad creep back up the other hill and sit down next to me. He slowly turned his head to me and whispered the words, "Let's hunt," and so, the hunt began.
I found the noise that came out of the rabbit to be annoying. It sounded like a mixture of a baby crying and a woman giving birth to her child. My dad too, must have found it annoying because he turned it off after about 20 minutes. "It's not working," my dad quietly whispered to me, "should we try the howler?" he asked. "Sure, why not," I responded, "we have nothing to lose." For those who don't know, a howler is a coyote call that imitates the sound of a coyote howling. You can use it to challenge coyotes to a fight, which lures them in. My dad gave off a few howls and stopped to listen for a response. It was dead quiet for about ten minutes and then all of a sudden I hear this eerie sound coming from across the valley. It is impossible to describe the feeling of hearing a coyote howl when they are a mere 300 yards away from you. My eyes immediately scanned the forest line looking for signs of movement or anything that resembled a coyote. A couple of minutes later the sound came again, but this time it was off to our left instead of right in front of us. My head jerked to the side, once again scanning the valley for the coyote. Then came a series of howls from the great dog located somewhere in front of us. This time when I looked, I saw something. I backtracked with my eyes until I spotted it and the sight was absolutely incredible. It was beautiful standing out there in the middle of the valley, looking unreal as its head tilted back and gave off another howl. I brought my gun up to rest on my arm and looked through the scope to find the coyote. As I was looking through my scope I noticed something about the animal. It didn't have that shiny golden coat of fur like most coyotes. Instead, it had a coat of thick gay fur. Both my dad and I found this strange and questioned whether or not it was even a coyote. Another thing I noticed about the animal was that it was huge, much bigger than your average coyote, and right then and there it clicked. It wasn't a coyote, it was a wolf. I told my dad this and he agreed with me that I was more than likely right. He also told me that it's illegal to hunt wolves in the U.S. I continued to gaze out, at the wolf through my scope for a while, until it decided that there was nothing interesting here and slowly trotted off back into its home... the woods.