HUMBOLDT — The coyote’s ears pricked, unaware that the source of the yipping and howls he heard were not a prospective mate, but digitally manufactured.
The coyote scuttled from a patch of brush to find the intruder.
When the coyote came close, Jerry Croisant nailed its shoulder with a flat-shooting .223 rifle, ensuring there was one less danger for nearby calves.
JERRY WAS born in 1952 and raised on a farm two miles from where he lives east of Humboldt with Donna, his wife of 44 years.
As a youth his days were filled helping out on the farm. Pastimes were fishing and hunting.
He haunted the outdoors at every chance, often with a dog in tow.
Jerry remembers one dog with wolf ancestry.
On a visit to his brother’s place, Jerry and the dog approached a low-hung electric fence. The dog apparently didn’t see the thin strand and came in contact.
“He wailed and took out running west,” paying no attention to Jerry’s calls. “I guess he thought I’d hurt him.”
The dog raced on. Phone calls turned up no clues to his whereabouts.
“A couple of weeks later I got a call from the police in Girard,” Jerry recalled. “A dog there had my name on its collar.”
When Jerry retrieved his dog, he happily hopped into the truck.
JERRY’S first taste of construction, which has occupied much of his work-a-day life, came with Mike Hofer’s crew in Humboldt. He had attended heavy equipment school at Beloit, but “I learned to run a backhoe with Hofer.”
He became so proficient that Kansas Gas & Electric asked him to do trenching for communications lines near the Wolf Creek nuclear plant reactor. The 700-foot trench required exacting work. “Some others (equipment operators) said it couldn’t be done,” because mapping of underground objects wasn’t accurate. He finished the project without a single glitch.
Jerry also was summoned by the Kansas Department of Transportation to dig out deep-seated fuel tanks that had contaminated soil in western Kansas. Removing the soil was part of the deal, some so deep his backhoe was secured to a heavy truck so it could crawl down a slope and reach the tainted soil.
When digging out a several miles-long propane line in the Eureka area, a scratch more than 27-thousandths of an inch would require a patch. In eight weeks, only one patch was required, for a nick only 30-thousandths of an inch.
