Making tracks
We're in the desert, south of Highway 87, not far from the Border Patrol station outside the reservation. "See this?" says Cross, pointing to a slight depression, half-filled already with afternoon shadows. "This print belongs to a horse-these, next to them, to a cow. How do you tell? Look at the frog in the center of both prints. See how they're different?"

I nod.

CPO Lambert Cross, at home on the Sonoran desert.

"Everything makes a difference when you're reading tracks," he says. "The time of day. Where the sun is in the sky. It's easiest to read them at noon, when the sky's directly overhead. In the morning, or late in the afternoon, when the light slides off the rocks and bushes in different directions, you have to compensate, to understand how the light and shadow affects what you see."

Before I can ask the next question-about the man, not the process-Cross points to a thread, a nano-fiber no longer than a cat's whisker, caught on a leaf and blowing gently in the wind. "See that fiber?" I see it. "When it shines like that, you know it's not natural. You know it's man-made, and somebody's passed this way."

How Lambert Cross came to pass his life in the service of federal law enforcement is another kind of information, intelligence plucked from a conversation that I know the tracker has had with countless other interviewers-the job, the danger, the intricacies of the work, and the kind of frontier adventures other people only see in the movies.

For Cross, the Border Patrol agents he works with, and the small band of Native American trackers patrolling the Tohono O'odham Nation, sudden shoot-outs, violent confrontations, and the prospect of death in the desert are standard fare. Even the youngest members of the team, new trackers recruited from the Tohono O'odham and a dozen other Native American tribes, quickly acquire the traits that set this outfit apart-a sensory alert system that works even when they're asleep, separating "normal" sounds from auditory signals that spell danger, and a seriousness that has to come from walking side-by-side with human tragedy.

"What do you find out there in the desert?" I ask Officer Cross, still pushing for particulars.

"Everything," he answers, his eyes focused on something far beyond my line of vision. "You see it all."

Early years
Lambert Cross says he's been tracking as long as he can remember. He was raised by his paternal grandparents, farmers on the Pima reservation, and he worked hard. But when he wasn't learning to use a hand plow to lay out 20 acres of straight rows for planting, he was playing with his friends in the desert that skirted the family's fields. "We didn't have toys," Cross says. "Or playgrounds with the kind of equipment kids have now. We had nature-wild pigs, rabbits, deer, and we made our own sling-shots to kill quail and doves."

Cross holds up a fist-"And we had this." He bends down quickly, and taps his fist into the dirt, changing the position of his fingers as he moves from one impression to another. "We played a game where we made our own tracks, imitations of the real thing, and we competed to see who could make the best 'deer tracks' or 'rabbit tracks' and who could recognize them the fastest."

I stare down at the hoof marks he's just sculpted into the sand with his fist. Cross points to an indentation on the far left and asks, "What kind of track is that?"

"A cow?"

Wrong answer. Cross begins to laugh, an unfamiliar sound, I think, out here in a place littered with broken liquor bottles, abandoned tires, and bits of torn clothing. Debris is strewn as far as I can see across the reservation, a dry rectangle of earth the size of Connecticut. A black boot sprouts out of a small dune of desert earth. Its angle makes you believe the owner lost it on the run, stepping out of the boot in mid-flight, running, maybe, from Lambert Cross or from Supervisory Border Patrol Agent Mark McKay, Cross' colleague. McKay is with us today, helping Cross reenact, for my benefit, a few hours in the life of a CBP tracker.

Cross looks at me, pulling me back to his original question. "What did I tell you about the 'frog'? How its size tells you this is a horse track and not a cow track?" Agent McKay calls us over to a gully a few yards away. "See those?" McKay says, pointing to what even I can see are human footprints. "These guys were wearing Adidas," he says. He points to another set of tracks: "These belong to the Border Patrol."

These trackers can differentiate even between the brands of shoes their owners wore as they passed through this gully. "It used to be easier to tell which prints belonged to law enforcement," says McKay. "Tracker and agents would cut V's in the soles of our boots. Sometimes you could even tell exactly which tracker-by name-had left the print. But we can still tell a lot-if the print belongs to a man, a woman, or a child. If they're moving fast or slow. If they're hurt. And all of this information, when you put it together, can tell us where they might be heading, and if they're dangerous."

I just see smudges in the dirt. Cross and McKay read people's lives.

Born to the job
McKay is younger than Cross, but he knows the game the tracker describes, and he vies with the older man at making the various "tracks" in the dirt. They stoop down over the sand, grinning, and their fists fly into different configurations as the "footprints" of deer, cows, and horses materialize in the dirt at their feet. McKay grew up on the desert as well, not far from Sells, in Ayo, Ariz.

When McKay was a kid, Ayo was even smaller than it is now, a place where Border Patrol agents represented order and professionalism. Like Cross, McKay didn't have a lot of toys or games to play with, but the desert, its occupants and his own powers of invention also transformed him into a novice tracker. Like Cross, he too grew up hunting wild pig, squirrels, rabbits, deer, quail and doves. On the reservation, there are no hunting licenses required and no prescribed hunting "seasons." Native Americans hunt for food, and it doesn't take long for them to discover secrets many sportsmen never learn-not to hunt rabbit after rain, when the meat is swollen with water, and to go after meat when it's "fat," after the animals have been feeding in a "green" season.

When Cross wasn't playing or hunting in the desert, he was working on his grandparents' farm, raising wheat, watermelon, sugarcane or beans-food they traded for other necessities-or he was trying not to fall asleep at his desk in the reservation school. "We worked so hard on the farm," says Cross, "that sometimes we ended up sleeping at school. The shoes we wore were always too big, so when we got out of school, we took them off and spent the rest of the time barefoot."

It was at the reservation that Cross's name changed. "My original family name was 'Bear Hand,'" says the tracker. "It was my grandmother's name. But it was common practice at the time for the school to give the kids names that were easier to remember, easier because they were non-Native names. I got the name "Cross" at school. It was a vocational school mostly, and we learned woodworking, plumbing, carpentry, sheet metal working, cooking, electrical work. I was good at welding . . . and eventually was certified as a welder."

Cross pauses, remembering. "That was good, because my dad was a diesel and gas mechanic, and I worked with him as a welder, working on car bodies and fenders."

Did Cross ever envision a future working in law enforcement? "I've lived my life one day at a time," he says. "But what I was taught, at an early age, was the importance of self-sufficiency."

"At my grandparents house, where I learned to hunt and to farm," says Cross, " I also learned to clean house, sew, and cook for myself-tortillas, popovers, everything. I learned to wash and iron my own clothes. " After he finished at the reservation school, Cross traveled to Alameda, Calif., where his plan was to work as an underwater welder.

What Cross didn't know was that before he could undertake that trade, he needed $500 to join the union. It didn't happen; instead, Cross enrolled in the New York Technical Institute in Oakland, Calif. He got a job working on Polaris missile inserts, and spent time at a rubber tire company. He was employed as a custodian, drove caterpillars, and did other odd jobs to pay his way through advanced training at the technical institute in Oakland. Eventually, he worked his way up from the lowest paid jobs to highly paid positions. He mastered languages-the language of his own Tohono O'odham tribe, the code-talk of the Navajos, and Spanish.

When Cross finally returned to the Nation in the 1960s, he took a job as a police aid, working on accident reports, mainly, and proving what had by that time become a talent for versatility-he did whatever had to be done. He soon secured another position at the Mt. Lemon Federal Youth Camp, a minimum security facility not far from Sells. Two years later, he returned to the Nation, taking a night job as jailer, working days as a butcher.

Cross's perseverance paid off: in 1968, he became a full-time highway patrolman on the Tohono O'odham Reservation. In 1972, after four years in local law enforcement, a Customs agent approached Cross and asked him if he'd like to take on some Customs work on the reservation. For Customs, the problem was a significant one: merchandise from the U.S. was moving over the reservation into Mexico for resale, and the "entrepreneurs" who were moving it weren't paying duty.

When Lambert Cross said "yes" to this latest opportunity, he didn't know it would change his life. He hadn't yet met Sgt. Stanley Leston, the original "Shadow Man," and he couldn't see down the road to 2004, when he would be the last of the original seven members of the Shadow Wolves to retire from a new organization called U.S. Customs and Border Protection. But if you ask him, he will tell you it wouldn't have mattered. It was, as any of the Tohono O'odham will confirm, his destiny.

Shadow Wolves
The group of seven Customs patrol officers who came to be called "the Shadow Wolves" took that name in honor of the group's supervisor, their main man, Stanley Liston. Liston, who'd worked for the local police department before joining Customs, earned a reputation as a quiet, relentless tracker, a man who could sneak up on criminals without their even knowing "the Shadow Man" was there. But Liston wasn't just quiet-he was also determined. Lambert Cross can vouch for that, because when fellow CPO Glen Miles was murdered by smugglers in 1986, it was Cross and Liston who tracked them all the way to the Mexican border. Cross recounts the story almost in a whisper, emotion, even now, 18 years later, breaking through his recollections.

Lambert Cross also remembers another time, when a child was lost in a place called Covered Wells. "There was nothing there but rock," he says. "They brought in the hounds, but nothing happened. They brought in outside trackers, but that didn't work. Finally, our group got a chance to look for the boy. We focused only on tracking, only on the tracks themselves. We worked through the night, and we found him. Alive. That was one of the times I like to remember. We saved someone's life."

If Cross likes to recall an operation that ended cleanly and successfully, it might be because so much of the work the Shadow Wolves undertake involves violent criminals, overlapping jurisdictions, and uncertain ends. The group, now 22 members strong, faces extraordinary challenges, sudden emergencies that may keep them in the field for hours or days.

They get the call that traffickers are running across the desert, and they go out immediately, in shifts, in teams, to reenact a choreographed search: two trackers, Team A, discover a line of footprints at one point, 5 miles south of the highway, while a second pair of trackers, Team B, tries to pick up the same line of tracks a mile or two ahead of them. If Team B succeeds, the group can 'leapfrog' down the line of tracks, saving time and energy. They go out armed, carrying 45 Thompsons, M-3 carbines, 45 caliber side arms, 357 Magnums and Glock 9's. They also carry water, survival gear, and flashlights. They use the North Star as a compass. And even when it's not their "team" that finally homes in on a target, the news of an apprehension, crackling over the radio, makes all the hours spent in the cold night desert or under the hot noon sun worth it. The victory belongs to them all.

Shadow Wolves in Eastern Europe
The reputation Lambert Cross has earned as a tracker has traveled around the world. So it was only a matter of time before Cross and his group followed the stories. Since 1972, Cross has traveled to the Baltics, to Central Asia and to the former republics of the Soviet Union to teach ancient tracking skills to enforcement officers in pursuit of new gangs of smugglers trafficking in merchandise even more dangerous than drugs-weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Lambert Cross has traveled to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to train customs officials, border guards, and national police. He and his colleagues, CPO Officers like Guy Ortega and Kevin Carols, have also trained officials in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Cross likes to recount the story about how these foreign "trackers" always bring dogs with them: "They're always surprised," he says, "when we tell them you can work without them. You just need to know what you're looking for. How to track over dirt, through water, over rock, across the snow and ice."

Cross is a sophisticated traveler and something of an anthropologist as well. "There are Indians, you know, in Central Asia," he tells me. "Genetically, we're the same people. Their group just fell away from the main body that immigrated thousands of years ago over the ice bridge that joined Asia to Alaska. I was in a village in Russia, and this older woman offered to read my fortune. She said not to worry about things at home, that she knew I wasn't from there, but people were praying for me. She said 'I know you're an Indian, because I'm an Indian, too.'"

The man and the job
I have spent at least four hours now with Lambert Cross, walking across the Sonoran desert, and listening to stories about his work, his life, his friends, and his beliefs. If there is anything that I know for sure at this point, it's that all of these things blend seamlessly into Cross' world view, that his perspective doesn't allow for compartmentalization, and that the sense of mystery that he believes endows all of life with a larger purpose has also driven his 30-year career with the organization now named U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

He tells me he is a spiritual man, a member of the Nazarene Church, and that he's a musician as well-a member of a group that specializes in Gospel music-and his photo on the cover of several recordings doesn't seem in any way incompatible with his career in law enforcement. At one point, long ago, there was a darkness in his life, and the church helped him to get rid of that darkness and find peace.

Today, Lambert Cross carries some of the lessons he's learned on his face, a place that trouble seems to have left as somber as the desert hills and washes he loves. It's a landscape marked also by resolution, by a hard-won knowledge that, in the end, we do not have to understand the nature of evil-its what-for's and why's-to fight it.

Cross is scheduled to retire from CBP in March 2004, but that doesn't mean he intends to stop tracking or teaching the craft to other law enforcement personnel around the world. The veteran tracker is slated to visit Eastern Europe and Asia again, this time as a government contractor. Watch for him, maybe on television, maybe in the press. He could be walking on rock, or through water, but one thing is certain: his eyes, as always, will be looking down.