A translation of Henri Joris' "Le chasseur perdu dans la for\^et" (1980)

This is an English translation of Henri Joris’ article “Le chasseur perdu dans la for^et (Un probl`eme de g'eom'etrie plane)” that appeared in $ElementederMathematik$ v. 35 (1980) n. 1, 1–14. Given a point $P$ and a line $L$ in the plane, what is the shortest search path to find $L$, given its distance but not its direction from $P$? The shortest search path was described by Isbell (1957), but a complete and detailed proof was not published until Joris (1980). I am thankful to Natalya Pluzhnikov for her dedicated work and to the Swiss Mathematical Society for permission to post this translation on the arXiv.