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Once upon a time big-game hunting meant going into wild places, where you not only sought game but also explored new country and tested your own resourcefulness. You forsook the comforts of home to renew your ties to the land. Hunting meant camping. You ate only what you could carry or catch or kill. You shared the experience with a partner or a guide, or you went alone. Hunting appealed to adventurous young men enamored of rifles.

These days, many people who call themselves hunters do not fit the traditional mold. In some ways, that's good. Women have joined our ranks--a blessing for those of us who've tired of tales of male prowess around the campfire, and welcomed by anyone concerned with hunting's political fortunes. Big-game hunters need not schedule month-long pack trips beyond railhead to hunt in Canada, or book long weeks in steerage on a steamer bound for Mombassa.

Given the patience and forbearance to endure TSA lines at airports, they're just hours from meeting their outfitter--who whisks them off in an air-conditioned four-door pickup. Camp is often a lodge, food as fresh and varied as any at a four-star restaurant. Hunters eat at tables, not from charred cans or tin plates on their laps. Rather than exploring, they travel well-trafficked routes to blinds and hillsides from which they'll see animals already scouted, commonly video-taped, often field-scored and sometimes fed for the occasion.

In remote mountain country, hunters must still warm a saddle to reach camp, or, if they're able, walk. Accommodations may still include white canvas. These camps appeal to me.

Now, lest you misunderstand, I appreciate soft living as much as the next guy. A warm tent and a hot shower--even one from a bladder bag under canvas--keep me in good humor. So too does food that didn't begin life freeze-dried or canned. But hunting in wilderness, where the country is big enough to challenge me physically and to hold surprises, has special allure. I'll relinquish some comforts to go there, because in my experience wilderness memories last the longest. You don't have to kill something to find satisfaction in a hunting trip to wild places. The journey is enough.

You might argue that no place is truly wild anymore, that every horizon has been breached. You'd be right. But some places are wild enough to test your body and your resolve. Distances there can wear you down; terrain there can be tough enough to stop you; weather there can turn your hunt into an exercise in survival. Even if you come prepared for wild country--mentally, physically, and equipped with the most efficient modern gear--you must often concede the outcome of a hunt there to factors beyond your control.

Big-game hunts with guaranteed results qualify as sport in the same way television wrestling does. Wilderness denies you the inevitability of a kill, and promises nothing.