How the Mountain Men Did It

You're born here and you go huntin' all your life. You know the sounds of the woods at night on a coon hunt.

Finally it becomes instinct. There are probably less than five people here who can read a compass, but they know every tree in these woods. So drawled Guard Bill Garrison, 45, last week as he described to TIME Correspondent George Taber how the Tennessee mountain men at Brushy Mountain prison flushed out and captured James Earl Ray in less than 2 1/2% days.

The veteran trackers who scoured the hilly forests, the twisting narrow roads, the abandoned cabins and non-working coal mines around Petros, Tenn., are a hardy tribe who know the countryside from childhood and can read it like Indian scouts. Explains Don Daugherty, 44, whose folks have lived in the Brushy area for two centuries:

"You learn the hills from hearing your granddaddy and all those old people talk: You learn where spots like Flag Pole or Chimney Top are and how to get up and down them. The FBI'S maps are useless. Someone will make a spotting at Chimney Top, and the FBI will still be trying to find out what they mean a week from now."

A tracker's real training comes from years of hunting in the thick oak and hickory woods or gathering ginseng roots, which sell for $75 a pound and are used as a tonic to prolong sexual endurance. Notes Guard Rich Trail, 20: "I've been goin' squirrel huntin' and coon huntin' and ground hog huntin' and rabbit huntin' as long as I can remember." Adds Guard Sammy Joe Chapman, 33, who caught Ray and the last escapee, Douglas Shelton: "Coon hunting at night is good training for tracking down James Earl Ray and those other escapees. It teaches you the tricks of the mountain, like traveling at night and how to see in the mountains in the dark while going through a rough thicket." As a handler of bloodhounds, Chapman is known to his fellow guards as a "dog boy"; to the inmates, he is a feared "sniffer."

One of the most reliable methods used by the mountain men to run down a fleeing inmate is that used for capluring any animal--the stakeout. Explains Daugherty, who reckons that he has chased down some 200 escaped men since 1963: "You'll hunker down there for six or maybe eight hours and you won't make a sound. You aren't supposed to talk or move or smoke--why do you think we chew tobacco? If it's daytime you hide behind a tree or a log. Sure enough, before long, you'll hear the criminal or see him. It's just like any hunting." Adds Daugherty: "We know where every holler goes, and we know the ways that animals or men react in the woods. A tired man turns downhill, so you start looking for downhill tracks."

Finding telltale signs of a man on the run is no job for a novice. Garrison, who spotted the trail that eventually led to Ray's seizure, can tell approximately how long ago some underbrush was shoved aside or crushed by men's feet, simply by the color of the brush--a fresh break has almost no discoloration, but an older break is brownish. Garrison can also determine if a convict has a partner traveling with him by noting that a twig has been bent back or broken shoulder-high. "There's almost an instinct for the first person to push the branch back, so it doesn't hit the second guy in the face." Another sure sign that his quarry is a criminal and not a hunter, according to Garrison, is whether the person has entered the high grass: "No one but someone on the run would go into that deep grass and vine."

The ultimate weapon of any hunt in the wilderness is, of course, the bloodhound. Sammy Joe Chapman, chief supervisor of the Brushy Mountain prison kennels, had only two fully trained hounds available for the forest searches: Sandy and Little Red. The other nine were still in training. Consequently the FBI brought in its own pack of bloodhounds. But when the feds gave their dogs some convicts' garments to sniff, just like they do in the movies, the locals scoffed. "Pure Hollywood," said one. Chapman put his dogs in pursuit by taking them to a single fresh track that gave them the scent they followed through the woods.

Prisoners resort to all sorts of stratagems to throw a dog off the trail. Some escapees have sprinkled pepper on their shoes or changed clothes --to no avail. Sloshing through a stream works, at least until the fugitive steps on dry ground and the dog is able to pick up the scent again. Surprisingly, a runaway's best defense is dry weather, which can often blend all local smells together, making them indistinguishable to a hound. Thus when thunderstorms hit the Cumberlands last week after a dry spell, Don Daugherty knew by his old mountaineer's instinct that Ray's hours of freedom were coming to an end. "Rain washes out the forest," he says, "and makes all scents new and tracking a lot easier." But, admits Sammy Joe Chapman, "for a 49-year-old man who didn't know the mountains, James Earl Ray really didn't do bad."

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