If you’re anything like me, luck usually isn’t on your side. I never win raffles or stumble into golden opportunities, and my competitiveness hates counting on games of chance versus my own skill.
Mostly, I’m OK with it. I prefer to earn my victories than have them gifted, but this also means my roughly 44% chance of drawing a badlands mule deer buck tag this year was predictably unsuccessful again, as was my husband’s. Statisticians would not agree, but to me, I thought we had basically a 90% chance of one of us drawing with two entries? We also failed to draw our second-choice white-tailed buck tags that we had drawn in 2021.
Yeah, I know it’s a lottery and that’s what we get for waiting our turn for buck tags, and I’m OK with it. We certainly pride ourselves in primarily self-sustaining our meat consumption, but hunting mule deer bucks in the badlands with a rifle is something I want to experience once in my life, so we continue to wait (impatiently). And if all goes to plan, we should have a caribou and a pronghorn in the freezer to tide us over and still stuff beer cheese brats.
Fortunately, if you’re like me and didn’t draw your tag(s) of choice, the positive part is the three weeks in November now unspoken for. We anxiously set aside those three weekends and even cached vacation time anticipating a week-long stint in the pursuit that now has a little more flexibility.
We await our fate in the South Dakota deer lottery, which may make our decision for us and ease the burden of trying to hunt both states. If our “bad” luck persists, we certainly have good opportunities to apply for and receive doe tags in North Dakota’s unsuccessful applicant lottery and still hunt beautiful country with perhaps a little less stress on our shoulders and just as much meat.
Or perhaps we finally have an excuse to return to Minnesota to deer hunt. While I’ve greatly enjoyed being mobile in a big landscape with room to glass and roam, I never did get to grow up at “deer camp” with my dad and brother. At the time, I showed little interest in rifles, big game hunting and camping in November, but things have changed and it’s a tradition I’m regretful to not have experienced.
I’d admittedly be a little chilly and bored in a deer stand all day, but I’d revel in the nostalgia of the north woods, the warm meal over a fire and swapping stories from the day back at camp, the lines of vehicles on Minnesota highways occupied with blaze orange drivers and just maybe bring back my very first Minnesota rifle deer.
Or maybe we’ll simply have a small game spree. In our first years living here, before we could apply in the deer lottery and before we knew how to apply strategically, those tag-less weeks saw some of our most successful upland and field waterfowl hunts. As long as we stayed out of deer country, competition was minimal, weather was ideal and bird migrations were often prime.
I know what Finley would vote for.
No matter what we choose, it likely won’t require quite as much vacation time, freeing up some days for other adventures – a quaint, Minnesota ruffed grouse extended weekend in October, an extra day or two on our annual upland hunt to the northwestern part of the state or just a random weekday afield when the weather is too good to pass up.
In all reality, we’re all lucky. Lucky to live in North Dakota and close to a longish list of outdoor pursuits for the choosing. When one door closes, another opens and I’m equally excited for a fall filled with time outside one way or another.
