A 4-year-old boy was lost for 6 days in the African wilderness. Against all odds, he survived

On Nov. 29, pilot Roan Carr-Hartley got a call that would send him on the most miraculous rescue mission of his career.

The chief of Assa, a village more than 50 miles from Carr-Hartley's home base in Tsavo National Park in Kenya, called to report that a 4-year-old boy was missing.

The chief told Carr-Hartley that the boy got lost in a thunderstorm while herding livestock with his brothers, and a team of 70 men from the village had been searching for him.

"A heavy night of rain had washed away the boy's tracks," Carr-Hartley tells TODAY.com.

"I didn’t know what the boy was wearing and had only a very rough idea of where he got lost, he added.

Carr-Hartley, 22, works as a pilot for a wildlife conservation group called Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, and he typically helps from the sky in wild animal rescues.

Working with the tracking team on the ground, Carr-Hartley started an aerial search about four and a half miles outside the boy's village.

"It was kind of a guessing game after that, because his tracks disappeared early on," he says.

Days passed and the rains continued, making for extremely difficult search conditions — and there was still no sign of the lost boy. Carr-Hartley says he started to lose hope.

"It’s hard to find an elephant, let alone a human on the ground," Carr-Hartley tells TODAY.com of the view from his plane.

Then on Dec. 3, Carr-Hartley says, the men on the ground picked up the boy’s tracks. On Dec. 4, he flew up to Assa to begin searching again.

Because of the great distance he had to cover, Carr-Hartley could search for only a limited amount of time each day before running out of fuel.

"I was given a very general area which was 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) north of the village, which is extremely hard to pinpoint in such thick vegetation in such a vast area," he says, adding he spent about an hour and a half searching from the air that day. "I started to get a little frustrated and rushed and knew time was ticking."

As he was making a turn back, Carr-Hartley looked out his left window.

"I turned and saw the boy. I genuinely could not believe it," he says. "I hadn’t even started looking for him, because I was looking for the ground team. I happened to turn at the exact moment and look out the left window. A tiny, tiny figure in this massive sea of shrubs and grass. It didn’t feel real at all."

With no ability to communicate with the people searching on the ground, Carr-Hartley began flying in circles above the boy. After 30 minutes, he saw the ground team approaching.

"I opened the left window and started pointing and they obviously knew I had something, so they started running to where he was," Carr-Hartley says. "There was an amazing moment where (one of the men) ran up to the boy and picked him up in the air above his shoulders and started cheering and smiling. Around 70 men descended on the boy and started chanting on the way back to the village."

The pilot, who has been flying for more than four years with the wildlife organization, tells TODAY.com that in addition to being alone in the rainy weather, the 4-year-old was contending with predators like hyenas and jackals. He also had a case of malaria.

"The rains actually benefited the boy in the end," Carr-Hartley says. "It’s such an arid area, there’s not many spots to find water out there and no food for six days, which is crazy for a 4-year-old child."

Carr-Hartley calls the boy's survival "a miracle."

"It’s a very unforgiving land, so it really is a miracle he came out so unscathed," he says.

While the search team walked the boy home to the village while singing songs of thanks and blessings, Carr-Hartley flew toward the village.

“I managed to find a spot to land on a nearby road near his village. I really wanted to see him and make sure he was OK,” Carr-Hartley says. “I showed his mother a photo of the boy and she burst into tears. She didn’t believe it was possible for her son to be alive.”

But Carr-Hartley tells TODAY.com he cannot take the credit.

“All kudos to the search party on the ground,” he says of the team of 70 who tracked the boy more than 11 miles over six days.

Carr-Hartley says the team of men slept in the wilderness each night and went four days without food while searching.

“They lost the tracks a couple times and at some points they were literally tracking his movement from long grass by looking at how the blades of grass were falling,” he says. “They were so determined and dedicated to this boy. They never lost hope. That’s the special thing about this story.”

Carr-Hartley says that the boy, Ayub, is doing well and the village has given him a new nickname.

"All of the people in the village are now calling (the boy) 'Pilot'," Carr-Hartley says.

Related video:

This article was originally published on TODAY.com