A trail of good luck followed Jeanetta Tiner on her happy trek back into the Arkansas wilderness in November 2002. In May 1999, Tiner suffered a stroke that required her to take a break from deer hunting, her longtime passion and family tradition. The time off was a rarity for Tiner, who started hunting as a teenager, but it didn't spoil her good aim. On her return trip to deer camp at the Old Belfast Hunting Club on the outskirts of Benton, her hometown, she captured an 11-point buck and two doe with her .270 rifle. She relives the moment often, using her DynaMyte 3100 to tell about it. "I killed an 11-point buck this year. I have a picture in my purse," she says. It was one of the first messages that Tiner programmed into the device with help from Melanie Lowry, her speech therapist at Saline Memorial Hospital. The stroke left Tiner with severe aphasia, a condition caused by a breakdown of the parts of the brain that control a person's ability to read, write, speak and comprehend language. This permanently reduced Tiner's ability to speak in her own voice. But she remains an expressive woman with an endearing way of letting others know what she's thinking. She affectionately calls her husband of nearly 44 years "Paw Paw" because she can no longer say George, his real name. Tiner, who taught her husband to hunt when they were dating, often embellishes her success story with the proud utterance "Buck, my buck!" While her residual speech is often unintelligible, she seasons it with a scale of inflections, facial expressions and gestures that clarify what she's trying to say. With the DynaMyte, Tiner has the security of knowing that others will understand her. The device allows her to communicate easily with store clerks, friends at church and the wait staff at the catfish buffet and steakhouse that she frequents. She's not shy about using the DynaMyte to make a connection with people who are unfamiliar with her situation. "I cannot speak," she'll say. "Please be patient with me and please ask me yes or no questions." The DynaMyte also provided an element of relief for her family, who spent a lot of time guessing in conversations with her before she had the device. "All she could do was point and try to tell you what she was thinking," said Tiner's daughter, Teresa Blevins. "It was real frustrating." The stroke affected Tiner in an unusual way, Lowry said. "In my experience, it is uncommon for someone to recover all of their physical functions but be so severely impaired in language. Yet her attitude as a patient was fantastic. She always had a hug for me at the end of therapy." As Tiner proved with her enthusiasm for learning to use the DynaMyte, she is receptive to just about anything that will give her a better quality of life. When she had the stroke, she was on leave from her job as an electrician in training at Alcoa, where she worked since the 1980s. She had just had a pacemaker put in her heart and was at home recovering from the surgery. The stroke occurred on the night of May 10, 1999 just after Tiner had gone to bed. She stayed in Saline Memorial's intensive care unit for the next nine days. From there, she went to Baptist Health in Little Rock, where the therapy she received for two months helped her to regain the ability to walk and care for herself. To see Tiner now is to realize how far she's come in the last five years. Though she didn't drive for a year after her stroke, Tiner now steers her four-wheel all-terrain vehicle or her pickup truck around Benton almost daily. She enjoys spending time with her four adult children and two teenage grandsons. A shining moment of her recovery was watching the birth of Laniee her two-year-old granddaughter. Tiner savors her frequent fishing trips in the spring and summer as she does her annual pilgrimage to deer camp with her husband and brother-in-law. Though it pained her to stay behind during the three years that doctor's orders kept her out of the woods, she was perfectly content to visit with her sister-in-law in one of the nearby cabins while the guys hunted. Now once again, Tiner is an active participant in the mid-November ritual. And should she return empty-handed, it's not a huge letdown. She's just glad to be back in the woods again.