A 7-year-old boy who went missing Monday night was found safe Tuesday morning.
Multiple state agencies — including the Aroostook County Sheriff’s Office, the Maine Warden Service, the Maine State Police and the Aroostook County Emergency Management Agency — as well as personnel from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Irving Woodlands and volunteer searchers, were in northern Maine overnight looking for the boy, Tait Margison of Westmanland.
Tait went missing Monday evening after he and his parents, Kurt Margison and Sigrid Houlette, went out to look for the family’s border collie. The boy was reported missing at 8 p.m., and searchers used dogs and infrared heat-reading equipment to look for him.
According to Richard Bowie, director of Down East Emergency Medical Institute, a volunteer search and rescue organization out of Orono, the boy found his way to Westmanland Road and flagged down a passerby Tuesday morning at about 6:15 a.m.
The boy was found about a mile from his home, Cpl. John MacDonald of the Maine Warden Service said Tuesday evening in a news release.
Justin Falloon, a team leader for Down East Emergency Medical Institute, said the boy was in good spirits when he arrived home.
“He’s a farm kid. He knows the woods well,” Falloon said, adding that it helped that the boy was wearing rubber boots to keep his feet dry.
In a Facebook post, the Aroostook County Sheriff’s Office said that when boy realized he was lost, “He sat down and waited for daylight. He is a County boy for sure.”
Falloon said the passing driver recognized Tait, but the boy didn’t recognize the driver. When the driver first offered to drive the boy home, Tait allegedly told him, “No thanks, I’d rather walk back.”
Bowie described Tait as “self-rescued” and praised the boy’s good instincts. “He had the initiative to walk out and see the vehicle.”
Falloon said the dog was found safe at a neighbor’s home independently of the boy.
In light of the incident, MacDonald offered the following recommendation:
“Maine Warden Service wants to encourage people that while taking hikes in the woods to remember some basic safety tips. Stay together with your group if you have one, tell someone where you are going, when you will be back and where you are leaving from,” he said. “Fortunately this was a happy ending where we saw a small community come together with trained search and rescue resources to find a lost person.”
