The last lost boy he found was named Phillip Roman. Phillip, who was ten years old, had wandered away from his family while they were at Clingmans Dome, the highest point in the Smoky Mountains, and as happens more frequently and more suddenly than you could ever imagine, he simply seemed to disappear. This was in the summer of 1994, and Dwight McCarter, who had been a backcountry ranger for almost thirty years and was just about to retire, was called in to track him. Phillip had been lost for three days by then. “I’d been away for the first two,” he tells me. The authorities took McCarter to the Point Last Seen—or PLS, in ranger jargon—and showed him three different tracks. The first set of tracks was a bear. “I knew it was a bear in half a minute, but they wanted me to follow it to be sure, and the farther I did it just got more and more bear.” The second set of tracks was a bear, too. “But the third set of tracks belonged to Phillip,” he says. Listening to McCarter tell a story is to understand why stories are told: It’s a rush, the sound his sentences make, the voice his words come to me on. It’s better than a book. “So we set out into North Carolina,” McCarter says. Phillip didn’t know it, of course, but he’d left a clear trail for McCarter to follow, signposts almost. McCarter knew Phillip was right-handed, “and when a limb came to him, he’d break it forward with his right hand. You’d do the same thing. The broken branches pointed to the direction he’d gone.” They came to a small waterfall and saw that the tracks on the other side of it had changed: One foot was dragging now. “He’d fallen off the waterfall,” McCarter says. “Not enough to kill him but to hurt him pretty bad.” photo: Erika Larsen Bonus Images Phillip could not have gone far up the ridge. McCarter had the men fan out across it, working in a zigzag path up the hill to the top. The plan was to make multiple sweeps, but it didn’t take long for one of the men to holler, “Dwight, over here! Someone’s talking to me from a bush!” That was Phillip, hiding away in the shadowy green of a rhododendron thicket, the last of twenty-six people Dwight McCarter found.

McCarter is sixty-nine years old now. He has kind, intelligent eyes and a Lincolnesque beard, lightened by gray. He’s thin, sturdy, but not tall, and when he’s telling a story—which is what he does, really, from the moment you meet him until the moment you’re gone—the tenor of his voice sweeps up and down the tonal register, from a baritone to a falsetto twang in the course of a single sentence, or even a two-syllable word. He laughs a lot, the kind of laugh that begs for company and gets it. He is amused by people, history, and nature itself. He was two years out of the army before becoming a ranger, in 1967. His first job was a seasonal position, manning fire towers. It was a job he loved. During fire season he’d sit in a cane chair on top of the tower and watch for lightning strikes, then he’d map the strike, “run a line out to it,” and they’d check the position out for smoke. But he wasn’t long for the tower. He had skills other rangers didn’t, and still don’t. McCarter can track a human being. VIDEO: ON THE TRAIL WITH DWIGHT MCCARTER photo: Erika Larsen

It’s not hard to get lost in the Smokies. “It’s boys, mostly,” he says. “Young boys. Hardly ever girls. Girls stick close, but boys run ahead, take shortcuts, hide to jump out and scare everybody.” For about a quarter of a century when someone in the Smokies was lost, McCarter was asked to find them. And he generally did, but not always, and not always in time. His domain comprised 521,000 acres and more than 800 miles of trail. McCarter and I spent a fall day together on the trails surrounding Blackberry Farm, the luxury Smoky Mountain resort where McCarter has worked as a guide, naturalist, and storyteller since 1979. It’s not far from Townsend, Tennessee, where McCarter has lived his entire life. It’s never been a full-time job—he did it on his off days from the National Park Service until he retired from that, in 1994—but McCarter enjoys showing people a world that, even when it’s right in front of them, they can’t see. Me, for instance: We’re hiking lazily down a trail for fifteen minutes before I realize we are tracking a bear.

“There she is,” he says. He kneels, and picks up the smallest of twigs. It’s freshly broken. The toothpick-size twig itself is a slate gray, but where it’s broken is white. A dot of white, no bigger than a bread crumb. “This is how I find the children,” he says. “I look for the white. This tells me where they went.” photo: Erika Larsen Natural Patterns Now I can see it, a shadow in the dark soil: the heel and the claws of a bear. Still looking at the print, he says, “She came down the mountain and stopped here at the trail, looking left and right for danger, for humans, then jumped over the trail. No prints here, see. Big bear, too. Three hundred pounds. Probably came through last night around 3:00 a.m. or so. Coming down the mountain for water, you know. Usually they keep going straight, but here…she angled off. That leaf is bent, there, and you can see the underside of the leaves of that branch over here. She was in a hurry.” He crumbles some of the dirt between his fingers. “Seen this track before. She’s always by herself. No babies. She’ll probably live to about sixteen and die alone. Sad. But maybe she just likes being by herself.” He laughs and suddenly it isn’t that sad anymore. “Or maybe she just has a bad personality.” McCarter doesn’t just track: He constructs a narrative about what he’s tracking. It’s not just about what happened, but why it happened, and what happened before it happened that made what happened happen. Of course, there’s no way either of us will ever know for sure if he’s right about the bear. But I take his word for it. Bears are plentiful in the Smokies. They probably won’t kill you, but if you’re lost and die by some other means, after three days or so they will probably eat you. Bears drag their quarry uphill to a ridge and cover it with dirt and dine on it slowly, over the course of a couple of weeks, coming down for water and then returning, until all that’s left of a person are brass shoe eyelets, belt buckles, keys, caps, vertebrae. “Every year that passes without finding the deceased, another inch of soil will cover the remains,” McCarter says. “A man went missing in 1998 and then was found in 2004. Under six inches of earth.”

photo: Erika Larsen

But sometimes the lost stay lost forever. In 1969 a six-year-old boy named Dennis Martin wandered away from his family and minutes later was gone. It was 4:30 in the afternoon. His family immediately started calling out to him and scouring the woods around where he had last been seen. Nothing. Five hours later a massive storm blew in, and the rain was cold, and the woods were dark, and Dennis was out there in it, wearing a T-shirt and shorts. Over the course of the next three weeks more than a thousand people, including members of the Green Berets, along with Dwight McCarter, searched for the boy. They never found a trace. When McCarter talks about Dennis Martin, he speaks slowly, he chooses his words carefully, and there’s a ghost in his eyes.