For me the most exciting time of any day of hunting comes just before daybreak. I call it "waiting for shooting light". Dawn is only a hint of pink to the east, and it takes its own sweet time in arriving.

You sit, all alone, in the deep north woods of Manitoba, Canada. The hush of dusk accumulates around your shoulders like a black fog. The sun is going. Shadows stretch and slide silently across the ground like disembodied live things, not quite corporeal.

Jack O'Connor, that legendary guns-and-hunting guru of Outdoor Life Magazine, once said of horseback hunting, "Never forget that a horse is almost as powerful as a bulldozer, with about the same amount of brains." He was right about horse power, but way out in left field about equine IQs.

A race horse going off at 100-to-1 odds is a "Long Shot." So is a natural royal flush, as are many other risky enterprises that don't fulfill their promise. And so is sending a pointed metal cylinder weighing less than half an ounce through several hundred yards of turbulent, moving air to strike a game animal's vitals.

It came as a shock to me, as I browsed a recent issue of Sports Afield Magazine ( for which I used to write occasionally ), to notice the red lechwe listed as one of the most endangered antelopes in Africa. The reason for my surprise was that on my visits to Botsawana's great Okovango delta in 1974, 1976 and 1987, the red lechwe was arguably the most abundant antelope present.

Many male friends have told me how lucky I am to have a wife who understands and enjoys hunting. Judge my "luck" for yourself.

Several comments have appeared recently in Texas outdoor publications about the ever growing numbers of wild hogs in our state. Reading between the lines, you'll notice that the writers' attitudes toward the pigs seem somewhat conflicted.

The story is told in East Texas about the notorious noodler who showed up one Saturday afternoon on the Crockett town square, very excited. "Noodling is sort of like arm-wrestling a big fish barehanded."

Birdwatchers - or "birders", as we prefer to call ourselves - come in several flavors. There are the little old ladies (LOLs), Bird Identifiers, and the "Listers."

Every hunter has his favorite game animals. The pronghorn antelope of the western prairies is not mine. He can't hold a candle to a whitetail buck for IQ, and his is one of the very few North American wild meats that I don't like.