WINSLOW -- Leah Cuetara, the 9-year-old girl who spent more than 24 hours lost in the woods surrounding Mt. Abram, said she survived by eating wild berries and snuggling into a pile of leaves in the night.

Around 9:30 a.m. Saturday, Aug. 31, she set out on foot from a family reunion she'd attended with her grandmother in Salem Township, heading for the woods.

"I was going for an adventure," she said.

She found one, but it would be quite some time before anyone found her.

Leah started out heading for a somewhat familiar spot in the woods where she thought she could find some crabapple trees, but lost her way. As the day stretched on, she wandered through the forest.

When she realized she was lost, she started following logging trails and streams, trying to find her way back to civilization.

"I was looking for a stream, because Grandma said, 'If you ever get lost, you need to find a stream,'" Leah said in an interview in her family's dining room.

Leah, a thin, energetic blonde described by her aunt as a "little ballerina," wasn't dressed for hiking -- certainly not for camping overnight.

She was wearing Capri pants, skateboard shoes and a tank top. She also wore a sweatshirt, but lost it somewhere in the woods before dusk. The forest chilled as the sun set, and she realized she probably wouldn't make it home that night.

"I cried and cried and cried," she said. "It was really, really cold. I thought, 'No one's going to find me.'"

She found a pile of leaves near the stream and bedded down in it, but there wasn't enough material to do more than lie on top of them. As she dozed off and slept fitfully, wardens, police and a host of volunteers scoured the woods for her.

A real concern

"Right out of the gate, we were really concerned about the amount of time" that had passed since anyone had seen Leah, said Lt. Pat Dorian, a Maine warden who helped organize the search. "And that huge piece of woods -- it was as much as six hours before we even had any people out there looking."

As word spread that a child had gone missing, more than 330 people volunteered to help with the search, which encompassed a five-mile area around Fish Hatchery Road. This helped, Dorian said, but only to a limited extent, since most of the volunteers had no experience working with a compass or a GPS unit.

Leading the search were about 30 wardens, Maine State Police, six dogs, a plane from the Maine Warden Service, a helicopter from the Maine Forest Service and a plane from the Civil Air Patrol, as well as volunteers from several area fire departments.

Leah's father, Joshua Cuetara, a Clinton Police reserve officer who also works at Sappi Paper, and her mother, Christina, heard she was missing in mid-afternoon Saturday and went to the command center where the search was being coordinated.

"I've always been more protective of my youngest (Leah), because I almost lost her," her mother, Christina Cuetara, said, referring to difficulties stemming from a heart condition of Leah's that makes her more susceptible to infections. "I couldn't hold myself together -- I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat, I just kept myself going on coffee."

While the evening felt chilly to Leah, it could have been worse, Dorian said. Around 4 a.m. Sunday, the temperature was 62 degrees Fahrenheit.

Nudge in her side

At one point in the night, Leah said, she heard a noise and felt a nudge in her side from what she believes was a large animal. Dorian thinks she was probably dreaming, since most animals would have let her be, but he also said it wouldn't surprise him to find bear tracks in the area.

The search continued through the night. As morning came, wardens considered calling for help from their counterparts in neighboring states.

Leah awoke at dawn on Sunday, feeling ravenous. Somewhere in the woods she found blackberries, raspberries and blueberries and devoured them. The last meal she'd eaten had been breakfast Saturday, and she'd been hiking for miles. Dehydrated, she drank from the stream.

Hearing low-flying planes, she climbed a nearby mountain as high as 2,500 feet. She told Dorian she went high enough that she could see fields and a house below that resembled her grandmother's. She waved to the aircraft circling above, but no one spotted her.

Dorian said Leah's age and level of mobility worried him. Most children who go missing are in the 3- to 4-year-old range, and won't travel far. His fear was justified; Leah hiked at least two miles away from her starting point, and her wanderings on the mountain helped her inadvertently evade a rescue party that had been following the stream.

A sign that had fallen, and then been replaced, pointed the wrong direction and sent her further astray.

Noon passed, and Leah returned to Quick Brook -- after the rescue party had passed through -- and was washing off her shoes when she spotted an orange hat bobbing between the trees.

James Roderick, a semi-retired Winslow resident, had been vacationing with his wife, Karen, in their second home in nearby Madrid, when they heard about the lost girl.

The two of them began searching around noon Sunday. After a couple of hours, they were talking about stopping for lunch when they heard a little girl yelling for her grandparents.

Leah emerged from the brush, her clothes soaked and her skin torn from plowing through thorns and undergrowth.

'Boy, you're cold'

"She had scratches on her," Roderick said. "I took her by the hand there, going up the bank, and I said, 'Boy, you're cold.'

"And she said, 'Yeah, I'm all wet.'"

The couple gave Leah a safari hat, an extra shirt and three peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and chips. The food disappeared quickly, and ATV riders up the trail took her back through the logging roads to her family.

It was the end of a long, stressful weekend for the Cuetara family.

"I was dealing with my own emotions, but also, I was trying to keep my other kids from freaking out," Christina Cuetara said. "It was very emotional."

"Daddy's never cried before like that," Leah interjected.

"Yeah, Daddy's not the type to cry, but he dropped to his knees and cried then," her mother replied.

"Yeah, he squeezed me really tight," Leah said.

"I've been in emergency services for 18 years, and been in search-and-rescue for the majority of that, so I know they don't always have good turnouts," her father said. "I had my own fears the whole time that she was missing that I didn't share."

Joel Elliott -- 861-9252

jelliott@centralmaine.com