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When you start to see sign, everything unrelated to the trail vacates your mind. Sign cutting is a vigil with no clear object: the sign mediums continuously reconstitute themselves. You often find valuable dominant indicators, but you have to will yourself to remain receptively nonpartisan; otherwise you'll steadily grow blind to divergent marks, and terrain changes will instantly cloak the trail.
Eventually, the microworld entrances: every plant has distinct attitudes and behaviors beyond the obvious-the way it holds its berries; carries and orients and discards its leaves; shrivels and responds to wind; bends with the weight of raindrops. Soil classes reorganize themselves uniquely after a rain. Rocks erode and array themselves in singular patterns. And color and form at that scale are infinitely variable: a cluster of scrub-oak leaves is a thousand shades.
But every medium has, beneath its variability, a composite architecture and a native range of hues, and this is what you have to see, because divergence from it is sign. If you remain rigidly zoomed in, you pick up the endless variations and they hypnotize you and veil the composite. You can't memorize precise schemes of coloration and structure-although the best trackers hold in their heads very good approximations of the hybrid aesthetics of scores of terrain types-but you can learn to see how particular facets of unadulterated landscape acquire a range of colors and shapes over time, so that when you look at a pasture or stream bank or anthill you grasp its physical essence and all its natural deviations, and interloping shapes and colors quickly declare themselves to you. When rain liquefies the ground beneath branch litter, the twigs sink and the liquid soil adheres to the million unique contours of wood and bark and stiffens into a perfect seal. Later, ru
After about an hour and a hundred confirmed sightings, the trail's autonomous sign began to cohere. First it was a stirring paraphrase of recent movement, and then an expression of willfulness pressed into the ground: the overarching intent of a journey. This filled me with an almost violent exultation whose energy was instantly focussed on the next span of information. I couldn't help experiencing sympathetic sensations: I'd see a sneaker-cracked branch and feel it breaking underfoot; I'd see a recently embedded rock and feel my sole bending over it.
McCarson gradually taught me to look for the identifying rhythm of the trail. Group size and behavior correspond to a certain frequency of potential sign; the potential is realized according to the receptivity of the terrain. If two people walk fast and abreast of each other over hard ground while concealing their sign, they'll leave transparent traces; if fifteen people ingenuously plod single-file over impressionable earth, they'll basically plow a new road. Our linear group of five was mainly concerned with speed; they didn't brush out on drags or attempt to walk along the hard edges of animal trails; they didn't bother to avoid print-trapping sandy soil. They didn't stop, and they left nothing behind. Without quite realizing it, I began to think of them as professionals, moving wordlessly in a kind of improvisational accord.
Ultimately, I began to see disturbance before I'd identified any evidence. A piece of ground would appear oddly distressed, but I couldn't point to any explicit transformation. Even up close, I couldn't really tell, so I didn't say anything. But I kept seeing a kind of sorcerous disturbance. It didn't seem entirely related to vision- it was more like a perceptual unquiet. After a while, I pointed to a little region that seemed to exude unease and asked McCarson if it was sign. "Yup," he said. "Really?" I said. "Really?" "Yup," Mc-Carson said.
McCarson experienced this phenomenon at several additional orders of subtlety. In recalcitrant terrain, after a long absence of sign, he'd say, "There's somethin' gone wrong there." I'd ask what, and he'd say, "I don't know-just disturbance." But he knew it was human disturbance, and his divinations almost always led to clearer sign. Once, we were cutting a cattle trail-grazing cows had ripped up the sign, which had been laid down with extreme faintness- and McCarson pointed to a spot and said, "I'm likin' the way this looks here. I'm likin' everything about this." He perceived some human quality in a series of superficial pressings no wider than toadstools, set amid many hoof-compressions of powerfully similar sizes and colors and depths. I could see no aberration at all, from five inches or five feet: it was a cow path. But McCarson liked some physical attribute, and the relative arrangement and general positioning of the impressions. Maybe he could have stood there and parsed the factors-probably, although you never stop on live trails-but he wouldn't have had any words to describe them, because there are no words.
A few days later, some agents were chasing a group of twelve who had crossed the river well after midnight. They had incised their tread marks on many powdered-up roads and drags-the chief identifier was "a motion wave with lugs around it in a horseshoe in the heel"-and tracking conditions in the brush were good, so at all points the line of travel was easy to establish and forward cuts came quickly.
As McCarson drove fast down ranch roads in quest of cuts, the radio transmitted updates: "I got 'em here at this deer blind-they got a real good shine on 'em." "They're crossing another road right here-hold on, there's some fresh toilet paper." "I got 'em laid up here in a real new jacal"-a branch shelter that illegal immigrants sometimes make-"and I got their campfire, still real warm." Around the fire were slick peach pits and cans with sardine juice in them-a scene so vibrant it was like seeing the group disappear around a corner. "This is lookin' like one of those rare story-book-endin' trails," McCarson said. "Just click-click-click-click."
Two cuts later, we were at the trail's apex, where six Border Patrol SUVs and about ten agents had converged. The sign described a sudden dispersal into opaque brush: the group had heard its pursuers and taken off. The agents were staring contentedly into meshes of mesquite. A green-and-gold Border Patrol helicopter appeared and dropped to about twelve feet above the thicket, raucously rotor-washing everything; it nosed around the mesquite for about three minutes, and then the pilot's voice came stereo-phonically out of everyone's radio, saying the group was thirty yards away, prone beneath an absurdly undersized camouflage tarp. The junior agents surrounded the hiding place and yelled instructions; twelve depleted men crawled out. The agents told them to sit in a row, perfunctorily searched them, and began discussing transportation arrangements. The captives were all young men; without speaking, they moved from vigilance to dejection to resignation. They received permission to eat, and pulled out Cokes and ca
When I was in southwest Texas, I watched Brackettville agents catch twenty-six people in five groups-all, except this one, by sensor or routine observation or accident. Every capture was quiet: no ru