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.

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?

"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.

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.

I hunt hard, goes the refrain, and I'm a good hunter. I see plenty of deer. I get my share. But somehow I never find a really big one. Just one real trophy is all I ask; we like the venison, but how I'd like to hang just one honest-to-gosh monster on the wall! But I just can't seem to get lucky.

Reprinted for Houston Safari Club Hunter's Horn; Summer 2021 - Know how it feels to be the target of automatic weapons fire in infantry combat. I have seen the eyes of a drunken man, armed with a machete, bent on taking my life. I’ve looked a wounded Cape buffalo bull in the teeth at just 15 yards

I know how it feels to be the target of automatic weapons fire in infantry combat. I have seen the eyes of a drunken man, armed with a machete, bent on taking my life. I've looked wounded Cape buffalo bull in the teeth at just 15 yards. I've endured the stunning silence after a light airplane's one engine quit without warning. I once had the reserve air valve of a scuba tank jam and leave me literally breathless 85 feet below the surface of the Caribbean. Altogether, I can recall a lot of times when the seconds seemed to drag by like a convict's weeks... but _the _longest ten minutes I've ever lived through were in a blind in an African dusk, listening to a leopard feeding just 45 steps away!