At day break, I tell Rosario my concerns: "?Necesitamos aqua? Alli hay." (Do we need water? It's there) I say, pointing to the Buck Mountains. "No," he says confidently- He marches on, leading his cousin Marcelino and two friends Armando and Guillermo across the trailless desert, guided by the distant landmark of Mohawk Peak North. I run after them, the Nikons and water jugs bouncing on my sweatsoaked t-shirt, and think to myself

maybe there is a chance we can make it to the interstate if we hold this brisk pace till 11:00 AM, lay up in the shade, then break for the blacktop under the cover and coolness of darkness.

But that notion is dispelled when we reach the Mohawk Drag, our fourth Border Patrol drag road thus far. Rosario tells me we must hide until La Migra passes. Then we can cross, and my companions will carefully brush out our footprints with the branches of a creosote bush.

Sitting in the burning white sand, I am struck by my companions' heroic journey. They have fled poverty-racked colonias in hopes of providing a better life for their families. They've criss-crossed dangerous smuggling routes used by ruthless drug cartels. They are braving the Camino del Diablo's fearsome heat that, by century's turn, had claimed the lives of 2,000 people, many of them Mexican nationals en route to the California goldfields during the 1850s. And they are walking across a "hot," or active gunnery range strafed and bombed by F-15s, F-16s, A-10s, Harrier IIs, and littered with unexploded ground ordnance. But their greatest fear, other than La Migra, are las viboras, rattlesnakes. They talk about both with the same contempt. I just listen. I don't tell them it's too hot for the cold-blooded pit vipers. Nor do I try explaining that Border Patrol trackers, (and their helicopter borne BOR/STAR rescue team of emergency medical technicians), have saved over one thousand people during the last year who wouldn't have made it out of the desert borderlands alive.

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