The low building abuts land near Route 374 where hundreds of law-enforcement officers were still combing the woods. They had been searching there since the night before, after a tracking dog had appeared to pick up a scent, a State Police official said.

Outside their home just a few thousand feet from a police cordon at Trudeau Road, Phyllis and Ken Phelps were planting tomatoes and playing catch with their two dogs as their grandson buzzed along with a weed trimmer. But their idyll was riddled with hints of anxiety, though they were loath to admit it.

“I’m in the kitchen and I keep looking back at the woods,” she said.

“Don’t make it sound like she’s scared,” Mr. Phelps, in his straw gardening hat, said to a reporter, adding that his wife could easily have been looking for something else.

“Yes, a fox might come in and try to eat the chickens,” she said.

Guns are a part of life in the North Country, the thickly wooded tracts at the uppermost edge of New York State. There are hunting rifles, but here in the shadow of the state’s largest maximum-security prison, they keep pistols and revolvers, too, most often unloaded — just in case.

At Vann’s Gun Shop & Reloads in nearby Plattsburgh, one of the owners, Mary Vann, said she had not seen a run on ammunitions, nor sold any more than usual of her top seller, a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson pistol, since the escape. There was no need.

“Everybody is pretty well armed up here to begin with,” she said. “We are prepared up here for almost anything.”

On Wednesday night, some residents received robocalls instructing them to stay indoors. Schools were closed on Thursday; some teenagers took advantage of the free day to go to the beach at a nearby riverfront.