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The prints were shallow and had been scrambled by super-imposition; it took McCarson about thirty seconds to disentangle the tread designs and stride lengths and foot sizes. I couldn't find a discrete print. "Group of five," he said: ru
If drag prints aren't decisive, trackers examine a group's sign along the first stretch of trail, wary of the corrosive or stabilizing effects of weather and terrain-hilltop wind withers prints; damp arroyos embalm them-and noticing things like insect crossings and preservative soil composition and raindrop cratering. Every left-behind object is a potential timekeeper. There are rare, unambiguous tokens: jettisoned cans of beans that ants haven't yet noticed, sunlit Kleenex still clammy with mucus, fresh bread crusts on a hot, clear day. But most often agents encounter noncommittal objects-desiccated bread crusts in full sun which could be two or ten hours old.
Swinging the shepherd's cane he uses as a tracking aid, Mc-Carson started cutting. Just beyond the drag was a strip of mesquite scrub, and then freight tracks on a high gravel embankment. In the scrub, the prints disappeared abruptly, as if the group had been choppered out. But McCarson read a carnival of sign through the scrub and followed a sequential displacement of gravel up the embankment. He pointed to a railroad tie and kept going. Possessed by the live trail, he couldn't pause to explain.
I sat down and studied the tie. It looked like every other tie. I began shifting position relative to the obfuscated sun. Eventually, three stacked ws of discoloration, collectively the size of a half-dollar, shimmied into view.
On the other side of the tracks, McCarson was standing in front of a fence, methodically locating the crossing point with his cane. Beyond the fence, the mesquite gave way to scrofulous pastureland. The wind picked up and a stop-start drizzle began. Any moderately heavy rain melts sign, toughens vegetation, and hardens the arid earth. McCarson walked along the edge of the scattershot grasses for a while, hesitant, and then accelerated.
He was mainly scrutinizing stalks of buffalo grass and curly mesquite grass and king ranch bluestem. The group had pressed the grasses forward. Now at a vestigial angle, the stalks reflected the light more directly, like opened compact mirrors, whitening it. Mc-Carson described this effect later; for the moment, my experience remained completely secondhand-even after he had amplified the sign by walking right over it, my glances fell nowhere.
I could see that moisture had strengthened and limbered up the grasses: instead of breaking and lying inert after receiving their foot-blows, which makes for the brightest reflection, they had been rebounding in slow motion for many hours, and had nearly regained their posture, although adhering rain droplets now pulled them down like sinkers and a jittery wind ceaselessly repositioned them. Under the dingy, dropped-down clouds, the reflective power of the grass was negligible, and the rainy light shrank the color differences.
The mesquite thickened; the grasses faded out; the static of drizzle hardened the ground and corroded the sign. "This is some tough cuttin'," McCarson said, neutrally. The terrain was too stingy for prints, but the walkers had scored the earth with the soles of their shoes, and McCarson was following the scuff marks, which were often the size of fingernail clippings and about as much lighter than the surrounding earth as a No. 2 pencil is lighter than a No. 1.
In cow shit or ant-processed dirt or hoof-crushed earth, Mc-Carson found fractional footprints. Largely dismantled by drizzle and generally separated by a quarter mile, they were about the size of suit buttons. For retracing purposes, he marked them by scraping a line in the adjacent dirt with his cane. He kept moving and held the silence of his concentration, but there was satisfaction in the absoluteness of the stroke and the granular conclusive sound itself: shhhick!
The ground was still hardening; the rain-erosion got worse. McCarson slowed, occasionally bending down a little and poking something diagnostically with his cane, but he never crouched and almost never came to a full stop.
"Well, we're just suckin' on the hind teat on this one," he said. A minute later he said, "Oh, by God, that's them!" and accelerated down an alley of spectral sign. Five minutes later, he slowed again. "The odds of following these five are pretty slim in these ground conditions," he said. "We're losin' so much time just tryin' to stay on the sign, we won't really catch 'em unless we take a risk."
So we held their line and walked fast down numberless, seemingly uninstructive trails. McCarson's trail choices appeared to be random, but he was sensing the path of least resistance, relating it to the group's hypothetical line of travel and behavioral tendencies, and occasionally seeing candidate sign. A few times, where the ground turned permissive, we swept perpendicularly back and forth, hoping for trapped sign. After fifteen minutes, McCarson said he was begi
We walked windingly for maybe a mile. Suddenly McCarson stopped, reached down, and picked something up. All the quick walking had reminded me that we were operating in undifferenti-ated wilderness the size of two Rhode Islands. McCarson stood and opened his palm. In it was an aspirin-size mud clot distinguished by a sole-honed ridge with a strict curvature. He handed it to me and kept going. A ludicrously deteriorated trail of disturbance had nonetheless held its integrity, in McCarson's eyes, for about five miles. The clot seemed talismanic. But we never got a forward cut, the weather didn't improve, and the trail died.
"We never know who we're go
"Our real effectiveness is in actin' as a screenin' mechanism- we're a deterrent, which is not something you can really see out in the field, and some agents that might not love tracking get really hung up on that. They can't get over it, and they turn into sorry, disgruntled agents. What this job boils down to is desire-you started with a hundred sets of tracks on your drags, and you're trying to get ten. It's not a factory job-there's no boss, you're not stamping out x number of product. What determines that you should try to catch those ten when ninety are already gone? I know what you really wa
McCarson grew up working on his grandfather's ranch, outside Comstock, which is about fifty miles northwest of Brackett-ville. The ranch didn't keep him entirely busy; as soon as he was old enough, he began hiring himself out to bigger local ranches, where he worked through the daylight hours and then traded money at cards and dice in bunkhouses until he could spend it in town on his day off. He never felt a desire to leave southwest Texas. He studied government at Angelo State University, but by the time he graduated livestock-raising in the region had lost most of its commercial viability.