The Nation: How the Mountain Men Did It

You're born here and you go huntin' all your life. You know the sounds of the woods at night on a coon hunt.

Finally it becomes instinct. There are probably less than five people here who can read a compass, but they know every tree in these woods. So drawled Guard Bill Garrison, 45, last week as he described to TIME Correspondent George Taber how the Tennessee mountain men at Brushy Mountain prison flushed out and captured James Earl Ray in less than 2½% days.

The veteran trackers who scoured the hilly forests, the twisting...

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