This article was first published December 6, 2025, at fieldethos.com.
My teenage son is constantly hungry. Shocker, right? But we literally can’t fill the kid up. So, when he finished his own fast food value meal and started in on his sister’s, asking between bites what we were having for dessert, I offered him a leftover fortune cookie that had been sitting on the kitchen counter for the last week.
“I’ll only eat it if the fortune has my lucky number on it,” he replied.
“What’s your lucky number?”
“Thirteen. Duh.”
I cracked open the cookie and pulled out the fortune. Sure enough, there it was: the number 13, last in a line of six.
1, 28, 17, 40, 12, 13
The fortune on the flip side of those numbers read, “Good luck is a hop, skip, and jump away. Hop to it!” Not impressed by that one, I did what no man in his right mind had ever done before. I grabbed my laptop and followed the link printed below those numbers to the cookie’s website for another fortune. The second offering might have been even worse than the first. It read, “You are alert to the events and feelings around you.”
Shaking my head, I started to drop the fortune in the to-go sack along with the rest of the trash and just happened to glance again at the row of lucky numbers. In that moment, time froze, and an image began to take shape in my mind’s eye. The edges of that image swam for a moment and then snapped suddenly into focus, revealing an absolute whale of a whitetail buck sporting the tallest tined, typical rack I had ever seen. As the background of that image continued to sharpen, I was shocked to see my own face. There I was, kneeling behind the buck, grinning like I’d just won the lottery.
“So, can I have the cookie or not?”
I handed the fortune cookie to my son and concentrated on stamping a mental snapshot of that rapidly evaporating image into my brain. It was the numbers that did it to me, I’m sure of it. And if you stop and think about it, it makes perfect sense. If I rattled off Marilyn Monroe’s measurements, an image would immediately form in the mind’s eye of every red-blooded male even halfway familiar with her physique. Deer hunters are no different. We see deer hunting everywhere we look. I just never expected to see a trophy buck in the lucky numbers of a fortune cookie. And I certainly didn’t expect to see a mediocre hunter like myself sitting behind such a buck. In that moment, though, every number on the cookie’s fortune instantly meant something to me.
1, 28, 17, 40, 12, 13.
1 for the spot he’d hold in the typical category of my home state’s record books.
28 for the length measurement of each of the buck’s main beams, perfectly matched.
17 for the length of his left G2, the one bladed like a swash-buckling pirate’s sword.
40 for the number of inches of mass the whitetail carried across his chocolate colored rack.
12 for the number of points protruding from those impossibly long main beams, a stunningly symmetrical six by six.
And finally, 13, my son’s lucky number.
With that same lottery-winning grin on my face, I slid that slip of paper into my wallet, right next to my hunting license, hoping that those lucky numbers might rub off on my hunting fortunes this fall. Even as I did, though, I knew good and well that I’d shoot the first mature buck that walked past my treestand, record book rack or not. Because the truth is, the way my son is eating us out of house and home these days, I can’t afford not to.
Wright Outdoors 