Securing the whitetail tag just one challenge among several on the vast prairie

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They say patience is a virtue.

They say good things come to those who wait.

Whoever "they" are possibly had whitetail hunting in North Dakota in mind when they came up with these adages.

I was playing around on the Internet — probably when I should have been working — back in 2001 when I came across a series of photos of giant whitetails that had recently been shot by hunters in North Dakota.

I like to think that my fanaticism for whitetail hunting keeps me abreast of the hottest big-buck destinations, but I have to admit I hadn't — and still haven't — heard much about deer hunting in North Dakota.

Rarely, if ever, do you read about the Peace Garden State in magazine articles heralding North America's premiere trophy destinations.

Rarely do you see the Drury brothers, Jackie Bushman or Bill Jordan on television chasing bucks in North Dakota.

Given the size of the North Dakota bucks in the photo I saw about eight years ago, I wondered why.

It turns out a firearms whitetail buck tag in North Dakota is the toughest whitetail tag in the country to get.

More than once over the past eight years, I've heard people from North Dakota say the buck tags issued by their home state "are like gold."

Consider this. Pennsylvania, which covers 45,308 square miles, annually sells about 900,000 hunting licenses to state residents and nonresidents combined. Each license allows the owner to shoot one whitetail buck.

On top of that, the state Game Commission issued some 850,000 doe tags this year.

North Dakota, which encompasses 70,703 square miles, this year issued via lottery drawing just shy of 150,000 whitetail firearms licenses for both bucks and does combined.

Just 1 percent of those licenses are sold to nonresidents of the state. The rest go to North Dakotans.

So even if you live there, North Dakota gun tags are hard to come by.

Archery licenses are a different matter. Those are sold over the counter and their numbers are not limited.

When I called a North Dakota outfitter back in 2002, I was told, "It will take you at least five years to draw a gun tag."

I started applying in 2003, and I applied every subsequent year except 2007.

(I knew I wouldn't be able to go to North Dakota last year, and I figured I might draw a tag in my fifth year of applying, so I skipped the 2007 lottery.)

Each year I applied, I earned preference points that increased my odds of being drawn the following year.

For the fifth time this past June, I filled out all the paperwork to apply for a whitetail buck tag online at the North Dakota Game and Fish Department's Web site.

In August, I got the news I'd been waiting a long time to hear. I drew a whitetail buck tag for Unit 2J1, which encompasses a huge area on the north side of Bismarck.

That's one of the areas in which native North Dakotan Tim Frantz outfits from his Coteau Lodge.

I'd decided to hunt with Tim about two years ago, after corresponding with him via e-mail and talking to him a time or two on the telephone.

He struck me as someone who takes his deer hunting seriously and who had access to lands harboring big bucks.

So I flew to Bismarck Nov. 6 within hours of the start of the worst early-November blizzard to hit the Dakotas in the past 20 years.

Interstates leading in and out of the city were quickly closed, and I had to spend the night in town as more than a foot of snow fell over a 24-hour period.

The firearms deer season opened at noon Nov. 7, but I didn't make it out to Coteau Lodge near Goodrich in the center of the state until late afternoon.

My opening day wouldn't commence until Nov. 8. But, with snow falling hard and winds blowing 50 mph as I made the white-knuckle journey to Goodrich in a rental Jeep, I didn't mind waiting.

I did get to tag along with Tim and another one of his deer hunters, Duke Lowrie of Louisiana, as Duke stalked and shot a 158-inch eight-pointer right before dark on opening day.

Spot and stalk.

That's how they hunt whitetails on the North Dakota prairie.

Woods are in short supply in this part of the country.

The deer here live out in the open, with the only cover being cattail-choked slough bottoms, brushy windbreaks and fields of standing corn and sunflowers.

You scan the vast prairie and intermittent hideaways with binoculars and spotting scopes, searching for a good buck.

Once one is located, you try to sneak as close as you can without spooking the deer. And that might not be too close.

Shots out to 400 yards are common.

It's about as far from the Pennsylvania deer-hunting experience as you can get.

And I think that's what intrigued me most about hunting central North Dakota.

Shortly after sunrise on Nov. 8, Tim's son, Cody, took me to a rolling prairie adjacent to a huge field of standing corn.

A light snow was falling in a stiff wind as Cody set up his spotting scope atop a knob that offered a good view of a series of open drainages and slopes next to the corn.

Cody felt sure the blizzard would have the deer working the cornfield.

And he was right.

As soon as we started glassing the prairie around us, deer materialized everywhere through the falling snow.

Cody was watching a band of four bucks way off in the distance when he suddenly pulled his face from his spotting scope and whispered harshly to me.

"Big buck. Big buck, right here."

Cody was pointing down the opposite side of the hill we were set up on.

I took a few cautious steps through the knee-deep snow, so I could see over the crest, and, sure enough, a buck was chasing a doe through the bottom of the wash below us, barely 50 yards away.

My rifle wasn't even loaded yet, so I fumbled through my pocket to find a bullet.

I pulled one out, worked the bolt on my Remington 7mm magnum, plugged the shell into the chamber and quietly pushed the bolt forward.

Next, I pulled the legs down on the bipod attached to my rifle and walked on my knees to the top of the hill.

Between the snow hitting me in the face and the light grass the deer were standing in that obscured his antlers, I couldn't tell if the buck had a good rack on his head.

"Are you sure he's a shooter?" I asked Cody.

My guide gave me a stern look that said he meant business as he tersely whispered through pursed lips, "Shoot that buck."

That was good enough for me. I set the bipod down in the snow, lined up the crosshairs on the buck's shoulder and squeezed the trigger.

At the gun's report, we heard a solid thump, indicating the bullet had found its mark.

The buck sprinted up the slope on the opposite side of the drainage basin, and I finally got a good look at his antlers when they hit the skyline.

Cody's assessment of this buck was spot on. The rack had 11 points and measured 157 inches — the biggest buck I've ever shot.

Now I know what you're thinking. I started this article talking about the value of patience and here I filled my North Dakota tag within the first hour of my hunt by shooting the first buck that came within shooting range.

What can I say? I spent all my patience waiting to draw that darn tag.

For information on hunting with Frantz at Coteau Lodge, call 877-877-3285 or visit their Web site www.coteaulodge.com.

E-mail: preilly@lnpnews.com