"You can't truly hunt a buck like this," Preston says. "You simply put yourself in the best possible place and hope a buck like this comes along." Preston's buck did come along! The massive 7x6 bruiser grossed 199 1/8 typical points.

Often, it seems, life's most important rewards come in the most unexpected of ways. Preston Brandt knows that firsthand.

The Boonville, Missouri, hunter killed the buck of a lifetime on the opening afternoon of the Show-Me State's 2006 firearms season. The huge buck grossed 199 1/8 typical, although considerable deductions and a broken left G-3 left the massive 7x6 trophy with a net score of 174 1/8.

"I wouldn't have this buck any other way," he said proudly.

Although Preston may not agree, to an outside observer his story certainly seems to be a just reward for his hard work, perseverance and passion.

"You can't hunt . . . truly hunt . . . a buck like this," he said. "You simply put yourself in the best possible place and hope he comes by."

And that's what happened last November. In many ways, Preston's walk into the public-land woods on that fateful Saturday afternoon represented the culmination of a long, hard journey that began some two years earlier while Preston worked at a marine terminal on the Missouri River.

"I was standing on a barge with my back to a crane and a cable broke," he explained. "A 26-pound shackle hit me in the back of the head. I hit the water unconscious, and a fellow worker pulled me up and helped me out of the river as I was coming to."

The accident left Preston with multiple skull fractures and an injury to the frontal lobe of his brain.

"I honestly don't remember much of the entire next year," he said. "Friends and family helped me reconstruct the accident and much of what followed."

After months of recuperation, Preston found himself with a 5-pound lifting restriction. Later his doctor increased it to 10 pounds. "It took all of my energy just to get back to work," he explained. "Then, it took all my energy just to do my work."

The response to serious brain injuries among humans is as different as the people who suffer them. In Preston's case, during the recovery process he temporarily lost the passion for the outdoors that he'd enjoyed since his childhood.

"I've always been a serious fisherman and an avid turkey hunter," he said. "But after the accident I just wasn't interested. I also had been a competitive shooter in NRA high-power competition. I finally bought a nice air rifle to try to start getting back into things, but it was tough. I shot nothing and hunted nothing in 2004. And I just didn't get motivated in 2005. I ended up tagging a couple of does, but it wasn't the same."

As the 2006 hunting season approached, Preston felt some of that old passion for deer hunting coming back. He and his hunting buddies decided to open the season in a place they had hunted in Moniteau County where pressure had always been light. However, the first light of the new deer season revealed something that he never expected to see.

"At daylight there were four other hunters around me," he said. "It turned out that my son was the only one in our group who didn't have other hunters close by. He decided to stay. The rest of us pulled out.

"One of my friends who was with us went to some private land close by that he had permission to hunt. My brother-in-law decided to hunt some nearby land that I own. I almost decided not to go back out, but then I thought, 'What the heck?' and I went to some public land just to the south."

Preston had hunted this area for more than a decade and he knew the terrain well. Two weeks before the season opened, he'd grunted in a 130-class 10-pointer there. Now he decided to see what an opening-afternoon gun hunt might bring.

"When I got there at about 2 o'clock, a man and his 12-year-old daughter were already sitting at the bottom of the draw where I wanted to hunt," he recalled. "I learned later that the young girl had never even taken a shot at a deer before."

The father and daughter were sitting near the public-land boundary, facing away from the private acreage it bordered. Preston walked past the pair and up to the top of the draw to hunt an inside edge he'd found while doing some "armchair scouting" with aerial photos.

"At about 4 p.m. I heard a shot at the bottom of the hill," Preston said. "I knew it had to be either the man or his daughter. I figured I'd better pay attention just in case, so I got ready."

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