SHADOW WOLVES TRACK HUMAN PREY, HALT DRUGS AT THE BORDER

TUCSON - They call themselves the Shadow Wolves.

They track their prey the old-fashioned way - through a broken twig, a hair
snagged by a mesquite branch, a fiber left behind by a bulging burlap bag.

Hour after hour, these silent clues lead the Shadow Wolves to their quarry:
smugglers who haul loads of marijuana, cocaine or heroin on foot or
horseback across the desert between Mexico and Tucson.

A U.S. Customs Service crew of just 19 American Indians, the Shadow Wolves
seize more than 70 percent of the drugs the agency finds on the 3
million-acre Tohono O'odham Reservation west of Tucson.

In the last six months alone, they've kept 40,000 pounds of marijuana and
cocaine off U.S. streets.

The Indian trackers accounted for nearly a third of the 180,000 pounds of
marijuana seized by Customs throughout Arizona last year, including the
border ports of entry.

They use the skills of a lost culture to attack one of the most pressing
modern crimes on the border. In doing so, they're preserving a link to a
warrior past.

Rene Andreu, resident agent in charge of the Customs Service investigations
office in Sells, Ariz., said that even among high-tech law enforcers, the
Shadow Wolves are highly efficient.

"We have the new technology, but that doesn't mean the new is better than
the old," Andreu said.

"As of yet, they have not devised a scanner or anything that can
electronically or mechanically detect the tracks of somebody going across
rough, harsh terrain."

The narrow trail was clearly visible in the early morning light as Gary
Ortega moved quietly through a dense stand of catsclaw, palo verde and
saguaro. A jumble of footprints marked the path as it descended toward a
wash along a slope of the Quinlan Mountains.

But the specific shoe prints the U.S. Customs agent was searching for - a
"running w" undulating pattern, a shoe with two ovals at the heel, and
another with a long wavelike pattern called a "lazy s" - were nowhere to be
seen.

Suddenly, Ortega stopped, bent low for a better look at the ground, then
pointed with the toe of his boot to a tiny shoeprint.

"The trail looks fresh, but it's illegals. We see a lot of them coming
through here. Sometimes they've got kids. We don't see many packing dope,"
the 27-year-old tracker said.

Ortega and his partner, Jason Garcia, 27, decided to try picking up the
trail farther south on a popular corridor west of the Baboquivari Mountains.

One of the biggest routes winds its way from the border west of Sasabe,
cutting through craggy ridges and deep washes of a desert lush from good
winter rains.

The trail is so heavily traveled that Customs officers call it the
"Hootchie Man" or Ho Chi Minh Trail - "you know, like the one in Vietnam."

The 18 men and one woman of the U.S. Customs Service's only American Indian
tracking unit patrol a reservation that shares 76 miles of border with Mexico.

Tohono O'odham land, the second-largest Indian reservation in the country,
has been a crossing point for smugglers moving goods and people into the
United States since the international border was created by the Gadsden
Treaty in 1853.

Chinese immigrants in the late 1800s, bootleg liquor during Prohibition,
and, more recently, cocaine and marijuana and huge numbers of illegal
entrants have poured into the United States along hundreds of footpaths and
dirt track roads that crisscross the rugged landscape.

Today's Customs trackers have night-vision equipment, high-powered radios
and Global Positioning Satellite locators to assist them in their work.

But these officers rely most on their ability to detect even the slightest
signs left behind by people and animals as they move across the land.

The trackers' skills are fading. But the Customs Service is working hard to
ensure they don't disappear.

Congress authorized the all-Indian Customs patrol unit 30 years ago to
foster better relations with the Tohono O'odham, a close society that
distrusts outsiders and intruders on their land.

When the first of the original members began to retire a few years ago,
Andreu said, agency membership was opened up to members of other tribes and
Customs stepped up recruitment.

Today the patrol unit includes Navajo, Lakota, Pima, Chickasaw, Oto
Missouri, Yorock, Kickapoo, Sacafox and Omaha.

By midmorning, Ortega and Garcia have spotted the "running w" and the "lazy
s." But the signs soon disappear inexplicably.

The two officers are joined by veteran tracker Cross and by Charmaine
Harris, 32, who had first spotted the tracks they were following near the
end of her shift the day before.

Within a few moments, Harris, the first woman on the team and its newest
member, confirms that these appear to be the suspects' tracks.

After looking at the crushed stems of plants disturbed along the trail,
Patrol Supervisor Marvin Eleondo suggests the group isn't too far ahead.

But the smugglers were now "walking underneath" a group of illegal entrants
moving along the trail behind them, hiding the important tracks.

"We'll try to jump ahead of them," said Eleondo, a 28-year veteran of the
Shadow Wolves. He says the group is patient.

"The other day we followed a trail for nearly 30 hours before we broke off.
Yesterday, the officers came up on the group and got 589 pounds and made
nine arrests," said Eleondo.

And like their namesakes, they will be back on the hunt tomorrow.