Its not hard to fox hunt on 27 MHz if you want to.
A local group of radio enthusiasts run two versions of fox-hunts on CB: the first has the fox giving out clues every 5 or 10 minutes as to his location, and so combines technical skills with trivia like knowledge. This is great for those participants that don't have or like to use technical means to find the fox.
The second fox hunt run we do is a pure fox hunt where someone takes a handheld CB and hides somewhere, no clues given, and its up to the hunters radio finding skills alone to catch the fox. We frequently find participants with no directional finding equipment at all manage to find the fox first... I guess they're going purely on signal strength alone, and then when in the general vicinity they'll visially search out the fox. So hunting a radio-fox with verticals alone can and does work!
We've had foxes hide inside a local McDonalds or grocery store, inside a rubbish bin, next to a sewerage plant (peeeuw!) and all sorts of inventive places. Techniques used by hunters are just as inventive: using hills, road cuttings, buildings etc as an indication of signal direction (ie if you're in front of the hill / building the signal doesn't drop, but behind it does etc), when getting stronger signals swapping to progressively smaller antennae, and finally using no antenna at all to really zero in on the source.
Quite small (about a foot across) loop designs exist for 10/11 metres that are quite directional. They shouldn't be hard to find. If you find one for 10 metres ham band, it'd be quite easy to adapt for 27 MHz - in fact the one and same loop would probably do it just fine.