LARAMIE - The 3-year-old son of the director of a dude ranch in the rocky, sagebrush foothills west of Wheatland was found unharmed at dawn Tuesday after wandering off from the ranch house at about 8 p.m. the night before.

Whip Longwell, son of the Flying X Ranch's new director Ame Longwell, was spotted in a hayfield about three-fourths of a mile from the headquarters, according to the owner of Cold Nose Investigators, a Centennial search dog company, who participated in the search for most of the night.

The boy "was scratched and dirty but otherwise OK," Curt Orde said.

Ranch hands and others searched for the boy for about 90 minutes before calling authorities Monday.

Albany County Sheriff's Lt. Michael Garcia coordinated the search, which continued all night. The ranch is located off of Halleck Canyon Road which runs west from the Sybille Canyon highway.

Orde brought his search dog "Moose" to the area at about midnight and the dog worked for four hours, locating scents indicating that the boy "had wandered from the yard into a corral area and then onto a road about a half mile from the ranch house. Moose helped the search by determining the boy had not gone into tack rooms, horse stalls, grain storage areas and had not gone down to the stream through the ranch."

Toward morning Moose stepped on a cactus, Orde said, and was taken back to the house to get the spines out and rest. When dawn broke, he said, sheriff's deputies or other searchers went up on some higher points and soon spotted the boy in the hayfield.

"Lt. Garcia turned to the boy's mom and said, 'We found your little boy,'" Orde said. "She was taken to the boy's location, and she brought him home. Everybody gave him a round of applause, and the lieutenant gave him a special deputy sheriff's badge."

Orde said an Australian shepherd stayed with the boy during the night. "At one point during the night the searchers saw a dog pass by, but it disappeared into the darkness and they lost him. The dog apparently returned to where the boy was and must have recognized the boy was in trouble."

This is the second child search and rescue operation in which Moose has participated in just over a year. In July 2007, Curt's wife, Cathy, was called to a location in the Sierra Madre Mountains west of Encampment where a 2-year-old toddler disappeared from his parents' trailer in the forested area.

Searchers had not located the boy for 4 1/2 hours when Cathy and Moose arrived on the scene. "Nobody knew which way the boy had gone," Cathy said Tuesday after she was contacted by telephone in Tennessee doing training with one of the company's other retrievers.

Moose quickly picked up the boy's scent, she said, and for 35 minutes he led her over ridges and across a creek about a mile away before pulling very hard to go down one slope.

"I removed the leash, and he plunged down and came out with a camouflage baseball cap that he dropped at my feet," she said. "He then took me down to the boy. I told the boy I was going to take him back to his mommy, and he hugged me tight around the neck."

The 8-year-old retriever won an award from the U.S. Police Canine Association for that rescue, Cathy said.

Curt Orde said Tuesday that time is of the essence when a child or adult cannot be found.

"Any time someone loses an individual, they should contact authorities immediately and request a canine tracker right away," he said. "That way we have the freshest scent to follow. Parents shouldn't be embarrassed to call and get a hold of the sheriff's office right away."