In January of 1964 I received exciting news. One of my scouts in Mexico had evidence of a jaguar drinking regularly at a certain jungle waterhole. In those days my Jeep Wagoneer pretty much stayed fueled and loaded for Mexico.

The last man on Earth will have a coyote and a cockroach for company!” There’s a lot of insight to that old saying. Since Europeans first set foot on this continent, the hand of every man has been turned against the coyote. He has been shot, trapped, poisoned, hounded and persecuted in every way imaginable for centuries.

How often have I said, in bitter debates against anti-gun fanatics on radio, TV and before live audiences during the past 30 years, that “a gun is just a tool, an inanimate object like a monkey wrench, having no independent will of its own for either good or evil?”

After having begun this occasional series with the African pangolin, I’m having second thoughts: for sheer, all-around weirdness, the pangolin is a tough act to follow. Still, there are different kinds of weird, so let’s have a look at the situtunga, an African antelope of which I’m told some Hill Country game ranches have a few specimens.

Among the most interesting things about hunting in foreign lands are some of the really outlandish animals one meets. These are not necessarily game animals that a hunter is there to shoot, although some do fit that description.

Many hunters scorn exotic game animals on grounds that they’re not “sporting,” meaning, I suppose that they’re too tame to be a real challenge. It may be true of some exotics, but definitely not all.

Sooner or later, most shooters get around to trying a muzzleloading rifle. When that urge came over me, back in the ’50s, there was no such thing as a replica hunting rifle. I dug up an original caplock rifle in a hock shop in Richmond, Texas. To say it had seen better days is a serious understatement, but all the parts were there and the bore still showed signs of having been rifled at one time.

Anote in a recent magazine stated that the feral hog has become the second-most popular big-game animal in California. It struck me that he may be approaching that status in Texas, too … if not also in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia and several other Appalachian states.

Texas Parks & Wildlife magazine recently reported that black bears appear to be recolonizing the Piney Woods of East Texas. That’s interesting news because the patriarch of the Colorado County deer camp in which I grew up told us many a campfire tale of hunting bears in the Big Thicket during the 1890s.

Back in the 1930s, nine-year-old boys with imagination and a flair for the dramatic were wont to assume superhero personas (and costumes) and go about the neighborhood rescuing damsels, battling evildoers, and generally standing up for truth and justice.