I learned from the book Transmitter Hunting. It's a little dated but still in print so I suspect nothing better is out there.
My recommendation is to make friends with a regular hunter. Offer to drive or navigate or whatever s/he would value and ask questions.
It helps to understand navigation. In the modern world, I expect that there are favored apps on tablets. I started with paper maps on a lap drafting board with parallel rules, protractor, and triangles. I used 3mm 4H lead to draw lines to make erasing easier. I'm sure those days are gone. Today, without guidance to the contrary, I'd use what I know: OpenCPN and Google Maps.
I think fox hunting is great fun and enjoyed it when I lived near an active club.
Here https://www.amazon.com/Transmitter-Hunting-Direction-Finding-Simplified/dp/0830627014 is the text I learned transmitter hunting from.
The RF side of things gets you close but getting right on top of the beacon (reach out ant touch it close) is time consuming and you don't really know how close you are until you can see the beacon aka "fox." How close is close enough?
The relatively low frequency 457 kHz of an avalanche beacon is appropriate to reduce attenuation from covering snow, but it also increases wavelength (656 meters) which increases error in the near field. This is where transmitter hunters use switched attenuators and hunt on signal strength.
If your application is conventional avalanche rescue I'd consider conventional HF/MF/LF direction finding arrays at a distance to reduce the search area and do some Monte Carlo simulations to see if high tech DFing is worth the effort or a "drunk sailor" random walk driven by signal strength is faster.
Regardless you'll have to build your gear very RF tight so leakage doesn't disrupt the DFing, particularly in the near field.
The radio is fine. What antenna? A rubber duck and body shielding will rapidly drive you mad. Yagi? Pseudo doppler?
See https://www.amazon.com/Transmitter-Hunting-Direction-Finding-Simplified/dp/0830627014/
There are a number of things you can do.
Bounce the signal off of hills is a good start.
If you have terrain like that, hide the fox behind terrain and use a directional antenna to point it at something like another hill to the north or maybe power lines/towers so that at the start what the hunters "see" is the reflection, not the direct signal. You might want to use a topo map for that.
Site the fox near an electrically noisy area. Electric fences and high tension power lines are great for that.
I read of one guy who used a very long, thin wire for the antenna, made it very hard during the "sniffer" phase of the hunt to track down the actual fox.
Also, if you want more ideas, I recommend this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Transmitter-Hunting-Direction-Finding-Simplified/dp/0830627014
One other tip: *DO NOT* put your fox into a capped piece of PVC pipe with the antenna sticking out. A friend of mine did that, and when I saw it, I said "You know, that looks just like a pipe bomb". Didn't even occur to him that someone in the park where he was going to place it might think it's a bomb. So he painted it yellow and put a label on it stating it's a harmless radio transmitter and giving his name, callsign, address, and phone number.