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Ron Wilson

My daughter travels a lot, mostly for work. Alabama, California, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Ohio, Oregon, Texas … I know I missed a few stops.

Spending as much time as she does en route to somewhere, there are the usual hiccups with the airlines, rental car folks and so on.

Yesterday, she hit me with this dispatch on my phone as she was trying mostly unsuccessfully to get home, back to Denver, from Seattle. I knew it was coming and was hoping to dodge the topic for at least a few days.

“My flight got canceled. Had to buy a ticket on another airline for tomorrow morning at 5 a.m. And I just saw that I didn’t draw a deer tag. Great day.”

I wanted to tell her that not drawing a doe tag wasn’t a surprise, considering she is a nonresident and was vying, per state law, for just 1% of the tags. I wanted to add that we got here because deer were hit hard by the unrelenting winter and tags were reduced statewide by nearly 11,000 and the unit we hunt was arguably the hardest hit. I wanted to say that the Department issued just 53,400 deer tags this year, the lowest since 2016, yet more than 75,000 hunters applied for those tags.

Instead, because I don’t like to text and I’d see her over the Fourth of July weekend, I replied: “I know it sucks. Your brother didn’t draw either.”

To people who don’t deer hunt, or even some who do, they don’t understand the worth in drawing a deer license. While figuring out where deer are moving, playing the wind, getting up well before first light to get into position because you think you’ve got it wired, pulling the trigger, skinning animals hung upside down and cutting up and vacuum packing the fallout in a warmish garage out of the wind are significant, there’s more to it than that.

I would bet that the kids and I talk about deer season, the one that awaits or seasons that are simply memories, every month because it’s important to us. It sustains us just a bit. The chatter certainly increases as we inch into fall as there are weighty topics to discuss, notably the deer camp menu and whose turn it is to sleep on the camp’s hide-a-way bed.

These conversations certainly play better if all involved were successful in drawing a deer tag in June, but that’s just simply not the case this year. We’re no different than a lot of hunting parties. Just the luck of the draw.

No matter. We’ll still gather as a family for the November 10 opener, the latest the season can open because of the way the calendar falls. I’m hoping the weather won’t be an issue, that we don’t get a repeat of last season.

Then again, it’s way too early to worry about that. Hoping for agreeable deer hunting weather, like drawing a nonresident doe tag in the lottery, is a crapshoot at best.

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