A frozen sun-disc inched its way upward to clear the rim of a mesa across the canyon, its rays spangling every leaf and twig and blade of grass with frost-fire. In the basin below my perch, I checked several trails through my binoculars, noting that not many deer had used them during the night.

Reprinted for Houston Safari Club Hunter's Horn; March 2020 - The Alaskan Arctic is a harsh and unforgiving land, demanding a very high price of those who would take her magnificent big-game animals in fair chase.

You have to understand at the outset that I am not a real bass fisherman. You can tell just by looking at me and my gear. I don't own a polyester jumpsuit with a patch on the breast pocket, I don't own a bass boat (except for an inflatable, named "Riff-Raft") with more electronics than a Russian trawler. I do not possess a graphite rod with anything written on the shaft, nor a freshwater reel with line heavier than 6-pound-test.

Reprinted for Houston Safari Club Hunter's Horn; Spring 2021 - Leopard maulings of sport hunters have never been particularly uncommon, but fatalities from them have never been as numerous as from the other members of the Big Five.

My wife says I'm a little paranoid about blue quail, but that's ridiculous. If it were true, I would suspect that blue quail conspire against my dignity and my sanity, but I harbor no such suspicion. On the contrary, I know positively that I am the intended victim of a blue quail conspiracy! What's so paranoid about that?

He was born on a mellow day in late May, a fragile, five-pound, 12-ounce bundle of ears, gangly legs, and cinnamon-red fur dappled with white. Even at birth, the little buck was exceptional. His mother had carried him and his twin sister 213 days, a week longer than the normal gestation for whitetail deer, and he weighed about half a pound more than the average whitetail buck fawn.

"I just can't understand how I could have missed that buck five straight times!" said the man we shall call Frank ( mainly because that isn't his name ). The rest of us around the campfire glanced at each other in puzzlement.

Preaching, owning a cat, joining a nudist colony, and teaching your wife to shoot are all activities requiring a durable and deep-bottomed ego. I don't know much about the first three, but I am a brass-bound, pluperfect expert at the last-mentioned!

In order to secure these revealing recoil studies, flashlight bulbs were taped to the muzzles of the guns and, for the rifles, to the scopes and the temple of the author's shooting glasses. The strobelight exposure was made a split-second prior to firing, and the traces made on the film by the bulbs records the movement of gun and shooter while the camera's shutter is open.

It was a December night, the kind that hunters know better than those who pass the winter inside a house, when the cold plucks and probes at every seam in a man's clothing. The five of us around the dying fire sat hushed, listening, wrapped in the splendor of the night sky. All our minds ran to the same theme: somewhere out there in the dark thickets there a great whitetail buck with Orion's light on his antler tips.