How would they have lost sight of him?
Two sets of parental eyes can only keep track of two children at any
moment. There's also the
awareness thing -- not that long ago, people will still being brought up - learning of the weird and kooky
fairy tales about strange things that happened in the woods, of which The Brothers' Grimm
anthology is just one
loose example. There's variations as well, like the
Slavic Baba Yaga, or the
Celtic Sidhe, and the stories are usually wrapped up in several layers of moral teachings, not mentioning any preternatural warnings that they might have been originally intended for, like
Hansel and Gretel (luring kids to a spot in the woods, for "dinner").
If you really have to go into the woods with family .... I'd leash everyone together via a technique known as
short-roping, and go through the hike with parents at the vanguard/rearguard, with the kids in-between, so that there's literally no room for 3D mistakes. But that's not how these things go.
What most likely occurs is that many, many, many of these victims get mentally/psychically lured into these areas generally, or particularly, such that 4D transfer windows are easiest to attain. "Why do I have this
urge to go hiking this weekend -- Why do I
want to go to the bar and get drunk -- Why do I
feel like I need to go out of my hotel room for a walk in the middle of the night".... Others just develop habits of these behaviors that unwittingly and unknowingly puts them in environments with which they know little detail of.
That's the one thing that David is missing from his profiling work. He's got everything else, except for the victim's narration of why they went "hiking", or of what led up to, or happened, in the "nabbing". Dead men tell no tales, as they say.
