Last July I devoted this column to a family of baby raccoons my wife and I befiiended at our home on Johnson Creek. I took pity on the four little guys and their gaunt mother, starving in the worst of the drought, and allowed them to share a little of the food put out for our cats.

Many hunters who snipe their deer from elevated stands seem to believe that elevation alone makes worrying about wind superfluous. (Those who don’t know enough to worry about wind direction and force anywhere, anytime, may stop reading right here, because what follows will probably only confuse them.)

The campfire is the heart of any hunting camp … and a camp isn’t a camp without one. Folks who hunt out of luxurious air-conditioned lodges or, worse yet, motels, are only to be pitied. The fire is common ground where all gather to share and comment on the day’s observations and adventures.

Watch small whitetail twin fawns at play and you’ll likely observe that one is not only slightly larger but that he (it will invariably be a “he”) is also bolder and more alert, more aggressive in nursing and quicker to sample unknown foods. He’ll seem spookier and more curious, and will venture farther from his mother’s side.

Since trophy hunters seem to be in low esteem among uninformed non-hunters, I cannot so identify myself without a word of explanation. First, true trophy-deer hunters are highly selective, discriminating and skilled hunters who kill very seldom and who help keep the age and sex ratios in a whitetail population as much like an unhunted herd as possible.

As this hunting season unfolds, hunters with a little imagination can amuse themselves on slow days by mentally cataloging the variety of antler shapes, sizes and variations of whitetail bucks.

Elephants are so familiar – as symbols, in cartoons, comics, advertisements, etc. – that they may seem unsuitable subjects for this series. But when you first find yourself in the presence of live wild elephants with nothing between you and these monsters but clear African air, I guarantee you’ll be shocked by their otherworldly-ness.

Few speakers of American English realize how many of our expressions can be traced back to firearms or their use. When we say a politician was a “flash in the pan,” for example, most of us have no idea of what a flash in the pan really is.

The odds are that your hunting rifle is not perfectly sighted-in, no matter what you remember from the most recent firing. Rifles can change, for many possible reasons.

Last week, we left the author perched in an ebano tree overlooking a waterhole in tropical Mexico on the first of 10 consecutive nights, listening to the night noises of the jungle and straining to hear a jaguar drinking.