Eventually, the doe moved closer to the feeder and began to eat, still obscured by brush. But as dusk approached, no other animals came out from their cover. Royce disassembled his gun as he admired the sunset. He stared out the gun slot, and we both listened to an owl cooing.
As night fell, we heard the safari pickup in the distance, and soon Katzer appeared, with Tyjewski in the back seat. "Did you [get] anything?" he asked. Royce said he hadn't. Then they headed back, talking little, as the roar of the truck's motor pierced the otherwise tranquil Texas night.
Bob and 10-year-old Sam Jenkins posing with their kill -- an Asian sika deer.
(David Deal)
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WHEN WE RETURNED TO THE LODGE, standing outside the front entrance was a slender, grandmotherly woman with a mane of tangled white-blond hair and a broad, warm smile. This was Gwen Hughes, owner of the ranch. She was wearing faded jeans, gold hoop earrings and a collared shirt with a logo of an animal caught in a bull's-eye. With her clients empty-handed, Hughes seemed worried. "Ohhh, you didn't see anything," she said. "Nothing?"
Hughes quickly pulled out her own moon/stars guide, designed by her father, a lifelong hunter. Hughes spun its series of dials, plumbing the guide to determine the best places and times to send Royce and Tyjewski out. She called over to Katzer. "Tomorrow, the south pasture -- they will go there," she said, firmly. "Tomorrow, for sure . . . Hopefully when you come back tomorrow someone will have gotten a nice big aoudad."
Hughes came late to Texotics. She was born into a Florida family that cherished hunting. "I'm from Orlando from before it was Disney World, when it was just ranches," she told me, over plates of aoudad cooked chicken-fried-steak style. Her father would "show me and my sister filing cabinets full of his calculations about game . . . He studied where the Earth was on its axis, its phases of the moon" to learn the best times for hunting.
Hughes spent a decade working as an educator and administrator in southern Virginia and raising her two sons before returning to Florida in 1994, after her father died of a heart attack. Inspired by their father's love for the outdoors, Hughes and her sister considered buying a ranch.
But by 1994, Orlando was full of theme parks, so Hughes moved to Texas, where land was cheaper. She met a caretaker of Rio Bonito, which in 1995 was in disrepair. When the caretaker was suddenly killed in a plane crash several months later, Hughes, though upset, believed it was a sign: "I was inspired, you know?" She relocated to the Hill Country, decided to obtain the Rio Bonito land. Hughes started researching exotic breeds and began building an inventory. The rarer animals, kudu bulls or dama gazelles or Afghan urial sheep, go as high as $5,000 or more each, and then cost thousands of dollars to feed over the course of their lives. Still, Hughes plunged in, and now has 16 species of game on site, including sika, fallow deer, Russian boars, ibex, Corsican sheep and aoudads. Sometimes, guests want to hunt species that she doesn't have, such as zebra or wildebeest, but Hughes could bring them in. "I could try to find zebra," she said, "but I haven't done it for them because zebra are very strong, strong-headed, and they can run right through a fence." Still, she said, "other ranches in the area do zebra -- it's economic for them, and they're able to keep them inside the fences. There is a very large interest in [hunting] zebra."
And unlike in Africa or Asia, where these animals roam wild, at the Texas Hill Country operations such as Rio Bonito, the animals have to be raised, coddled and catered to. So Hughes has built a kind of small exotic animal nursery and breeding area on site.
Though there are fences around her property, Hughes doesn't see her ranch as any different than the kind of hunting she grew up on, since the animals range across the property. "We have so much land here, that you'll see it makes it tough to hunt," she said.
The morning after Royce and Tyjewski's first hunt, Hughes was barreling around the ranch in her truck, her sleeves rolled up, exposing her ropy, long arm muscles. She had been up since almost 4:30 a.m., scouting out areas where her animals might be gathering. Though her guides are plenty experienced, Hughes has a more intrinsic knowledge of the land.
After tucking into breakfast, Hughes attended to the other half of her enterprise: the hunters' families. Since so many ranchers in Texas had the same idea of going into exotics, Hughes needed a niche. "We made it into a family ranch, a place where a guy and his wife could come on a hunt, or a mother-daughter team," she said. "Nothing brings a family together better than being outdoors and taking animals." In the dining hall, Hughes proudly pointed out photos of girls posing alongside heads of animals -- an 11-year-old who'd shot a chocolate fallow; a teenager dressed in camouflage, holding a high-powered rifle and standing next to an oryx.
In the late afternoon, when the hunters started to wander toward the dining hall, the staff pushed axis deer meat that some of the wives had helped cook earlier in the day onto plates alongside potatoes and Southern greens. Hughes sat down next to one of her sons, who works as a guide, and the guests settled in for the feast. Heads went down, a moment of silence, and the eating commenced. A father-and-son team of hunters from Arkansas, who'd never been to Africa, talked about the sika they'd taken down the previous evening. "I didn't know what it was -- I never saw anything like it before," said the son, a twenty-something with short, bristly hair. But he had bagged it, and now he had a story to take home.
Deep in the Hill Country, at a village named Harper, half an hour from the Rio Bonito ranch, hundreds of locals in jeans and camouflage passed through the gate and into Raz Livestock's monthly auction, one of many exotics sales in Texas. Before the auction started, potential bidders inspected the animals. Squeezing along a narrow catwalk slung above the animals, inside a massive shed, ranchers stared down into the pens of menageries from around the world -- wildebeests and water buffaloes slowly turning in circles, emus flapping their wings, packs of zebras butting their heads into pen walls, wild Siberian boars rooting around on the ground. Potential bidders had to register at an office outside; near the registry, local taxidermists advertised their services.
Staring down into a zebra pen, I bumped into Charly Seale, executive director of the Exotic Wildlife Association, and his wife, Carolyn, a former model who now runs hair salons. "The exotic meats are so much better for you -- they're lower in cholesterol than store-bought meat," she said. "If more people ate exotic meats, cancer rates would definitely go down."
After selling traditional Texas cattle, the auctioneer began screaming out bids on the exotics. One by one, animal handlers brought the animals into a semi-circular enclosure covered in metal bars, surrounded by a tin-roofed amphitheater adorned with desiccated animal skulls, where more than 150 bidders were packed in on folding chairs and bleachers. Occasionally, one of the sellers would poke a cane through the wire at an overly placid animal of his, trying to spark it to life so it would get higher bids.
Sitting in a booth directly above the enclosure, the auctioneer hollered as handlers dragged out a young kudu with thin horns. The price climbed quickly. Finally, the kudu bull went for nearly $2,000. The animal handlers grabbed the kudu by the horns, pushed it back toward the pens and brought out the next kudu. "It's a long afternoon," said one man in the crowd. "Let's go get a burger."
On their last afternoon at Rio Bonito, Royce and Tyjewski were the only hunters left, and they hadn't taken a shot, so Hughes decided to let them stalk. Stalking is a difficult proposition because the animals can hear nearly all movement around them, and because it requires considerable physical exertion. Still, Royce welcomed the new approach. "Nothing is like stalking," he said. "I'll crawl on my belly, inch by inch, for three hours, to go a few hundred feet and get close to the animal. All my muscles tense, and my senses are so aware."
Dressed in camouflage, their guns ready, the two hunters and Katzer moved slowly through a patch of partly open scrub, almost tiptoeing to the cover of small oak trees, where they could hide themselves. Underneath the trees, Texas dall sheep, sika bucks, African axis deer and Corsican sheep were gathering. The men moved closer, darting from tree to tree. Finally, they got close enough to see the animals clearly. But no one took a shot. "None of them really interested me -- they're just medium-sized," Royce said later, of the animals with smaller horns, which wouldn't be very impressive mounted.
Night began to fall. Just before dark, Royce glimpsed the markings of a large sika buck, but he couldn't see the animal's entire torso. He waited. It got darker. He waited some more. There was still no clear view of the buck's torso. The sky turned nearly black. "He wasn't presenting himself in a way I could take a clean shot," Royce said. One final time, he packed up his gun.
Tyjewski, though, held out some hope. He returned to a tree blind and waited again. Two and a half hours later, a large dall sheep, with a full curl of horns, came into plain view, the first large animal he'd gotten a clear look at. He quickly raised his gun and fired. The bullet smacked into the animal, and it turned, confused, toward Tyjewski and began to move toward the tree blind. He fired again. "The second shot just finished the animal," Tyjewski said. The dall fell to the ground, and a guide skinned it for him. Tyjewski then handed it over to a local taxidermist to mount the head for him. He is expecting the head to arrive sometime in the summer.
Joshua Kurlantzick is foreign editor of the New Republic.
