By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

NY Times

The campaign of Gov. Rick Perry of Texas found itself on the defensive on Sunday over a report that he had hunted at and taken guests to a West Texas camp with a racially charged name that his father, and later Mr. Perry, had leased.

The Washington Post reported on Sunday that at least seven people it interviewed said the name for a portion of the property, Niggerhead, was visible on the rock at the entrance “at different points in the 1980s and 1990s,” and that a former worker said he believed he had seen it as recently as three years ago.

The hunting camp is near the small town where Mr. Perry grew up. The Perry campaign did not dispute that the racial slur was used as a name for the property. But it issued a statement saying that the name was changed soon after Mr. Perry’s father, Ray, joined a lease that gave him hunting rights there almost 30 years ago.

The revelation was one more challenge confronting the Perry campaign just as it was left reeling from his comments during a recent debate in support of granting the children of some illegal immigrants in-state tuition at Texas state universities, remarks that he later retreated from.

Some recent polls have suggested a softening of support among Mr. Perry’s conservative base as he has faced more scrutiny of his record and the rest of the Republican field has been more aggressively turning its fire on him.

The latest flare-up also injected the issue of race into the Republican nominating fight, with one of Mr. Perry’s opponents, Herman Cain, seizing on the issue Sunday, saying there “isn’t a more vile, negative word than the N-word.”

“For him to leave it there as long as he did, until before, I hear, they finally painted over it, is just plain insensitive to a lot of black people in this country,” Mr. Cain, who is black, said on “Fox News Sunday.”

David Axelrod, the chief strategist for the re-election campaign of President Obama, declined to comment on the specifics of the Texas matter. But he said it was an example of the challenges that candidates like Mr. Perry face.

“Campaigns are like an MRI for the soul — whoever you are, eventually people find out,” Mr. Axelrod said in an interview Sunday night. “Time will tell whether this comes to reflect him or not.”

Mr. Perry’s name was on the lease for the property from 1997 to 2007. The statement issued by his campaign spokesman, Ray Sullivan, said, “Perry’s father painted over offensive language on a rock soon after leasing the 1,000-acre parcel in the early 1980s.”

Mr. Sullivan added that neither the governor nor his family ever “owned, controlled or managed” the property, which he said was owned by a Texas charity called the Hendrick Home for Children. A Hendrick employee said on Sunday that she was not aware of the name and referred questions to her boss, who did not respond to a phone call seeking comment.

In an interview with The New York Times on Sunday, Wallar Overton, the son of Mr. Perry’s scoutmaster in his home county of Haskell, said the hunting camp had always been known by that name.

“It’s just what it was called from Day One,” Mr. Overton said. “I personally am not offended by the name, and I don’t like the word.”

“That’s just what people call it,” he said.

There seemed no dispute that the hunting pasture was once known by a racial epithet — as a number of topographical sites had once been, both in Texas and in other places — nor was there dispute that the epithet had been painted onto a rock on the property.

But for Mr. Perry, 61, the crucial issues for his candidacy will most likely be how he reacted to seeing the slur and the timing of its removal from the rock.

After Mr. Cain criticized the Texas governor, the Perry campaign issued another statement citing the governor’s “long and strong record of inclusiveness and appointing African-Americans to key state posts,” including the chief justice.

A close friend and ally of Mr. Perry, Cliff Johnson, who roomed with him in Austin when they were both state representatives, said that from the late 1980s to about a half-dozen years ago, he had gone hunting with Mr. Perry or others on pastureland covered by the hunting lease, though he said he could not be sure it was the same parcel that was the subject of the Post article.

Mr. Johnson, a senior adviser to Mr. Perry early in his term as governor, said he never had seen a rock with any racial slur on it, and that he had never heard Mr. Perry or any other member of the hunting parties refer to the land parcel that way or use racial epithets in conversation.

“I’ve hunted out there a couple of times, but I never saw the rock, and I never heard of the rock,” Mr. Johnson said. “It never entered our conversations.“

Fred McClure, a longtime friend of Mr. Perry, who called a reporter at the suggestion of a campaign official, said he once took an overnight trip to the camp in the late 1970s or early 1980s. He said he never saw any reference to any racial epithet on the property, though because he flew to the site with Mr. Perry he never saw the entrance, where the rock was said to be located.

Any suggestion that Mr. Perry is racist, added Mr. McClure, who is black, “is not only untrue but also extremely unfair.”

Mr. Sullivan, the Perry spokesman, also disputed “the implication that Rick Perry brought groups to the lease when the word on the rock was still visible.”

The Post, however, quoted Ronnie Brooks, a retired game warden, as saying the name was still on the rock when Mr. Perry began taking lawmakers to the camp, though he said the rock was later turned over.

“One year there’d be four or five” hunts hosted by Mr. Perry, Mr. Brooks told The Post. “The next might be 8 or 10, something like that. They’d cook, fish, might kill a wild hog and eat it. They’d just go there to relax and enjoy themselves. He was a very gracious host and, in my opinion, well thought of.”

Referring to the name on the rock, Mr. Brooks added, “I remember the first time I went through that pasture and saw that.”

“It kind of offended me, truthfully,” he said.

Related at The NY Times

• The Caucus: Texas Hunting Camp's Name Causes Trouble for Perry (October 2, 2011)

• The Caucus: Perry Open to Military Intervention in Mexico's Drug War (October 1, 2011)

• FiveThirtyEight: The Case for Buying Low on Perry