Shadow Wolves Stalk Our Southern Border

TOHONO O’ODHAM INDIAN RESERVATION, Ariz. –

The alert sounded in John Bothof’s patrol truck shortly after midday.

Somebody has stepped on the side of a road. Somebody whose footprints said he was up to no good.

“See how deeply the rim of the shoe sinks into the sand?” Bothof, a Lakota Indian from the Black Hills of South Dakota, crouched by the print together with his partner, Carol Kirkpatrick, a Navajo from northern Arizona.

“It means he had a load,” the track reader looked up. “Probably a backpack full of drugs.”

The prey has revealed itself. It was time for wolves to go on a prowl.

The Shadow Wolves, a unique all-Native American tracking team employed by the Department of Homeland Security to hunt down drug smugglers.

There are only a dozen of them in the whole country, members of different tribes, who have learned and preserve the ancient skill of reading the Earth’s private diary.

They have been working on this sprawling reservation southwest of Tucson since the early 1970s, intercepting loads of illegal drugs heading from Mexico to the United States.

Now that border security has finally moved to the forefront of the national agenda, their job has taken on added urgency and importance.

The radio in Bothof’s truck now spewed a steady torrent of coded traffic. The Wolves were getting oriented and gathering into a pack.

“There are probably six of them. We have a good count,” the voice of Gary Ortega, a Tohono Indian and a nine-year veteran of the unit, crackled into the cabin.

The smugglers also revealed a degree of sophistication. They did not cross the road all at the same place.

Their tracks brought other bad news. They likely had crossed about 12 hours before, in the dead of night and ahead of a rainstorm they knew would wash away at least some of the tracks.

The hunt began. It ...