This is all part of changing an avocation to a vocation. It goes with the territory. Sometimes you can't make it happen, no matter how hard you try. This, too, varies considerably with the subject. Africa, for instance, is great. So what if I don't get my leopard? At least there'll be a story about a kudu or a three-toed gazork. Combo hunts are pretty good. I've done four moose/caribou/black bear hunts in Newfoundland. Never got a bear there, and it was the fourth try before I got a moose...but at least I always had a caribou to write about.

Single-species hunts are the riskiest. If you really want a deadline-busting failure rate, stick with an American outdoor writer's bread and butter: Whitetails and turkeys. I've just come off three back-to-back whitetail hunts in three good areas. No shots fired, no stories. Hell, I wasn't looking for a monster. I was willing to compromise every single day. But terms must be acceptable. I saw lots of nice-looking bucks, but I never saw a single buck old enough to meet the ground rules where I was hunting. At this writing, the season isn't quite over and I've got one more chance.

With our publication lag time, even though my (so far) forgettable whitetail season isn't over, we're now heading into turkey season. Another nemesis. This is complicated by the fact that, while I'm a pretty good deer hunter, I'm a rotten turkey hunter. That said, last season started out pretty good. I shot a really nice Osceola gobbler. This takes my average down to about fourteen hunting days each for the two Osceola gobblers I've taken--and Florida is an awful long way from home.

Then I went to Mississippi, a great turkey state, and we had a great place to hunt. My old friend Bill Bynum put it together. He's a great turkey hunter, but even if he wasn't, we had Mississippi's own Preston Pittman of Pittman Game Calls on hand. The deck was stacked. Except we were hunting Eastern wild turkeys, which get my vote for the second most difficult game on Earth after whitetails east of the Mississippi.

It took us a day or so to locate some birds, and then we had a couple of big gobblers in good positions, right where we wanted them. Right. Then came a bell ringer of a thunderstorm--all night, all day. During a brief respite I had a jake attacking my decoy, and you bet I'd have compromised except jakes aren't legal in Mississippi. So the hunt ended in a drizzly dusk, some birds taken, but not by me.

The following morning dawned cool and clear. We were on the way to the Memphis airport when my cell phone rang.

"Your gobbler sure is a good 'un," drawled Bynum. "Came to me straight off the roost."

Sometimes you just run out of time. The least he could have done was freeze it and send it to me so I could dress up in camouflage and pose with it. He didn't even offer.