MEXICO – Children searching on bicycles Thursday evening for a missing Mexico youngster found him about a mile from home just as Mexico police, firefighters and a game warden were about to scour the Androscoggin River bank looking for him.

Scott Sage, 8, was missing for nearly two hours and was feared lost in the rain-swollen river that runs behind his 28 Dix Ave. home after his mother’s boyfriend’s 12-year-old daughter found his bicycle near the river.

“It was a nightmare,” Jody Sage said Thursday night of she and her family’s frantic search for Scott that also galvanized several neighbors and area children into action.

“It’s an awful, awful feeling. It was very scary. It’s nothing I ever wish to go through again, or wish on any parent. This was the first time that he’s ever done anything like this. He’s very grounded. He’s going to be house-bound for a while,” Jody Sage said.

She doesn’t allow her son to wander far from home, but the boy had taken off on his bike sometime before 6 p.m. When her boyfriend’s daughter told her that she’d found the boy’s bike minutes later behind the town sewage treatment plant pumping station, Jody Sage said she still thought he was nearby.

When the girl returned again and said Scott Sage hadn’t responded to her yelling for him, panic began setting in.

“I grew up in this neighborhood, in this house and we knew not to go in the river or near it, but the water’s high and things start creeping into your mind. We didn’t know if he was in the river or trapped under a branch. I don’t know how he didn’t hear everybody yelling for him. Half the neighborhood was out with us, knocking on doors,” Jody Sage said.

Relatives and friends fanned out across the neighborhood, hollering for Scott. At 6:55 p.m., she contacted Mexico Patrolman Dean Benson, who photocopied a photograph of the smiling boy wearing a soccer shirt and began passing them out to searchers and Rumford police.

By 7:28 p.m., Mexico firefighters were called in to do a hasty search along the river. Then, at 7:50 p.m., Benson learned that children had found Scott Sage and were taking him to his house.

“He was just a little muddy,” Benson said.

Before Benson arrived behind the fire station to confirm the boy had been found and call off searchers, though, two boys on a bicycle rode up to the firefighters, whose faces were taut with worry.

“They found him! He’s alive!” the two boys shouted to firefighters.

Jody Benson said her son told her he went down the Swift River bank. There, Scott Sage met a friend on a bike and walked with him along the river until the friend abruptly rode off, leaving him alone up past a local swimming hole near Intervale Avenue. That’s where children found him.

“Everybody was wonderful, just wonderful,” Jody Sage said of people who helped search.