Benjamin, Texas - Wyman Meinzer once read an account by an Indian about what it was like to be shot at with a buffalo gun. The Indian said the sound of the bullet passing was like the sound of a hummingbird. Mr. Meinzer then persuaded a friend to fire a Sharps .50-caliber rifle at him while he lay behind a hummock, so he could hear the bullet's hum as it whizzed over his head.

"Another time, Wyman was reading about 19th-century dentistry in Texas," says Andy Sansom, a friend. "He got a local dentist to fill his tooth using the techniques that he had read about. It was horrible! Hearing him tell about it, you say, "Oh, my God!' But he just wanted to know what it would have been like to live back then."

Mr. Meinzer , who by living much of his life in the wild has become the most authoritative photographer of Texas wildlife and the rougher regions of the state's landscape, knows he was born into the wrong century. He acknowledges that he's only awkwardly at home in the 20th, and seriously out of synch with the upcoming 21st. But that doesn't bother him at all.

He finds his bliss far from the madding crowd, hunkering in the mesquite to capture on film the private moments of coyotes and roadrunners, and chasing tornadoes across the badlands in a pickup truck, and rearing his sons in the tiny town where he grew up, within sight of the middle of nowhere, and communing with ghosts of old-time Texas.

"Ever since I was a small child," he says, "I've had a fascination with the Native Americans, the people who were here long before us. And the people who were here before them. The Clovis people. The Folsom people. They were not pampered folks. Only the strongest survived. If you lived to be 30, you were a tough son of a gun.

"The white people who came to this part of Texas in the 1850s and '60s were a breed different from us, too. The buffalo hunters, the soldiers, the early ranchers, the cowboys. Some of them were good people and some were bad people, but they all were very strong-willed and very healthy people. And they were wise to the ways of the wilderness. It's a wisdom that we've lost."

In 1979, David Baxter, then editor of Texas Parks and Wildlife magazine, published the first Wyman Meinzer nature photographs. They were of coyotes. Since then, Mr. Meinzer 's pictures have appeared in more than 60 state, national and foreign magazines and in nine books. Nearly all his work celebrates the unforgivi/ng beauty of the Texas landscape, and the often violent power of its weather, and the savage grace of its animals.

Many of his images, like the photographer who shot them, seem throwbacks to a place and time before cities and electronics and noise, when Texas was almost empty of people, when the prehistoric Clovis and Folsom people tracked woolly mammoths across the Rolling Plains, and the later Comanche and Kiowa followed the buffalo. "My sense of Wyman is that he's kind of a reincarnation of a buffalo hunter," says Mr. Baxter. "He knows too much about that country, too much about its wildlife and its history, to have learned it in one lifetime."