Lost Hunter: The Untold Story

By V. Paul Reynolds

In mid November of 1982 in Maine’s Grant West Township, a few miles East of the Greenville Airport, an experienced Massachusetts deer hunter got turned around later in the afternoon, and it began to snow. An extensive search party that included his own hunt companions, trained ground personal and search aircraft never found a trace of the missing hunter. After a few days with colder temperatures and a new cover of wet snow, the Maine Warden Service called off the search. The statistical data of other missing hunters, as well as the gut instincts of experienced woodsman and survival experts, all pointed to one conclusion: the hunter could not have survived! He was presumed to have perished from the punishing cold and bitter nights.

The incident, with all of its human drama, was, as you might imagine, the subject of intense press coverage by all elements of Maine and New England news media, most especially when the rest of the story broke unexpectedly almost three weeks later. The missing hunter, George W. Wescott, 52, of Swansea, Mass. was still alive and was picked up by a stunned telephone serviceman on the Scammon Road that runs north of Lower Wilson Pond.

Public Opinion

From all reports, Wescott took a drubbing, not only from the press but from Maine public opinion. Some of the criticism from Mainers was scathing. Critics, including experienced hunters and survival experts, called him a fraud. There were suggestions that he had scammed the public for the publicity, or that he escaped an ugly divorce and ran away to warmer climes with a lady companion.

What was the rest of the story? For a long time, it never got told. Wescott faced difficult toe and foot amputations and rehabilitation time from his ordeal. If the press really wanted to delve into the postscript account from Wescott himself– and we are not sure- Wescott was hurt and angry and wanted no part of press interviews. He was also miffed at the Maine Warden Service for reasons that become clear later in this article.

As so often is the case, the Wescott story fell off the radar quickly. It was not until eight years later in 1990 that George Wescott agreed to sit down and tell his story for the first time – an in-depth television interview with the late Bangor Daily News outdoor columnist Ralph “Bud” Leavitt.

Leavitt was a consummate, probing interviewer. It is clear from Wescott’s body language and attitude that he trusted Leavitt and was was ready to tell all, for the first time since his narrow escape from death eight years earlier.

Bud Leavitt Show

Leavitt, in the interview, starts by setting the stage, much as this article has attempted to do. Then he let Wescott tell his story, and tell it he does.

On that first day in the deer woods, Wescott realized late in the afternoon with snow spitting that he had had been going in the wrong direction. Just before dark he found himself facing Rum Pond with no quick or easy way out. He would spend the night. With the wet snow, wind and faulty safety matches he could not get a fire going. “ I spent the night doing muscle tensions and trying to keep my blood circulating. I slept a couple of hours,” he recalls. At daybreak he decided to seek higher ground hoping to find an opening where he would be visible to search aircraft. He headed for Rum Ridge. “It was then I realized that I was in trouble with my feet, walking became slow and painful as the day wore on.” During this period, search and rescue people fired constant gun shots and ran chain saws hoping that the sound might give the lost hunter an exit bearing. Wescott said that he never heard a sound or an aircraft until he finally made it to an opening late in the day atop Rum Ridge. “An aircraft flew directly above me at a fairly low altitude. I waved my orange hunting cap fully expecting the plane to fly back over me with a wing wave. That never happened,” he recalls.

Disappointed and exhausted from the ascent of Rum Ridge with frozen feet and a layer of heavy snow on the ground, Wescott settled in a for a long cold night. The next morning from the ridge he said he could see a camp on Lower Wilson Pond and decided that reaching that camp was his only hope of survival. Wescott was warmly dressed as a typical deer hunter, but there was a chink in his survival armor: his boots. “I thought those new boots were top of the line with the brand name and all. They were Korean knockoffs. Bad purchase. They were so damn tight that I could not wear my usual three pair of socks. One pair only,” said Wescott, conceding to Leavitt that you always should break in new boots before the hunt.

Hobbling and limping on his frozen feet, Wescott told Leavitt that it took him close to two days to make it through the snow and down Rum Mountain to Lower Wilson Pond, where he eventually broke into a camp.

Before his ordeal was to end, Wescott would break into three different camps on Lower Wilson Pond. At the first camp he found no food, except coffee and coca. He found some wood and was able to heat up a camp stove, thaw his frozen pants and socks and eventually cut his boots to get them off his badly swollen and frost-bitten toes and feet. His toes were black and painful. He found aspirin, which helped. At another camp, he found some cookies but the canned meats were all rusty and spoiled and he dared not eat the bad meat.

Wescott

Leavitt asked Wescott if he made any efforts to flag spotter planes. Wescott said that he put a blanket on the snow by the lake with letters spelled on the blanket with tape. He also fashioned a makeshift horn from an aluminum fly rod tube, and blew it frequently by the lake to no avail. Later, after Wescott was hospitalized in Greenville, search officials said they flew over Lower Wilson Pond a number of times and saw nothing. Wescott contends that never in that extended period at the camps did he ever see or hear an aircraft.

A number of days later at the third camp, Wescott discovered a small sailfish, which is a tippy shallow draft sailboat. “ I saw that as my ticket out of there. It might get me across the lake. I knew there was the Scammon Road on the north side pond that would get me closer to people, if I could just get there,” he recalls.

The first attempt with the sailfish crossing was aborted when Wescott tipped the boat and fell into the icy water. He returned to camp to dry himself and his clothing and spend yet another night at the camp. To make matters worse, the wind blew the lake into frothing whitecaps for five days straight. Wescott waited. Late on the fifth day, the wind subsided and Wescott saw his opening. He paddled uneventfully across Lower Wilson Pond. Exhausted. He spent another night hunkered down, although the weather had warmed some, he recalled. At daybreak, hobbling on his frozen feet and supported with a stick, he got to the Scammon Road and starting limping along toward Greenville.

Wescott said that in no time at all a telephone service truck approached him and stopped.”When I opened the truck door, the driver took one look at me, kind of recoiled and said, “Holy….! Are you who I think you are? Wescott said, “ I probably looked the part with my scruffy beard, torn clothes and cut off hip waders with trash bags over the top and socks for gloves.”

When Wescott asked the telephone repairman to stop at the nearest phone booth so he could contact his family with the good news, the driver said, “No way, Bud. We are going directly to the Greenville hospital emergency room. I will make your calls for you.”

At the Dean hospital, the emergency room medical staff would not believe that Wescott was who he said he was. Only when he showed his identification did they realize that he was actually the deer hunter who had been missing in the North Woods for three entire weeks! From the first-time photos shown on Leavitt’s show of Wescott’s tattered and blackened feet and toes, it becomes even more amazing that he was able to survive and ambulate at all. Before it was over,Wescott would lose all of his toes on his left foot and right foot, as well as part of his right foot.

Postscript

More than 40 years later, there are some postscripts associated with this incredible survival story and chapter in the annals of Maine’s missing-hunter stories that are worthy of mention. Wescott made it clear to Leavitt that he was miffed at the Maine Warden Service for two seemingly valid reasons. First, he contends that the critical physical profile of him used by the search and rescue teams were badly flawed, that they gave up on him prematurely because they profiled him as not being in good enough physical condition to endure the hardship. “Look at me, Bud,” Wescott said, patting his flat tummy. Do I look like a fat guy to you? And I am not a smoker as the warden profile claimed.” On television Wescott, who worked as an iron worker for a living, looks at 52 to be in prime physical condition for a man of his age. The second reason for Wescott’s animus toward the Maine Warden Service was the request that then Warden Colonel John Marsh made to Wescott. “ Mr. Wescott, would you be willing to take a polygraph test?” Wescott was at first insulted by Marsh’s demand, but eventually, under family pressure, took the lie detector test and, according to Leavitt, passed with flying colors.

Looking back after all these years at this fascinating missing hunter story, as well as watching the broad-shouldered Wescott matter of factly recount his ordeal in 1990 to Leavitt, an adage comes to mind: “Never judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes.” It seems that the critics, and even the search and rescue personnel, missed a critical element in their armchair speculations about Wescott’s story: the missing hunter’s frozen feet. From his first night until his last night in the woods, Wescott was a man profoundly debilitated as his feet only became progressively more painful and useless.

The irony is that, despite the Warden Service’s physical profile of a middle-aged man who was physically compromised and not likely to survive, Wescott was unusually tough and anything but a quitter. A lesser man would have probably given up and frozen to death in his sleep. During Leavitt’s show most of the callers were sympathetic to Wescott and apologized for the way he was treated, both by the press and the general public. One of the show callers was a Greenville Warden, Glen Perkins, who had apparently been involved in the search for Wescott. Perkins was forthright, explaining that mistakes had been made in the search for Wescott, and that the Warden Service is proud of its search and rescue record, but would continue to upgrade its capacity to make the right decisions in any given search and rescue scenario.

Wescott, despite his ordeal and amputations, did not give up hunting and fishing in Maine. As a gesture of good will, Wescott was given a complimentary hunting license by Glenn Manuel , the same Fish and Wildlife Commissioner who earlier had demanded that Wescott undergo a polygraph test.

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