Back Cast

The last time I drew a whitetail buck tag was 2021. I haven’t applied for one since and I couldn’t tell you what possessed me to apply for one then. Feeling lucky, I guess, or figured my odds were decent considering the Department made available 72,200 deer gun licenses that year — the most since 2011 and a far cry from the 42,300 allotted to hunters this year.

For years I’ve applied for doe tags only because I can’t settle on the idea of not hunting at all. While applying for a doe license as my first choice doesn’t guarantee that I’ll get drawn, it’s worked out well so far.

With deer populations trending in the wrong direction due to regularly blamed troubles — disease, tough winters, drought, a lack of wildlife habitat on the landscape — there may come a time when a doe tag becomes even more difficult draw. If I’m stiffed by the lottery, I’ll still go hunting because that’s what we do in November. I’ll shoulder the adjustable shooting sticks instead of my .30.06, lean against favorite rock piles waiting for the sun to come up or sit down, push heavy cover when needed, high-five the hunter(s) in our small party who does fill their tag, then get my hands bloody.

Twenty-plus years ago, I wrote a piece for this magazine that encouraged hunters to shoot does because sound management dictates that you harvest does to control the deer population. Of course, that was a different time as there were far more deer (and acres and acres of more habitat) on the landscape, and many hunters were carrying several antlerless licenses as the Game and Fish Department made available more than 100,000 deer gun tags annually from 2001 through 2011.

Wildlife managers today say it’s highly unlikely we’ll see those days again in North Dakota and I’m begrudgingly coming around to their way of thinking. Even so, it’s hard to conceive what the new normal will be. Hopefully, not today’s 42,300 license number, the lowest we’ve seen in the state since 1978. But who’s to know? Without a merciful, helping hand from Mother Nature and a coordinated effort to dramatically increase habitat across much of rural North Dakota, the outlook certainly isn’t what many of us would like it to be.

Sometime during opening weekend last season, my daughter and I sat on a prairie hilltop not far from where she shot her first deer, a mule deer doe, a handful of years ago. While we waited for her brothers, who we knew would wander along eventually, we counted the number of deer the four of us had shot over the years on public and unposted private land we could see and easily hike to from our perch without much difficulty. The number wasn’t heroic by any stretch but sounded like a lot at the time because, despite the miles and burnt boot leather, we had yet to see a deer ... not running with its ears pinned back away from other hunters in the distance; not bumped nearly at our feet from a cattail slough; not silently slipping back into cover before first light.

When we finally rendezvoused with her brothers, we made another plan because, well, it was deer season and that’s what we do in November.