AN HOUR BEFORE sunrise, my guide, Josh Randolph, and I settled into our 4-by-8-foot hunting blind at the mouth of Creepy Canyon. Josh told me there was a clearing in front of us, which I had to take on faith, since it was still too dark to see much more than the faint silhouettes of a few live oaks and the canyon's walls rising above them.

If, sometime over the next three hours, a boar was to make its way into the clearing, my plan was to shoot it. I'd never done any such thing before, and even after hunter's education...