Say all you want about satisfaction afield, but day after day of staring at empty terrain just isn't fulfilling. So we dream of trails worn deep by herds of big game, coverts packed with upland birds and skies clouded with waterfowl.

Guns and ammo manufacturers decades ago had it right. Their boxes and posters placed hunter and game in the same frame, feeding our dreams of adventure and abundance. We're still chasing those dreams today.

Fortunately, through proper management, species like whitetail deer, turkey, and to a lesser extent, elk, have more than lived up to our imaginings.

The American hunter sees his pursuit not only as a right, but an entitlement. To stride across a free land and pursue truly wild game unimpeded by the constraints of boundaries is ordained; it is our heritage, and has much to do with the way we view ourselves as a people. This is the source of our great tradition of American public lands; places where anyone with a hunting license can venture unencumbered.

Yet our view of ourselves may be slightly skewed. The privatization of hunting continues to grow in this country. According to a 2001 survey of hunting and fishing, well more than half of all U.S. hunters, 57-percent, hunt private land exclusively.

I've written in the past in this column about the privatization of hunting, calling that practice a European tradition, and certainly not our own. But it may be time to let go of that assertion, because gradually, more and more American hunters see control of private lands as the only means of preserving their own quality of hunting, and perhaps rightfully so.

So hunters buy land, or lease it, plant food plots to grow and hold animals and post it to keep other hunters out. This has long been a Texas tradition, not one you would have attributed to the other parts of the country 20 years ago. Times have changed. Private hunting land is becoming the rule, rather than the exception, even in parts of the wide-open West.

The land rush owes itself to many factors. Some cite guides and outfitters for locking up land. Examples of that can certainly be seen where parcel after parcel of land in a single county turns up posted where no signs stood before, or vast ranches are leased-up in the West. Groups of hunters, friends and relatives, disgruntled with competition for hunting spots, often buy or lease acreage, posting the land for an entire season so that their group can access the spot on deer opener. Meanwhile, archery hunters and bird hunters are kept out for the remainder of the long fall.

Some hunters (and non-hunters) don't trust the whims of state game managers, preferring to manage property and the game on it themselves, setting their own rules for maintaining a healthy herd and/or trophy quality.

Africa, for all its deserved glory as a hunting destination, has its own high-fenced, privatized tradition. Even on huge 30,000-acre tracts, it's the only way to keep game from migrating out, or falling into the hands of poachers.

Privatization in the U.S. doesn't just encompass big game lands, it includes waterfowl and upland areas too. From Michigan to Mississippi, the Dakotas to Hawaii, the shift to privatization of hunting lands continues to grow. America, unlike Europe, will always have vast public lands where a hunter can trod freely, but the pendulum has swung. This may be the Land Of The Free, but heed this: "No Trespassing."