Anticipating a buck's moves, then altering your methods to confuse him can put venison in the freezer. All it takes is a little imagination and the ability to... "Think like a deer!"

Preaching, owning a cat, joining a nudist colony, and teaching your wife to shoot are all activities requiring a durable and deep-bottomed ego. I don't know much about the first three, but I am a brass-bound, pluperfect expert at the last-mentioned!

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.

Gun experts, big-game hunters, writers, and others have theorized on killing or stopping power for over 100 years - and the debate still goes on. But the experts don't know any more about stopping power than you do. If your present rifle works for you, on your game, in your hunting conditions, stick with it.

Recoil is not something for which every human being has some inborn, specific tolerance limits. It is something that every shooter must live with, and which can be dealt with and adjusted to by virtually anyone.