ILYPANTS.NET
Notes To My Kids: Little Stories About Grown Up Kids
One weekend when you two kids came to my house in Fort Worth we did something me and my dad did when I was a kid. We went wolf calling. Wolf calling you say? There are no wolves locally. True but there are lots of coyotes and that is really what we went to call one evening.
After telling the kids we were going to try wolf calling I identified a place not too far from my house that looked like good ground for this endeavor. In fact I had seen some coyotes there in broad daylight when I went walking up there. There were three hills covered with post oaks and bordered by an open pasture that at the time was being graded for new houses. There was a small creek to the southwest of the hills that I guessed the coyotes used for water. You could get into the area since was not a gate and the dirt “roads” in the construction area were well packed. So after buying a wolf caller, a device used to make the sounds of animals that would attract the predator desired, we were ready to go. And so one cool and moonless fall evening we drove up there and started to call the coyotes.
We sat on the tailgate of my pickup, the dear old F150 I had for so long, and I started making the squealing noises my dad had showed me how to so long ago on my mom’s dad’s farm. To see the coyotes we had a large flashlight with red plastic taped over its end so we could cast light on them without them seeing the beam (coyotes are supposed to be color blind, thus the red color of the plastic).
I kept the call going at irregular intervals, just as my dad taught me, paused, and shined the light around where I thought there would be coyotes. And like so many times when I was a kid there weren’t any to be seen.
Yes many times no coyotes will appear when you try to attract them even though they are nocturnal creatures and many times not very scared of humans. But that night they were elsewhere or were scared to come out towards us.
While we wanted to see some of our local cousins to the domesticated dogs we were not successful. But the result was not what was really important. The real result of that night together was being able to do something with you two that most urban dwelling kids never heard of much less had the chance to do. And thus we did just that and I also got to remember similar fun nights I had with my dad that had happened decades ago on a hill side pasture near the creek on dark, cold nights on my granddad’s farm.