The predator: even when he wasn't bagging banks, Hugh McColl was hunting.

• Author: Bryant, Tom

The painting hangs behind the desk in his office on the 51st floor of the 60-story Bank of America Corporate Center in Charlotte. It shows three cowboys, guns blazing, frantically mounting their horses on a dusty street in a town in the Old West. The sign over the door to the clapboard building immediately behind them reads: First Republic Bank. "I had that painting commissioned," Hugh McColl says. "We titled it Take the Money and Run."

It has been called the deal of the century. When what was then NCNB Corp., with McColl as chairman, got approval from the feds to buy bankrupt Dallas-based First RepublicBank Corp. in 1988, it doubled in size. But McColl and his boys didn't run. It was just one of the dozens of takeovers he would lead, culminating in the 1998 merger with San Francisco-based Bank of America, which created the nation's second-largest bank. That time, they took not only the money but the name.

Since retiring in 2001, McColl has started more businesses. "I turned 70 years old in June, and I plan on doing more of what I really love, and that's hunting and fishing," he says as I get my notes ready for the interview. "As a matter of fact, if I didn't have so many irons in the fire, I would move to my ranch tomorrow."

I was really up for this visit. McColl and I have a lot in common, if you take away his millions. We are about the same age, and we grew up in small South Carolina towns about 50 miles apart. Our relatives on the family farm taught us how to hunt and fish, and we learned how to enjoy the outdoors at a young age. He played football and baseball in high school, just as I did, and he was in the Marine Corps, just as I was. There the similarity stops. In the Marines, he was an officer, giving orders to people like me, an enlisted man. As his accomplishments since have shown, he's very good at it.

His spread, which he leases, is on the famous King Ranch--825,000 acres of south Texas that a former steamboat captain began acquiring in 1853. Bigger than the state of Rhode Island, its four parcels cover more than 1,300 square miles and sprawl some 60 miles north to south. You can't help but think Captain Richard King and one of the most acquisitive men in North Carolina business history would have gotten along well. McColl calls his place there Cielode Cazadores de Cordoniz: Quail Hunters' Heaven.

His first love, he says, is quail hunting. When I ask him about his early days hunting on the family farm in Bennettsville, S.C...