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.

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.