Several comments have appeared recently in Texas outdoor publications about the ever growing numbers of wild hogs in our state. Reading between the lines, you'll notice that the writers' attitudes toward the pigs seem somewhat conflicted.

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.

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.

There’s no doubt that the second-ranked big game animal in Texas is the wild hog ... sometimes glamorized as “wild boar” or “Russian boar.”

We in West Kerr County undoubtedly enjoy the presence of the largest herd of free-ranging axis deer in North America – and maybe in the new world. They are not an unmixed blessing, however. Yes, they’re magnificent beasts, beautiful to the eye, and, yes, they provide perhaps the finest wild meat on this continent, but there is a downside.

Let’s begin at the beginning. My name is John Wootters and I’ll be the author of this outdoors column for as long as it suits Publisher Clint Schroeder. I’m a native Texan, now living on Johnson Creek outside Ingram. Some of you may have heard of me.

Between 1979 and 2001, I did my whitetail hunting on acreage I owned in Webb County. For 20 Years before that, I leased hunting rights like most other Texas deer hunters. I sold the property in 2000 and suddenly found myself without a place to hunt. This didn't trouble me for the first season, and my wife and I got nice invitations from ranch-owning friends, so we didn't go without venison.

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.