The two partially-white Whitetail Deer photos were taken by my hunting partner Tim Roberts of Neshkoro WI, back in 1995. Tim shot the almost-all-white deer on the evening of December 22nd in one of my favorite stands located on a 300 acre lease we had hunted for over five years. It was the largest of a group of four partially white deer he had in bow range that night. He was able to track and retrieve it the next morning. He called me that day as he knew I would want to see it as I was going to be hunting on the land for the next three days. He told me that one of the other deer he saw was a nice size doe with a missing front leg from the knee down and had a white stripe down her head and snout. The other two had small patches of white on their head and were smaller. We both knew that partially white deer were not that common and felt they should be treated like a trophy. After a long discussion, we decided that if we could take the nice size doe, with the missing leg, we should since it probably wouldn't make it through the winter.

Tim was not going to be hunting the next two days as he had commitments for Christmas with his family out of town. I hunted in the very same stand for the next two days hard and did not see a deer. We both met at the land the morning of December 26th, and since he got to harvest the one deer already, he gave me first stand choice. Since this would have been the fifth straight day someone hunted the stand in which he got the original partially-white deer in, I decided to go to an area on the back end of the land that was always very good for us. I thought that maybe the pressure would have caused them to move out of the area where
he got the first one. I was wrong. Tim went to the stand where he shot the first one, and I had hunted in for the past two days, and the three deer returned on the same trail. He dropped the three-legged doe in her tracks with a heart shot at 15 yards.

We both hunted the land hard that year and years previous and wondered why we never saw them before. I saw only one of the other partially-white deer the next year and after that we never saw them again.

Tim and I continued to hunt hard and take some nice bucks but by 1997 we were pretty much done shooting the lesser bucks and were holding out for something worth the wall. Tragically before either of us were able to harvest a buck worth mounting, my partner was killed in a motorcycle accident in September of 1998.

The morning of October 6th, a month later, I was hunting from one of Tim's stands we had put up on a ridge before his passing. The buck pictured to the right made the mistake of coming up the ridge on a trail that was in my bow range. The deer was a 9-pointer with a 17.5" inside spread, dressed out at 165 lbs. Every time I look at him on my wall I kind of think it was Tim who sent him up the ridge to me. RIP my friend.

– John Schreiber Fond du lac, WI