The Night Strip

Below the Hunt Index sits the night strip — one row covering 5 p.m. to 6 a.m., every hour of a full night scored in its own cell.

Brightness, not numbers

Each hour renders as one of four brightness levels — one ink on dark. A dim cell is a slow hour; a fully lit cell is a peak hour. There's no numbered curve and no hue ramp — just the one ink, four steps of it. That's deliberate: the engine has real resolution hour to hour, but not so much that a precise number would mean anything.

The hour speaks as a word

Under the strip, the current or leading hour prints its state in plain language:

1. Peak — the best hours on the strip tonight.
2. Building — activity is picking up.
3. Slow — the quiet stretch.

That's the entire vocabulary. No "moderate-high" or "62% likely" — just one of three words, matched to the brightness you're already looking at.

The NOW tick

A small marker sits under the strip showing where you are in the night right now. As the clock moves, the tick moves with it — but the hours themselves don't change shape. A night graded at 78 at 9 p.m. is still a 78 at 11 p.m.; only the tick moves, never the grade. That's on purpose — a night's worth is scored once, over the whole night, not recalculated as the clock runs.

The howl window

A small speaker mark under the strip, and a HOWL line on the night card, show the howl forecast — when coyotes are likely to be talking tonight, not when they're likely to answer a call. It's a different question from callability, but it does touch the strip: an hour that is both talking time and moon-down gets a real lift, usually enough to make it one of the brightest on the strip.

What it does not show

The strip never shows a raw number on the glance view — no 0–100 curve, no percent per hour. That level of detail lives one tap away, in the hour detail sheet, for anyone who wants it. The glance surface stays to brightness and a word.