BOWDOINHAM – Grant Thompson tried climbing a tree when he heard rescuers in a helicopter.

It was too high, though. The brush in the forest was too thick. And the 9-year-old was tired, having walked in circles for hours.

The rescuers kept coming, though. They gathered at the fire station, divided the forest into grids, and searched on foot. When darkness fell, they promised to search through the night. Another 400 people volunteered to search at daybreak.

But they weren’t needed.

Grant was found at about 2:15 a.m. Thursday. He was curled up on a patch of moss three-quarters of a mile from his grandparents’ home when he saw a flashlight. Then Grace, Game Warden Ron Dunham’s German shepherd, found him.

The boy was missing for nearly 17 hours.

He was cold and hungry, but he was all right. The worry was over

“I don’t have the words,” said his grandfather, Tharon Bowley. “You read in the paper that a boy is missing and you think, ‘That’s sad.’ But when it’s yours, it’s the worst feeling in the world.”

Grant had never wandered off before.

On Thursday morning, he was zipping around the yard like usual when he went into the woods with Bowley’s dog, a Belgian Shepherd named Megan.

That was around 9:30 a.m. Half an hour later, Grant’s family began calling out his name. They waded into the dense brush that surrounds the home.

Grant didn’t know the forest. He lives in Nashua, N.H., with his mom and dad, Sharon and Brandon Thompson.

His family searched and hollered.

“I said to myself, ‘This is too big for us,'” Bowley said. They asked for help. They called the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office. Volunteer firefighters from Bowdoinham and the Maine Warden Service joined in.

“By 12 o’clock, the place was packed,” said Sharon Thompson, Grant’s mom. Neighbors came, too, some bearing food for the searchers.

“I think every neighbor on this road helped,” Bowley said.

People divided up and methodically checked each area. A friend and neighbor, Randy Snodgrass, was among them. He traipsed through the trees and low brush and even fell into a stream while looking for the dark-haired boy.

A search and rescue team from Brunswick Naval Air Station searched the forest from the air but was unable to see through the dense trees. A team on the ground tried finding Grant with a bloodhound.

Again, they found nothing.

At his grandparents’ home on Thursday, Grant said little about those hours.

He had followed the dog, Megan, into the woods. But only a few minutes after his family began searching, Megan returned alone.

“She failed the Lassie test,” Sharon Thompson said.

Panic and joy

Grant tried to follow a path, he said, one of many used in those woods by all-terrain vehicles. But he became confused. He fought mosquitoes and tried to find his way back to his grandfather’s house.

When night fell, many of the volunteers came in from the forest.

“I was starting to panic again,” Sharon Thompson said. Then, she saw the wardens go back with their dogs. There were 10 teams in all. One promised her that she’d search all night if that’s what it took.

When the call came back at 2:15 a.m. that Grant was all right, the command post created inside the fire station erupted.

“There was yelling and screaming and yelping,” said Snodgrass, who never slept that night. When he found out where Grant had been, a spot known as Picnic Rock, he was stunned.

“We were there,” he told Bowley. “I walked by that place.”

Apparently, the boy had been going in circles, doubling back into places where the searchers had already looked.

Sharon Thompson said she will forever remember her son’s “big, beaming smile” as the warden drove into the command center lot.

The volunteers fed him peanut butter, crackers and Gatorade. When he returned home, he had pizza.

Sharon Thompson and Bowley say they were overwhelmed by the support of so many people

“There is no amount of words I can say in praise of these people,” Bowley said.

Grant says he will stay out of those woods “for a while.”

But his grandfather promises it will be longer than that.

“It’s a good thing I don’t have a ball and chain,” Bowley said.

dhartill@exploremaine.com