TEXAS' PEYOTE HUNTERS STRUGGLE TO FIND A VANISHING, HOLY CROP

Harvesting Peyote Is Legal for Only Three People, and All of Them Live in Texas

Mauro Morales picks his way through mesquite trees and prickly pear
cacti. The 65-year-old cautiously steps around a thicket of
tasajillo, or rattail cactus, just down the road from his small ranch
near Rio Grande City. Tasajillo thorns stick you like a fish hook, he
says. Then there's the cola seca--the rattlesnake--another job hazard.

"We're far enough from a hospital that you probably wouldn't make it
if you got bit," he says in a quiet voice, as though a snake might
take his words as an invitation to strike.

Morales has been wandering through the chaparral for half an hour,
staring at the ground. He combs over small rocks with a stick.
Finally, he spots a greenish knob, sprouting out of the ground under
the tasajillo thicket.

"There's some medicine, right there," he says. It's a lone peyote
button, about an inch in diameter, way too small to harvest. It'll be
another five years before this peyote is mature. As he navigates the
hostile flora, he points to three more small peyote plants, all of
them too young to cut.

"I used to collect as much in a week as I now do in a month," he
says. "I don't know what's going to happen to the medicine."

Morales almost never utters the word "peyote." For him, the small
green-gray cactus is a sacrament with miraculous healing powers,
hence his word for it: medicine.

What makes peyote different from just about any other cactus in the
world is that it naturally produces mescaline, a psychedelic alkaloid
that can induce hallucinations lasting for days. It was mescaline
that opened what Aldous Huxley called "the doors of perception" to
"the divine source of all existence."

Before LSD, before Ecstasy, there was peyote.

Peyote and mescaline are both classified by the federal government as
Schedule I Controlled Substances. This puts them in the same legal
category as crack and heroin, drugs that, according to the Drug
Enforcement Administration, have "a high potential for abuse, no
currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States, and
a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance
under medical supervision."

Much recent scientific research contradicts the DEA's verdict on
peyote. There is little evidence of any adverse long-term effects on
physical health and virtually no evidence that it is addictive.

Still, harvesting and selling peyote is illegal for all but three
people in the entire country. And those three people happen to be
located in Texas, operating in a swath of South Texas between Rio
Grande City and Laredo.

These people--Morales is one of them--are called peyoteros, people
who make their living selling peyote buttons to the approximately
250,000 Indian members of the Native American Church. Only 20 years
ago, there were dozens of peyoteros in small towns along the border.
Now, two of the three still working are in their 60s. Meanwhile,
membership in the Native American Church is growing, and demand for
peyote is outstripping the limited supply.

For Native American Church members, this 70-mile stretch of land used
to be known as the "peyote gardens"--the only place on U.S. soil
where the cactus grows in its natural habitat.

"I talk to the medicine every day," Morales says. "I pray to it. I
know it works, and I want to help the Natives in any way I can."

In his 1976 doctoral dissertation, "Man, Plant and Religion: Peyote
Trade on the Mustang Plains of Texas," the geographer George Morgan
speculated that Hispanic traders first bought peyote from a Mexican
tribe called the Huichol. To this day, the Huichol harvest the cactus
during their annual 250-mile pilgrimage from their homeland in the
Sierra Madre to a sacred mountain in central Mexico. The pilgrimage
takes them four weeks by foot and along the way, in the desolate
Chihuahuan desert, they eat peyote, hunt deer and train a new
generation to become shamans.

The Huichol, unlike most tribes, were never quite conquered by the
Spaniards. They resisted Christianity and continue to practice an
animist religion based on mystical beliefs about peyote, deer and
corn. Morgan discovered that Mexicans brought peyote across the
border and started trading it with marauding Indian tribes from
Oklahoma in the late 19th century. These tribes then passed on the
cactus to other Indians to the north and west. Soon, Indians from
California were arriving in South Texas in search of the fabled peyote gardens.

Anglo authorities didn't look kindly upon the Hispanic-dominated
peyote trade. In 1909, a U.S. special officer named William
"Pussyfoot" Johnson bought up all the peyote in South Texas and
burned it. According to Morgan, the operation worked for almost a
year, until Johnson ran out of money. The Bureau of Indian Affairs
convinced the post office to ban peyote sent by mail in 1917, but the
ban had little effect since most Indians preferred to travel to the
peyote gardens themselves. The post office lifted the ban a few years later.

After these early conflicts, Anglos mostly shrugged their shoulders
and left peyoteros to their business, which was starting to flourish.
Indians from Oklahoma started arriving on the Texas-Mexican railway
with empty burlap sacks, which they would fill with thousands of
buttons of dried peyote. In some places--such as the now-deserted
town of Los Ojuelos--the peyote trade was the basis of the entire economy.

The peyoteros had a natural monopoly on their crop. Even though it's
illegal to cultivate, there have been sporadic attempts to transplant
the cactus to Oklahoma and New Mexico, all to no avail. In the United
States, peyote will only grow in the hot, dry climate of South Texas.

The peyoteros remember a time a generation ago when Indians camped
out and harvested their own peyote. "Back then, it was what we call
open range," says Salvador Johnson, another peyotero. "You could
harvest what you needed. At that time, ranchers were poorer than we
were. They couldn't even afford feed for the cattle. Now those same
ranchers are multimillionaires from oil and gas royalties."

Like many peyoteros, Johnson was a little mystified when peyote
suddenly became trendy in the late 1960s and into the 1970s. It was
during this time that the drug caught on among hippies and New Age
folk, largely through the works of Carlos Castaneda, an
anthropologist turned best-selling author.

Castaneda wrote a series of books about a shaman named Don Juan
Matus, a Yaqui Indian who took the anthropologist under his wing. Don
Juan believed that "mescalito"--a code word for peyote--was a vehicle
for self-knowledge. Through mescalito, Don Juan said, one could learn
how to fly and see beings in liquid colors. Under Don Juan's
tutelage, the rational academic learned how to become a sorcerer and warrior.

Castaneda's books were a phenomenon. The author, however, turned out
to be a fraud. He was denounced by fellow anthropologists for trying
to pass off a fictional character as an authentic source. In a cover
story in Time in 1973, the magazine presented evidence that the
author had lied about his background, including his nationality. None
of this, however, stopped the influx of peyote-seekers in the one
place in the nation where the plant grew wild.

Poachers started arriving, many of them Anglo hippies from the West
Coast. One of those poachers was Frank Collum (not his real name), a
hippie from Connecticut who had heard about the peyote gardens
through some Indian friends in New Mexico. When he first started
going to South Texas in the early 1970s, he would hop a fence and
camp out for a week.

Now, he doesn't think it's worth the risk of getting caught for
trespassing. Collum still goes down to South Texas, but his Indian
wife buys dried peyote from Salvador Johnson. (In addition to
belonging to the Native American Church, peyote buyers have to prove
they are at least one-quarter related to a federally recognized
Indian tribe.) Collum raised his son in the Church, going to meetings
that would include all-night ceremonies in a teepee. Those days are gone.

"Peyote is in jeopardy," he says. "You hear stories about it coming
from Mexico now. The ranchers in Texas have put up tall fences you
can't jump. Then, there are all the wetbacks and Border Patrol.
There's just too much heat.

"A lot of the Natives are real sensitive about the situation," Collum
says. "The supply will not meet the demand unless you can convince
the ranchers to cooperate. And the ranchers, they don't give a fuck
about peyote."

Ranchers used to be friendly with the peyoteros, who paid them a
small lease for access to their land. In recent years, as land prices
have skyrocketed and Hispanic immigration has boomed, Anglo ranchers
have come to view the peyoteros as a nuisance. According to Morales,
many ranchers would rather plow their fields to plant grass for
cattle feed than protect their native plants.

Salvador Johnson used to be a full-time peyotero, but now it's a
part-time job. Rather than fight the ranchers, he's started helping
them organize hunting trips. He also works as a general contractor
around his hometown of Mirando City, a hamlet about half an hour east
of Laredo.

"The big money is in deer hunting," says Johnson.

Mauro Morales remembers when it was possible to find massive clumps
of peyote growing wild. "There was medicine just a couple miles from
my home," he says. He grew up on the same street where he still lives
in a ramshackle, two-story pink house with a dirt driveway. As a
young man, he worked in the fields harvesting peyote for extra money.
The matriarch of the peyote trade, a woman named Amada Cardenas,
first showed him peyote in 1950.

"Natives call the big ones 'chief,'" he says. "And when they find a
chief, they get down and pray to it. Miss Cardenas showed me my first chief."

Morales says that it's getting harder and harder to find chiefs. The
only way to ensure the supply, he says, is greenhouse cultivation,
something he's discussed with botanists from around the world,
including a group from Germany that visited him in January.

But Johnson, the only remaining peyotero in the once-thriving area
east of Laredo known as the Mirando Valley, doesn't believe
cultivation will solve the peyoteros' problems.

"Even if we buy the land, we don't have control of peyote because God
put it here," he says. "We don't know how it grows, how it
multiplies. God will give us what we need, and that's it. He's the
one who makes the rain. He's the one who makes the peyote."

Johnson says that the tipping point for the peyoteros was the
mid-1970s. As ranchers struck oil and gas, seemingly worthless South
Texas scrubland became expensive. Many peyoteros found more lucrative
work in the oil fields. Others were getting old and retiring.
Stringent requirements for a peyote license, which include a letter
of recommendation from the local sheriff, stopped a lot of young
people from becoming peyoteros.

Johnson had returned from the Vietnam War and wasn't sure he wanted
to continue the family tradition. He quit selling for a while in
1976. "We were selling peyote and making a profit, but I had to make
sure I was doing the right thing for my family," Johnson says. "In
the late 1970s, there were so many drugs on the market we had never
seen before--angel dust, PCP, reds, yellows, blues. Then, the DEA
classified peyote as a Schedule I substance. There were a lot of
landowners who started to think peyote was a dangerous drug."

Johnson, a 60-year-old with a white mustache who looks like a
well-tanned Wilford Brimley, wasn't sure he wanted to be associated
with a drug most people thought was harmful and addictive.

"I said to myself that for me to continue doing what I'm doing, I
need to understand this drug," he said. "I needed to have an
understanding with my family that I was doing the right thing. I
wanted to understand its effects on health."

So Johnson went to visit an Indian he'd known his entire life named
Leslie Full Bull. For a few months, Johnson lived on a reservation in
South Dakota and got to see for himself the long-term impact of
peyote. He came away believing that the plant was a positive thing
for the community.

"I'm really involved with the Native American Church," he says. "I'm
so involved with it that I believe that I'm one of the smartest
people in the world about peyote. I've been to Montana, South Dakota,
North Dakota...Name a state, name a tribe of Indians that use peyote,
I've been there."

The real test, though, was a firsthand experience of peyote in a
Native American ceremony--a meeting.

"I got so involved in these meetings that the only way for me to
understand what this peyote does is to take it."

According to Jody Patterson, supervisor of controlled substances
registration with the Texas Department of Public Safety, peyoteros
have to follow the same rules regarding peyote as everyone else. If
they aren't one-quarter Indian and a member of the Native American
Church, it's illegal no matter if it was taken as part of a religious ceremony.

Johnson, who says he's "probably" part Indian--"most Mexicans
are"--has been taking peyote for "many, many years" and sees the
legal niceties somewhat differently. He says he takes peyote only
after it has been blessed by a high priest. He expects that the
Indians he sells to will do the same.

"I can only hope that you're using it the right way," Johnson says.
"Now, if I know you're using it the wrong way, I can report you and
you'll be arrested."

Martin Terry is a Harvard-trained botanist at Sul Ross State
University in Alpine who may be the world's leading authority on
peyote. He runs a small nonprofit called the Cactus Conservation
Institute, which is dedicated to saving peyote from extinction.

"I've become increasingly passionate about the conservation of cacti
in the past 10 years," he wrote in a recent e-mail. "I've personally
witnessed species becoming scarce in places where I had previously
found them to be abundant."

Terry is afraid that the natural habitat for peyote in South Texas is
being ruined by ranchers and poachers. "The problem is defined by
access to land," he says. "The peyoteros are Hispanic. They work
through family connections. More and more of the land is being bought
up by Anglo owners who don't derive any benefit from the peyoteros.
They don't give a damn about the peyoteros."

For the first time in history, Terry says, there's active patrolling
of ranch grounds. Ranchers have cut back brush to allow trucks to
ride along their fence lines. Ranchers want to protect against
peyoteros getting in and deer getting out.

The ranchers' hands-off policy represents a dilemma for Terry. On one
hand, protection against peyoteros will conserve the cactus. On the
other, it prevents Indians from getting access to their sacred plant.

"From the point of view of the plant, the only threat is
overharvesting," he says. "The fences and personnel that protect
ranch lands from would-be harvesters are the very opposite of a
threat, as the protected populations of peyote inside those fences
are the only healthy ones in South Texas."

Still, Terry is sensitive to the peyoteros and their way of life. He
considers Mauro Morales a personal friend. He wants to make sure that
Indians have access to their cactus, but that's getting harder and harder.

"Everyone I talk to, they say peyote is getting more expensive,"
Terry says. "The buttons are getting smaller. It's now about 30 to 35
cents a button. Ten years ago it was a third of that."

As a botanist, Terry thinks he's found a solution--buying up land to
protect the plant. But the price of land has skyrocketed.

"The only obstacle is the cost of buying a minimum of 2,000 acres of
South Texas real estate," he says. "That means we're talking about
something on the order of $2 million. For a relatively new 501(c)3
like the Cactus Conservation Institute, that's a fund-raising project
of enormous magnitude."

It's also a challenge raising money to save a plant that the federal
government considers a dangerous, addictive drug. But the biggest
obstacle for conservation might be the Indians themselves. Many
Indians are opposed to cultivating peyote in greenhouses. Their
opposition stems from a mystical belief in the cactus as divinely planted.

Alden Naranjo, a Ute who's been traveling to the peyote gardens from
Colorado since the 1960s, isn't too worked up about the disappearance
of his sacrament.

"Peyote predates Christianity by thousands of years," he says.
"Native Americans have their spirituality based in this sacrament. It
came north to us from Mexico. I don't think it will disappear. We've
used it for thousands of years, and it's still here."

Naranjo, like Salvador Johnson, doesn't want to see peyote grown in
greenhouses. He would rather see it imported from Mexico, where 90
percent of the continent's supply grows. For Native Americans like
Naranjo, the current crisis in the peyote supply is just the latest
story in a history of injustices.

"It's just the white man's greed," he says. "The white man wants more
land, and that discourages peyoteros. It's getting harder for us,
with stricter trespass laws."

It wasn't always like that in Texas, he says. "A lot of that land was
open. Before the oil speculators, land was cheap. Then the white man
with his European concept of ownership came in. There's just too many
white men."

There are, in fact, white members of the Native American Church.
Frank Collum is one, and he's been welcomed into meetings by Indians.
It took him a while to be accepted, but now that he's married to an
Indian and a veteran of peyote meetings, he feels like he's just as
much a part of the church as anyone. In the eyes of the law, however,
it is illegal for Collum--or any non-Indian--to buy or consume peyote.

According to James Botsford, an attorney who has been defending
peyote use by Indians for decades, there's a clear distinction
between Indian and non-Indian peyote users. The law, he says,
protects Native American Church members who can prove they have one
grandparent from a federally recognized tribe.

There have been recent challenges to the law on First Amendment
grounds. One case made it to the Utah Supreme Court, but the ban on
peyote use by non-Indians remains.

"I'm comfortable with the law as it stands," Botsford says. "There's
not enough peyote around to allow a broader interpretation of the
law. Indian people understand peyote to be the flesh of God,
something that the creator put here to help them pray."

A year ago, Mauro Morales started losing weight. He always looked
forward to February when busloads of Indians descended on South Texas
for meetings in the peyote gardens. Suddenly, though, he didn't have
the energy to go hunting for medicine with his sons. Morales is a
small man who has always weighed about 125 pounds.

"I was all skin and bones," he says. "I was down to about 97 pounds."

The doctors couldn't give Morales a clear diagnosis. They told him he
needed to rest, so he spent most of his time on the couch. When the
Indians arrived in February, they were shocked to learn that he could
barely walk.

"The Indians kept saying, 'We need you, we need you,'" Morales says.

One Indian from South Dakota called Morales and told him he would
come down to his place the next day. The man had been visiting
Morales for decades, and like many Indians, he had formed a
friendship with the peyotero. The Indian brought 20 people to pray
for Morales in his little peyote garden behind his house. In the
garden, Morales has clumps of old peyote--chiefs--as well as
ultrarare specimens of the star cactus, a super-potent, highly
endangered plant in the same family as peyote.

Morales' Indian friends often set up their teepees on his ranch about
half an hour outside town to conduct their ceremonies. This time,
though, the 20 Indians put the teepee behind Morales' house. It's not
the most tranquil spot for a camp-out. The neighborhood is abuzz with
ranchera music, crowing roosters and belching pickups. But the
Indians wanted Morales to participate in the meeting, which goes from
dusk to dawn with constant drumming, singing, praying and--of
course--peyote eating.

"I was so sick," Morales says. "I didn't think I could make it in the
teepee--you've got to be in there all night long. I got up at 5 a.m.
to go out. I didn't want to go back in. It's so hot in there, and I'm
sweating."

Still, he went back in. Morales, who had spent the majority of his
life working around peyote, had never used it. Now, with his Indian
friends praying over him, he took the medicine.

"I've only taken it when I've been real sick," he says. Days later,
Morales started gaining weight. He got off the couch and was able to
walk without pain. He's not sure how it worked, but he's convinced
that the medicine--along with the Indians' prayers--healed him. Now,
when they come back to Morales' place, he cuts them a deal, selling
them bags of peyote at $200 a piece, which amounts to a significant
discount from his regular price of $350.

"You've got to have faith in the medicine," he says. "Without faith,
it won't work."

Morales says he's seen the medicine work for others as well. The most
miraculous case he's seen happened when his brother was dying in the
hospital. A doctor called Morales to tell him the brother had two
days left. Morales started calling his family. At the same time, a
group of Indians was visiting him to stock up on peyote before
heading back to Arizona.

"One of them told me to write my brother's name on a piece of paper,"
he said. Morales wrote the name--Ajeo--and the Indians left. He
didn't ask the Indians' names because he didn't believe it would
work. "They told me not to worry because my brother wasn't going to die."

The family gathered at the hospital, thinking that it would only be a
matter of hours. Days passed, and Ajeo held on. He didn't die for
another six months. Weeks after the Indians left, one of them called Morales.

"He asked how my brother was doing," he says. "I said that he was
still alive. He said it was the medicine. They were praying for him."

Other terminally ill people have turned up at Morales' door, looking
for medicine. He would like to be able to help them, but if he deals
to the wrong people, Morales' license to sell peyote could be revoked.

"One woman drove here from San Antonio," he says. "She had been
taking chemo, and it wasn't working. Nothing had really worked for
her, and someone had mentioned the medicine. But she didn't have the
papers, so I had to turn her away.

"If you don't have papers, I can't sell to you," he says. Then, with
a little smile, he adds, "but I can tell you where you might find it."

As Morales explains the magical power of the medicine, he inspects
his supply. So far, business has been slow for the winter. It was
still deer season in early January and Morales couldn't harvest much
peyote if he wanted to. He sold about 5,000 buttons for December,
which means that he netted around $1,750. Subtract wages for his
handful of part-time workers, and it becomes clear that Morales isn't
making much money, even though the price of peyote has more than
doubled in the past 10 years.

He keeps thousands of buttons ready to sell. Stored in large wooden
trays behind his house, some of them are covered by tarps and others
by a makeshift roof. There's little security to protect his supply,
but he says he's never had a problem with theft.

Morales bends down to demonstrate his technique for cutting the plant
above the root so that it will grow back. He puts a button on a table
and cuts a slice open. He offers it to me to smell. He gives me a
little nod as if to indicate that I should try it. Without asking
permission, I take a bite. Morales smiles. It tastes like a dirty,
raw potato. The little button seems to suck all the moisture right
out of my mouth. Suddenly, it starts tasting spicy, like a raw
jalapeno. The feeling is intolerable, and I spit it out.

"Maybe you just don't have the faith," he says, winking at me.

Humberto Fernandez--known universally as Don Humberto in the village
of Real de Catorce, Mexico--eats peyote for breakfast. One
button--it's just enough to get him going for the day.

Don Humberto was a young Mexican hippie bumming around California in
the 1970s when he heard about peyote growing wild near a ghost town
in the mountains of central Mexico. As it turned out, the ghost
town--Real de Catorce--was close to his hometown in the state of San
Luis Potosi.

"I was hanging out in the esoteric sections of bookstores in
California and reading about the Huichol Indians and peyote," he
says. "I said, 'Wow, that's where I'm from.' I didn't know anything
about it growing up."

On a whim, Don Humberto moved to the town and started renovating a
colonial building a few blocks from the cathedral. He turned it into
a boutique hotel that catered to Europeans who had heard about
peyote. About 10 years ago, primarily through word of mouth, peyote
tourism in the town boomed.

Before he knew it, Don Humberto was hosting Brad Pitt and Julia
Roberts, who came to town to film The Mexican. He points to a corner
of his restaurant where Pitt ate breakfast every morning for two
months. Don Humberto, with his aquiline nose and stringy
black-and-gray beard, looks like a Hollywood character actor--the
classic ethnic bad guy. His involvement with The Mexican led to a bit
part in the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie, but his heart is
still in Real de Catorce, where he's the most recognizable face in town.

"I came here as a dropout," he says. "There was nothing in town when
I arrived. There was one lady on the corner who sold rice, beans and
eggs. That was it. People asked me why I was coming here, but I had a
dream, a vision."

About 90 percent of the town's economy revolves around tourism. There
isn't much to see in the town--an old church, some crumbling colonial
architecture and abandoned silver mines. The sacred mountain of the
Huichol, Wirikuta, is just an hour's horseback ride away.

While most of the locals embrace the new peyote tourism, it also
attracts some unsavory characters. On street corners, young men
harass foreigners for a "ride in the desert." For about $70, they'll
take tourists out to the peyote gardens below the mountains. It's
technically illegal, but no one seems to care much. As Don Humberto
says, peyote tourists are the core of the town's livelihood.

He's hoping that Indians longing for the lost peyote gardens of South
Texas will work their way to his little village on a mountaintop.
He's already seen a few relocate to Real. An Indian from San Antonio
bought a house and lives there part-time. Then Don Humberto and his
Swiss wife, Cornelia, met a group of Indians near the Four Corners
who promised to come.

"They said they had a vision that was leading them down here," says
Cornelia, who was attracted to Real 20 years ago, in part because of
peyote. "But peyote's not for everyone," she adds.

Cornelia and Don Humberto see peyote tourism as both a blessing and a
curse. When tourists first started arriving in big numbers, local
police preyed on them. "Police used to harass foreign tourists,"
Cornelia says. "They'd take watches and cameras as bribes. Now, they
leave everyone alone."

She says that there's an unspoken agreement that police will never go
into the desert looking for peyote seekers. "But," she says, "if you
take it out and get caught with it, you could go to prison."

The Mexican government also has ambivalent feelings about the foreign
influx. It has designated the area around Real de Catorce as a
protected natural and cultural reserve. Although the government wants
to promote tourism to the region, it also passes out fliers warning
peyote seekers that the collection and trafficking of the cactus can
be punished with up to 25 years in prison.

On the other hand, there's a long history of peyote's use as a folk
medicine in northern Mexico. Mexicans have been using peyote as a
cure-all for rheumatism, arthritis and other ailments for centuries.
They drink it in teas or rub it directly on the skin.

Martin Terry says that even here in San Luis Potosi--the peyote
heartland--the cactus is endangered. He says that the National
Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)--the biggest and most
prestigious university in Mexico--keeps GPS data on clusters of
peyote plants around the sacred area of the Huichol. Last summer,
someone ripped huge roots from the area. They squeezed the mescaline
out of the cactus and left the roots to die. He thinks it may be a drug cartel.

"Only six years ago, it was a place of great abundance," he says.
When he went back this summer, "there were just a few plants left.
Those that were of no value were left to die."

Frank Collum, the Anglo peyote eater and sometime poacher, says that
Native Americans should back off the Mexican peyote gardens. "If it
keeps going like it is," he says, "there'll be a war with the
Huichol. They eat an incredible amount of peyote. They've got their
own problems with the Mexican government."

One local from Real de Catorce, Juan Hernandez, makes his living
taking foreigners to the sacred places of the Huichol on horseback.
He charges about $20 per horse and serves as a guide. Hernandez is a
mestizo who lives in town, but he has close ties to the Indians.

"They call me before they start their pilgrimage in April," he says.
"It takes them about four weeks to walk here and when they get here,
I have firewood and food ready for them."

Hernandez guides three horses straight up a mountaintop to a spiral
of stones. It's not much of a monument, but the landscape is
breathtaking, with a view of the Chihuahuan desert stretching as far
as the eye can see. Hernandez says that this is the birthplace of the
god of the sun, Quetzal. He rubs coins across his body--it is a
symbol of cleansing--and enters the stone spiral. When he gets to the
center, he places the coins on a mound of other offerings. There are
old shoes, a driver's license, candles, and Mexican and U.S. coins.

"This is a place of spiritual renewal," he says.

Hernandez follows many of the Huichol practices--including peyote
eating. He prefers to mix it with chocolate or fruit juice so he's
not likely to vomit it back up. He likes it because it gives him
energy. He believes--like the Huichol-- that the peyote ceremony on
Wirikuta releases the shamans' spirits from their bodies. He's seen
their spirits flying around the mountains like large, colorful birds.

But he's not immune to the transformations going on in his hometown.
His eyes light up when the name Brad Pitt is mentioned. "He was so
cool," Hernandez says. "We all hung out with him for two months when
he wasn't filming."

Mauro Morales looks a little worried when he talks about Mexican
peyote. He knows that there's much more medicine on the other side of
the border, but he's not crossing the river to seek it out. Even
though he's a licensed dealer, transporting the stuff across the
border would land him in jail. And he's skeptical of the Mexican police.

"You don't want to get caught with medicine over there," he says. "In
Mexico, you're guilty until proven innocent. Here, you're innocent
until proven guilty."

Still, like many people following the decline of the peyote trade in
Texas, he hopes that, someday, he might be permitted to import peyote
into Texas. But time may be running out for him. Morales says that he
knew he was getting older when Indians started calling him "grandpa"
a few years ago.

Morales gets part-time help harvesting peyote from his sons in
February, when deer season ends and Indians start arriving. But one
son has a full-time job, and the other is more interested in his
hobby of cockfighting than in picking medicine.

Morales has his eye on his 14-year-old grandson Angel, who's doing
well in school and has good manners. Angel might be able to take over
the family business someday. But he's not sure. "The medicine might
be extinct in 25 years. Then everyone will have to go to Mexico."