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Just Aim for the Big Middle”: Polly Quick and Coyote Number 17

Published January 28, 2005

I, Bernie Harberts, did not use generative AI to write or illustrate this article. Spell check and grammar check, yes. AI, no.

Ray Quick drills holes in the aquifer and his wife Polly punches holes in coyotes.

Polly Quick making jerky the afternoon Bernie Harberts met her and Ray in La Luz, New Mexico, 2004 — Polly Quick making jerky the afternoon I met her and Ray.

Ray Quick making jerky under canine scrutiny in La Luz, New Mexico, 2004 — Ray making jerky across the kitchen table from her under close canine scrutiny.

Ray’s a well digger, one of the last in the area to use a cable rig, an old Bucyrus Erie 22W. While Woody and Maggie were resting in his corrals, he takes me on the job.

The back of Ray and Polly Quick's stone house where Bernie Harberts camped with Woody and Maggie in La Luz, New Mexico, 2004 — The back of Polly and Ray’s stone house, where I camped with Woody and Maggie.

Ray Quick's spare Bucyrus Erie cable rig in La Luz, New Mexico, 2004 — Ray’s spare Bucyrus Erie cable rig.

It’s slow work. “People call me on the phone and say ‘This is Quick Drilling right? So you guys must be really fast, right?’ But nope, Quick’s the surname, not the speed. Drilling by cable rig takes a lot longer than the modern rotary drill rigs. There’s just no way to hurry bashing a hole in the ground.”

At the site, there’s a monstrous bow-fronted truck with a derrick on the back that’s raising and dropping something off the back. All that old iron bracing and welding complains and shimmies like mad every time I hear the “CHUNKKKK!” and “SCREEEEE!”

“I’m digging this one four hundred feet,” he tells me as the drilling tool rises and falls in the hole at our feet. A cable raises and drops a pipe-shaped bit into the earth that will hopefully, eventually, yield water.

There’s a chunk of hardened steel on the end of the pipe. That’s the bit.

One of Ray Quick's spare drill bits weighing hundreds of pounds, La Luz, New Mexico, 2004 — One of Ray’s spare drill bits. It weighs hundreds of pounds.

As the bit is raised and dropped from the derrick, it smashes through another bit of rock and sand. Occasionally water is poured into the hole. The resulting slurry of muck and gravel is removed with another pipe-shaped tool called the bailer. That’s how cable rig operators get so muddy.

Ray Quick checking on drilling progress at a well site in La Luz, New Mexico, 2004 — Ray checking on progress. It’s a muddy job.

Between shakes of the tower he adds, “Everyone’s using so much water, we have to keep drilling these holes deeper and deeper. I remember when we had water at two hundred feet.”

That was in the days when there was more rain and fewer coyotes. After we get back from well drilling (we made twenty feet that day) Polly explains how she takes care of the new interlopers. Standing there in the kitchen she points to the window over the sink. “I took the screens out of our windows. That way when I see a coyote, I just poke the old ’30 out the window and ‘BLAM!'”

“The old ’30” is a 30-30 rifle.

Coyotes, it seems, have a fierce appetite for the Quicks’ chickens and cats. “The cats don’t get very old around here,” she tells me over coffee and crowding felines. The layers in the yard struggle too. “This way, while I’m cooking, I can always keep an eye on my hens.”

She pulls a Kodak instant photo from the china cabinet.

“Here’s number 17,” she says and it’s a photo of a coyote lying under a mesquite bush. “By the time you open the door, they’re gone. Yeah, shooting from inside the house is the way to go. I have a nephew who uses those hunting magazine wounded rabbit calls. He hasn’t shot a coyote yet. Every time I get one, I call him up and say, ‘Got another one. Wanna come over and see what he looks like?'”

No screaming electronic calls. No fancy scope. The ol’ 30 looks more like a club than a gun sitting up there on the cabinet.

So what’s her secret?

“Just aim for the big middle,” Polly grins as she pours me another cup of coffee and lights a cigarette.

(Thanks Ray and Polly for putting us up in a bed and sending us off with that beautiful bag full of pomegranates!)

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