The Nation: 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 2½% 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."