In 1953 I was in the Army, assigned to the Eighth Army Headquarters Public Information Office in Yongsan, Korea, a suburb of the ruined capitol city of Seoul. My job got me out and about the Korean countryside quite a bit, and, being the hunter I am, I couldn’t help noticing the hordes of ringneck pheasants infesting the rice paddies.

It's funny how an odor, a sound, or the ghost of a flavor can instantly transport one back to some earlier, fondly-remembered time. A few bars of some popular song from your highschool days can suddenly bring rushing back all the emotions, hopes, and sensations of your dating days.

He was born in 1875 in Houston County, Texas, the son of a circuit-riding Methodist preacher. He was named Robert Joseph Spence, but everybody except family called him “Mister Bob.” Sometime during the first World War, he was elected sheriff of Houston County, an office he held into the socalled Roaring Twenties.

We have no idea where she came from or how she found us, but a wild turkey hen simply walked into the yard of our ranch house in the brushlands of Webb County one day and adopted us. I named this bird “Mahonia.” I don’t recall why; that’s the scientific name of a prickly shrub common here in the Hill Country called “agarita.”

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.