KEY POINTS:
On the eighth day, Terry Penfold - starving, hypo-thermic, with flies hatching in the gash on his head - quietly picked himself up from under the pine trees and walked 3km in his underwear.
He found a house where the doors were unlocked and the people were gone.
He sat down and waited.
Pure luck, reckons Gisborne Sergeant Gregory Lexmond. He likes telling this story.
"Judging by the state of him when we found him... He only had his underpants and a singlet on... There were southerlies setting in. If he'd have been in there another night I'd presume the worst."
Penfold's brother and sisters thought the Tolaga Bay man was dead. They had last seen him at a family funeral on April 4 - for a favourite uncle of Penfold's - where he had an argument and drove off.
His sister, Memory Cornelius, said they assumed he was headed back to his aunt's house in Wairoa.
But instead Terry, 52, who has bipolar disorder, drove his Rav4 to the steep clay tracks of Paroa Forest.
On Wednesday past his family's first advertisement appealing for sightings appeared in the Gisborne Herald.
"That night we had a ring from a forestry worker who recalled seeing [his] vehicle," Lexmond says.
The search for Terry started in earnest on Thursday morning.
Fourteen searchers were sent in to scour 3sq km of thick forest, steep cliffs and creeks.
Searchers first found the Rav4. A couple of kilometres up the track, Penfold had driven straight at a chainsawn gap in a felled log. Both door panels buckled - he was wedged, stuck but then he barreled out the other side and over a bank.
Police think he slept on the ground, and used the car for shelter. Police found mud on the headrest and the seat, and an indentation where he had rested on the ground.
Penfold was lucky: for the next week the weather was kind.
Police also found the place, about 200m from the car, where he fell 5m into a dry creek bed.
Then a police dog started to find pieces of clothing - a pair of trackpants, a hat, shoes, spread over a 200m radius around the car.
Finding clothes is not a good thing.
"Hypothermia," says Lexmond. "You look towards thinking you're going to find a body at the end."
Then they found his jacket, won in a fishing competition and a favourite of Penfold's, under the pines.
But while the searchers had their eyes on the ground, looking for a dead person, Terry was sitting, waiting, in a farmhouse 2km away.
He had sustained a puncture wound to his leg, cuts all over his bare feet. Over following days a severe laceration in his head became flyblown. Penfold didn't have the energy to brush the flies away.
He was very hungry and told rescuers he had not eaten during his ordeal. He'd clearly lost a lot of weight, say police.
The owners of the house hadn't locked up when they left that morning. They came home at 4pm to find a man in his underpants, waiting inside.
They called for medical help and Penfold was taken to Gisborne Hospital, where he is currently being psychologically assessed.
Cornelius says the family had never known what to call his "episodes". He hadn't told them he was bipolar; he had a partner and children to other women, but was a man alone much of the time.
The family had sat hunched around the phone all that Thursday.
They had been up to check the forest hills earlier in the week, thinking that maybe he had gone back to the scene of childhood memories, or was trying to emulate Christ's vigil on a mountaintop.
But, nothing.
"We had sort of given up hope, but we never lost faith," Memory says.
"We never heard, all day. Then [police] rang me up when they found him, about 5pm... We were really, really rapt and overjoyed that he came out of it alive.
"Terry has always been very strong, and I think that's due to being into judo," she says. "Mind over matter."
