As Vixen recalled, “Anytime you say anything about a child getting lost, it hits everybody’s heartstrings. So I mean, there was just droves of people showing up.” By the time Vixen James and Wes Hilliard made it to the top of Cave Mountain in the late afternoon, Incident Command was dealing with two problems: the search-and-rescue mission to find Haley, and the personnel management issue of dealing with all of the many people who had shown up to help with the search—and the second one was fast blooming out of control.

  “We were overwhelmed with volunteers that were not contacted, which makes our job harder,” George Stowe-Rains said. “It was one of the biggest searches I’ve ever managed, and it was probably one of the most difficult because of the resources that showed up on the scene that we had not planned on or asked for. I mean, they’re good-hearted, but it really challenges us, because we’re trying to plan a search mission for all the trained resources we have there, and we get all the untrained resources showing up, and we have to try to plug them in somewhere and take care of them also. It really convolutes the whole deal.” The crowd of well-meaning but burdensome volunteers swelled, aggravating the authorities’ headache—some people, as Vixen memorably put it, “showing up in flip-flops” in order to head out into treacherously rough and rugged terrain; “bubbas,” in intra-NPS slang: arrogant, underprepared idiots who blunder into the wilderness with no idea what they’re doing, liable to get hurt or lost and then themselves require rescuing, thereby sapping resources and attention away from the very mission they showed up to “help” with.

  By the time Wes and Vixen got there late in the day, the staging area was a zoo, with the kind of logistical management problems reminiscent of a crowded sports event or concert; it was becoming difficult to find a place to park, and the emergency responders were beginning to have to worry about traffic jams on the rocky, narrow dirt road.

  At this point we encounter one of those irreconcilable factual disagreements in which one of two people must be remembering things incorrectly. George Stowe-Rains told me that the inundation of untrained volunteers gumming things up and making the search-and-rescue operation more difficult had become such a problem that “we were getting ready to get somebody to help us—State Police, National Park Service, somebody, some law enforcement agency—to just block the road and say, ‘No, if you’re not trained, if you can’t show us credentials, you’re gonna have to just go away.’ ” Vixen James, however, remembers that they did in fact do exactly that: Incident Command sent a park ranger to set up a roadblock near AR-21 toward the bottom of the east side of Cave Mountain Road and stationed him there to vet the volunteers trying to drive up, controlling whom they allowed in to participate in the search.

  I am going to side with Vixen’s memory, because he has a good and very personal reason to remember that roadblock’s place in the story: Among the local residents of Newton County who went out to Cave Mountain volunteering to help with the search and who were turned away were his father, Lytle James, and his father’s neighbor, good friend, and frequent hunting buddy, William Jeff Villines. Both men had been born and raised there, and both were experienced hunters who had spent their lives bushwhacking off the trails, tracking game in the hills and thorny gullies of the Buffalo River valley. Vixen’s great-great-grandfather on his father’s side had settled in the Ozarks in 1901, and his mother’s family, the Fowlers (a family that will become important later in this book), had been there since the middle of the nineteenth century. Vixen’s father was the youngest of twelve children and had worked as a lineman for Carroll Electric for forty years in an area that had not had much electricity when he started; he had climbed utility poles beside every tiny backroad in Newton County, and he had a map of it engraved on his soul. After he retired from the electric company, he and his wife had focused on their small cattle farm of a hundred acres and about fifty cows. “My dad was just a simple country person,” Vixen said (Lytle James died at the age of eighty in 2017). William Jeff Villines came from a sprawling family that had settled in the Ozarks before the Civil War; drive around in Newton County, and you’ll see the Villines name on the side of a mailbox in just about every bank of mailboxes on the shoulder of the highway beside a turnoff down a little dirt road. William Jeff was a full-time farmer, as his father had been and on the same land. Vixen: “He was a true mountain-man, William Jeff’s dad was, and therefore, William Jeff, same deal, had all those skills. Both William Jeff and my dad’s land butts up through National Park Service land. So they both spent their whole life in that area up of the Buffalo River, fishing, river hunting, small game, deer, turkey, and stuff like that. But William Jeff especially was truly an outdoorsman, a true mountain-man.”

  It is also worth noting that the large and spread-out Villines clan was hit particularly hard by the eminent domain episode in the 1970s. Quite a few of William Jeff’s close relations had lost houses they had lived in all their lives and that had been in the family for generations, and the National Park Service had strong-armed his own father out of hundreds of acres; thus, the farm William Jeff inherited was substantially reduced from what it had once been.

  When these two men, who knew that specific area of wilderness as intimately as anyone alive in the world, showed up to volunteer their time, sweat, and deep knowledge to help rescue the six-year-old girl they had heard was lost there, they arrived at a roadblock at the bottom of Cave Mountain, where an employee of the National Park Service—an organization to which William Jeff Villines in particular was very much not personally endeared—asked to see their “credentials,” and when they could produce none, turned them away. Go home, let the professionals handle this.

  “Naturally,” Vixen said, “that was a frustrating thing.” Although he was quick to say he didn’t blame Incident Command for the decision to set up the roadblock: “A lot of people don’t understand that it was kind of a needed thing. If whoever was standing at that roadblock would’ve known that Dad and William Jeff knew the territory like they did, I’m sure they would’ve let ’em through. But just because there were so many people, that’s how it initially happened that they got turned away.”

  It was Vixen who had called his father from his cell phone while he and Wes were driving up from Fort Chaffee and told him that a little girl, his friend Steve’s daughter, had gotten lost near Hawksbill Crag on Cave Mountain. It was that call that had prompted Lytle James and William Jeff Villines to drive over there, where the park ranger manning the roadblock had turned them away. That had probably already happened by the time Vixen and Wes, who would have been coming from the other direction, arrived at the staging area (apparently there wasn’t a roadblock at the west end of Cave Mountain Road). When they got there, Haley had been missing for more than five hours, and the search-and-rescue operation was in full swing: helicopters thwacking overhead, Incident Command trying to manage everything amidst the increasingly frustrated crowd of well-meaning yahoos, the media there by then with cameras and microphones and satellite dishes to further fuck things up for the authorities. Vixen and Wes in their National Guard uniforms were quickly let into the inner circle of police, park rangers, and other emergency responders buzzing about the central hub of the church and its parking lot, and from then on they were in the thick of things, attendant at every command briefing, either out in the woods searching and reporting back, or helping coordinate logistics and supplies. Vixen recalls getting the National Guard to bring in tents, food, a few water buffaloes (big water tanks on trailers), and more personnel from Fort Chaffee. The next thirty hours or so smear together in his memory. Sometime deep in the night he caught an hour or two of sleep on a cot in one of the tents that had been brought up from Fort Chaffee; Wes Hilliard didn’t get any sleep at all, and neither did George Stowe-Rains. Throughout Monday, it was more of the same: teams methodically searching the highest-probability-of-success segments of the grid, the helicopters still circling and still coming up with nothing, a lot of K-9 units searching with dogs. (George Stowe-Rains: “Every police department in Northwest Arkansas wanted to send a canine over. But if they’re not trained in search and rescue, if they’re just trained in law enforcement stuff, they’re not really a benefit.”)

  At some point during the day on Monday Vixen called his father again—the mobile cell towers that had been set up at various points on Cave Mountain by then made that possible—and Lytle James told his son that he and William Jeff had gone out there offering to help with the search the day before and had been turned away. And that had pretty well pissed them off. Bear in mind the government’s historical role in the lives of Buffalo River valley residents as an ignorant and impersonal juggernaut of meddlesome ineptitude most recently notable for about-facing on its plan to bury everyone under an artificial lake and instead sending guys in suits to bully little old ladies into selling houses their grandfathers had built for less than market value, all for the apparent benefit of the tubers and kayakers they had always gotten along with just fine before. Their general attitude calls to mind Reagan’s famous quip about the nine most terrifying words in the English language: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” They had been told, thanks but no thanks, the government has got this under control, go away. Fine then, we leave you, in your infinite wisdom, to it. His father was in a sulk about it.

  Meanwhile, Vixen got back to work. Throughout that day, he felt himself in an awkward place, pinched between conflicting responsibilities. He had grown up in precisely this area of the Ozarks, and he knew it far better than the people who were in charge of the mission; however, he wasn’t specifically trained in search and rescue, and as a military lifer he knew his place in the chain of command and wasn’t in a position to question the decisions of the people higher up in it who had more expertise in this kind of work. But his gut instinct nagged at him about the trained search-and-rescue guys’ faith in the efficacy of CASIE III’s algorithmic data crunching: { [ (six-year-old girl) + (point last seen) + (weather) + (map of terrain) ] + [absence of evidence of her having fallen off the bluff] } = highest-POS areas must be somewhere on the mountain on top of the bluff or higher. No one seemed to be entertaining the possibility that Haley had somehow gotten down the mountain and into the valley. No one was searching in the low ground. “As a liaison guy, I wasn’t going to point out that, ‘Hey, I think she’s gone down,’ ” Vixen told me. “And I’m not belittling anything they were doing in the patterns, but we weren’t getting down deep, or very far away from the starting point. And I know that Dad and William Jeff hands down knew that area as well as anybody that was out there. So Monday night, I grabbed the chaplain. I said, ‘We’re going to the house, grab a quick bite to eat, take a shower.’ I was going to convince Dad to come back. Of course he’s pretty stubborn. He got his feelings hurt ’cause he got turned away. I said, ‘Dad, you gotta come back. You gotta go down deep.’ And he said, ‘Well, we’re not goin’ out there to check in.’ I said, ‘You ain’t gotta check in.’ Which was against the rules, but I told him, ‘You can go up and park at the campground. That’s where you need to start out anyway, and run that creek.’ He got on the phone with William Jeff and said, ‘We’re loadin’ up at daylight.’ And William Jeff said the same thing, about not wanting to check in. And Dad goes, ‘We ain’t checkin’ in.’ ”

  Here we come across another seemingly irreconcilable factual disagreement between George Stowe-Rains and Vixen James. George said he remembers that Lytle James and William Jeff Villines arrived at the Command Center at the church on the morning of the third day—Tuesday, May 1—and told the officials there that they planned to search down by the river on mules. He remembers having a conversation with them along with Jeff West. “And we thought that was a great idea,” he recalled, “and we asked them if they would take a radio in case they did make a find, they could radio us. They did not want a radio. And they left.” George remembers the conversation, remembers offering to give them a radio, and very distinctly remembers their refusing to take it for mysterious unstated reasons. Vixen, on the other hand, said that his father and William Jeff set out on their own that morning without trying to check in with Incident Command or communicating with anyone. There you have it; I simply feel I have to raise this caveat before continuing to narrate Vixen’s version.

  Early in the morning on Tuesday, the first day of May 2001, Lytle James and William Jeff Villines packed a bunch of snacks they thought a six-year-old girl might like—little plastic tubs of chocolate pudding and, weirdly, some bottles of Diet Coke—plus a camera, loaded two mules named Copper and Big Mama into a horse trailer, and towed it with Lytle’s truck to the parking lot at the trailhead just off the east end of Cave Mountain Road for the trail that leads to Bat Cave (where Confederate soldiers used to mine saltpeter-rich bat guano for gunpowder; don’t look for it now—the cave is officially closed to prevent human contact from spreading white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease affecting the endangered bats, and the trail leading to it is gone). On muleback they descended from Bat Cave Trail down a steep embankment to the Buffalo River and began making their way through the valley alongside its north bank.

  Some months after all this happened, Dateline NBC aired an episode about it, in which the tan, slim, handsome Dateline NBC anchor Rob Stafford interviewed them sitting on some rocks beside the Buffalo: two aging men, clean shaven and heavyset in button-down shirts, Lytle wearing an Arkansas Razorbacks cap and William Jeff in a forest green cap with mesh sides and the white lettering “Villines Hill Farm” across the front; the interview includes this mildly hilarious exchange:

  Lytle James: When the government gets involved and the news media gets involved—you know, we didn’t want to go gettin’ mixed up in that. We didn’t know what they was plottin’ out, but we knew what we could do.

  Rob Stafford: You’re saying you have more trust in yourselves than you do in the media and the government?

  [Awkward pause]

  William Jeff Villines: Well, for one thing, they was tellin’ you where to hunt.

  Leaving aside that one hears in the sheer incredulity of Rob Stafford’s question a splendidly myopic prophecy of twenty years of red/blue culture war politics to come, there is a telling difference between what the trained search-and-rescue experts were doing and what Lytle and William Jeff were doing, implicit in William Jeff’s choice of verb: hunt. The skill that Lytle and William Jeff brought to the search was the one they had honed over many years tracking game in that same wilderness. They were, essentially, tracking an animal: a four-foot-tall, forty-nine-pound, six-year-old female Homo sapiens. You can also hear it in another comment William Jeff made during the Dateline NBC interview: “We got to thinkin’ that, well, if anything’s wounded or anything’s lost, most all time they’ll go down to the river.” And he told Tim Ernst, “You won’t find the game if you don’t have any sign.” Because Lytle James died in 2017 and William Jeff Villines was recently debilitated by a severe stroke, I am forced to rely on sources who interviewed them at the time, and Tim Ernst’s account in his self-published book The Search for Haley: An Insider’s Account of the Largest Search Mission in Arkansas History is the fullest. “Sign,” he wrote, “can be anything from tracks to scat to pawed areas in the dirt, or even broken branches where an animal—or a little girl—has passed.”

  Lytle James and William Jeff Villines were at home and in their natural element on muleback in rugged and difficult terrain—in these woods, on the bank of this river, in these mountains, in this vast wilderness. The two men—both of them grandfathers by then—had been born and bred here with a century of bloodlines behind them—this wilderness was where their fathers had taught them to hunt and they had taught their children to hunt. A place where one can swivel from twelve o’clock back to twelve o’clock without seeing a single man-made object might look like chaos to most people, but to them the wilderness abounded with information; they knew every faint game trail and inlet of the river and had personal memories of specific trees, all in warm human connection to everyday life and to their childhoods. Their eyes could see subtle patterns and clues invisible to a stranger to these woods—or to helicopters with heat sensors, or the algorithms of computer programs.

  The two men on mules clopped along the bottom of the bluff line above the north bank of the river through dense foliage from early in the morning until the early afternoon, passing through Dug Hollow, beneath Tim’s cabin and Hawksbill Crag, and then went down to the river where Whitaker Creek feeds into it. At around one thirty they rested briefly on the bank of the Buffalo to eat lunch and let their mules drink from the river. Then they turned around and headed back in the direction they’d come, continuing to search alongside the river. They had been out all day without seeing any kind of sign, and by that point they were beginning to grow doubtful they would find Haley.