Be warned: This is not just a fond reminiscence about a long-ago hunt. It's a tale of success and failure. It began badly and ended badly. But, in between, oh, in between there was one unforgettable, shining moment when I steadied crosshairs on the shoulder of a splendid Stone ram and caressed the trigger.

We live in the very heart of Texas' exotic-game country. More free-ranging foreign beasts are frolicking around in Kerr County than anywhere else in Texas.

Some pretty unforgettable sounds have fallen on these old gunfire-deafened ears of mine, but a shriek that shattered the evening hush at our Sandy Creek hunting camp 45 years ago still rings in them even now! Never, before or since, have I heard anything like it. With no warning, it welled up out of the silent woods and froze me in my tracks.

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?

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.