Chapter 26
Baby, this town rips the bones from your back;
It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap …
—BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, “Born to Run”
CABALLO BLANCO’S face was pink with pride, so I tried to think of something nice to say.
We’d just arrived in Batopilas, an ancient mining town tucked eight thousand feet below the lip of the canyon. It was founded four hundred years ago when Spanish explorers discovered silver ore in the stony river, and it hasn’t changed much since then. It’s still a tiny strip of houses hugging the riverbank, a place where burros are as common as cars and the first telephone was installed when the rest of the world was programming iPods.
Getting down there took a cast-iron stomach and supreme faith in your fellow man, the man in question being the one driving the bus. The only way into Batopilas is a dirt road that corkscrews along the sheer face of a cliff, dropping seven thousand feet in less than ten miles. As the bus strained around hairpin turns, we hung on tight and looked far below at the wrecks of cars whose drivers had miscalculated by a few inches. Two years later, Caballo would make his own contribution to the steel cemetery when the pickup truck he was driving caught the lip of the cliff and tumbled over. Caballo managed to dive out just in time and watched as the truck exploded far below. Later, chunks of the scorched carcass were scavenged as good-luck charms.
After the bus pulled over on the edge of town, we climbed down stiffly, our faces as war-painted with dust and sweat salt as Caballo’s had been the first the time I met him. “There she is!” Caballo hollered. “That’s my place.”
We looked around, but the only thing in sight was the ancient ruin of an old mission across the river. Its roof was gone and its red-stone walls were collapsing into the ruddy canyon they’d been carved from, looking like a sand castle dissolving back into sand. It was perfect; Caballo had found the ideal home for a living ghost. I could only imagine how freaky it must be to pass here at night and see his monstrous shadow dancing around behind his campfire as he wandered the ruins like Quasimodo.
“Wow, that’s really something, uh … else,” I said.
“No, man,” he said. “Over here.” He pointed behind us, toward a faint goat trail disappearing into the cactus. Caballo began to climb, and we fell in behind him, grabbing at brush for balance as we slipped and scrabbled up the stony path.
“Damn, Caballo,” Luis said. “This is the only driveway in the world that needs trail markers and an aid station at mile two.”
After a hundred yards or so, we came through a thicket of wild lime trees and found a small, clay-walled hut. Caballo had built it by hauling up rocks from the river, making the round-trip over that treacherous path hundreds of times with river-slick stones in his hands. As a home, it suited Caballo even better than the ruined mission; here in his handmade fortress of solitude, he could see everything in the river valley and remain unseen.
We wandered inside, and saw Caballo had a small camp bed, a pile of trashed sports sandals, and three or four books about Crazy Horse and other Native Americans on a shelf next to a kerosene lamp. That was it; no electricity, no running water, no toilet. Out back, Caballo had cut away the cactus and smoothed a little place to kick back after a run, smoke something relaxing, and gaze off at the prehistoric wilderness. Whatever Barefoot Ted’s heavy Heidegger word was, no one was ever more an expression of their place than Caballo was of his hut.
Caballo was anxious to get us fed and off his hands so he could catch up on sleep. The next few days were going to take everything we had, and none of us had gotten much rest since El Paso. He led us back down his hidden driveway and up the road to a tiny shop operating from the front window of a house; you poked your head in and if shopkeeper Mario had what you wanted, you got it. Upstairs, Mario rented us a few small rooms with a cold-water shower at the end of the hall.
Caballo wanted us to dump our bags and head off immediately for food, but Barefoot Ted insisted on stripping down and padding off to the shower to sluice away the road grime. He came out screaming.
“Jesus! The shower’s got loose wires. I just got the shit shocked out of me!”
Eric looked at me. “You think Caballo did it?”
“Justifiable homicide,” I said. “No jury would convict.” The Barefoot Ted-Caballo Blanco storm front hadn’t improved a bit since we’d left Creel. During one rest stop, Caballo climbed down from the roof and squeezed his way into the back of the bus to escape. “That guy doesn’t know what silence is,” Caballo fumed. “He’s from L.A., man; he thinks you’ve got to fill every space with noise.”
After we’d gotten settled at Mario’s, Caballo brought us to another of his Mamás. We didn’t even have to order; as soon as we arrived, Do?a Mila began pulling out whatever she had in the fridge. Soon, platters were being handed around of guacamole, frijoles, sliced cactus and tomatoes doused in tangy vinegar, Spanish rice, and a fragrant beef stew thickened with chicken liver.
“Pack it in,” Caballo had said. “You’re going to need it tomorrow.” He was taking us on a little warm-up hike, Caballo said. Just a jaunt up a nearby mountain to give us a taste of the terrain we’d be tackling on the trek to the racecourse. He kept saying it was no big deal, but then he’d warn us we’d better pound down the food and get right to bed. I became even more apprehensive after a white-haired old American ambled in and joined us.
“How’s the giddyup, Hoss?” he greeted Caballo. His name was Bob Francis. He had first wandered down to Batopilas in the ’60s, and part of him had never left. Even though he had kids and grand-kids back in San Diego, Bob still spent most of the year wandering the canyons around Batopilas, sometimes guiding trekkers, sometimes just visiting Patricio Luna, a Tarahumara friend who was Manuel Luna’s uncle. They met thirty years before, when Bob got lost in the canyons. Patricio found him, fed him, and brought him back to his family’s cave for the night.
Because of his long friendship with Patricio, Bob is one of the only Americans to have ever attended a Tarahumara tesgüinada—the marathon drinking party that precedes and occasionally prevents the ball races. Even Caballo hasn’t reached that level of trust with the Tarahumara, and after listening to Bob’s stories, he wasn’t sure he wanted to.
“All of a sudden, Tarahumara I’ve been friends with for years, guys I knew as shy, gentle amigos, are in my face, butting against me with their chests, spitting insults at me, ready to fight,” Bob said. “Meanwhile, their wives are in the bushes with other men, and their grown-up daughters are wrestling naked. They keep the kids away from these deals; you can imagine why.”
Anything goes at a tesgüinada, Bob explained, because everything is blamed on the peyote, moonshine tequila, and tesgüino, the potent corn beer. As wild as these parties get, they actually serve a noble and sober purpose: they act as a pressure valve to vent explosive emotions. Just like the rest of us, the Tarahumara have secret desires and grievances, but in a society where everyone relies on one another and there are no police to get between them, there has to be a way to satisfy lusts and grudges. What better than a booze-fest? Everyone gets ripped, goes wild, and then, chastened by bruises and hangovers, they dust themselves off and get on with their lives.
“I could have been married or murdered twenty times before the night was over,” Bob said. “But I was smart enough to put down the gourd and get myself out of there before the real shenanigans started.” If one outsider knew the Barrancas as well as Caballo, it was Bob, which was why, even though he was liquored up and in a bit of a ranting mood, I paid careful attention when he got into it with Ted.
“Those f*cking things are going to be dead tomorrow,” Bob said, pointing at the FiveFingers on Ted’s feet.
“I’m not going to wear them,” Ted said.
“Now you’re talking sense,” Bob said.
“I’m going barefoot,” Ted said.
Bob turned to Caballo. “He messing with us, Hoss?”
Caballo just smiled.
————
Early the next morning, Caballo came for us as dawn was breaking over the canyon. “That’s where we’re headed tomorrow,” Caballo said, pointing through the window of my room toward a mountain rearing in the distance. Between us and the mountain was a sea of rolling foothills so thickly overgrown that it was hard to see how a trail could punch through. “We’ll run one of those little guys this morning.”
“How much water do we need?” Scott asked.
“I only carry this,” Caballo said, waving a sixteen-ounce plastic bottle. “There’s a freshwater spring up top to refill.”
“Food?”
“Nah,” Caballo shrugged as he and Scott left to check on the others. “We’ll be back by lunch.”
“I’m bringing the big boy,” Eric said to me, gurgling springwater into the bladder on his ninety-six-ounce hydration backpack. “I think you should, too.”
“Really? Caballo says we’re only going about ten miles.”
“Can’t hurt to carry the max when you go off-road,” Eric said. “Even if you don’t need it, it’s training for when you do. And you never know—something happens, you could be out there longer than you think.”
I put down my handheld bottle and reached for my hydration pack. “Bring iodine pills in case you need to purify water. And shove in some gels, too,” Eric added. “On race day, you’re going to need two hundred calories an hour. The trick is learning how to take in a little at a time, so you’ve got a steady drip of fuel without overwhelming your stomach. This’ll be good practice.”
We walked through Batopilas, past shopkeepers hand-sprinkling water on the stones to keep the dust down. Schoolkids in spotless white shirts, their black hair sleek with water, interrupted their chatter to politely wish us “Buenos días.”
“Gonna be a hot one,” Caballo said, as we ducked into a storefront with no sign out front. “?Hay teléfono?” he asked the woman who greeted us. Are the phones working?
“Todavía no” she said, shaking her head in resignation. Not yet. Clarita had the only two public phones in all Batopilas, but service had been knocked out for the past three days, leaving shortwave radio the only form of communication. For the first time, it hit me how cut off we were; we had no way of knowing what was going on in the outside world, or letting the outside world know what was happening to us. We were putting a hell of a lot of trust in Caballo, and once again, I had to wonder why; as knowledgeable as Caballo was, it still seemed crazy to put our lives in the hands of a guy who didn’t seem too concerned about his own.
But for the moment, the grumble of my stomach and the aroma of Clarita’s breakfast managed to push those thoughts aside. Clarita served up big plates of huevos rancheros, the fried eggs smothered in homemade salsa and freshly chopped cilantro and sitting atop thick, hand-patted tortillas. The food was too delicious to wolf down, so we lingered, refilling our coffee a few times before getting up to go. Eric and I followed Scott’s example and tucked an extra tortilla in our pockets for later.
Only after we finished did I realize that the Party Kids hadn’t shown up. I checked my watch; it was already pushing 10 a.m.
“We’re leaving them,” Caballo said.
“I’ll run back for them,” Luis offered.
“No,” Caballo said. “They could still be in bed. We’ve got to hit it if we’re going to dodge the afternoon heat.”
Maybe it was for the best; they could use a day to rehydrate and power up for the hike tomorrow. “No matter what, don’t let them try to follow us,” Caballo told Luis’s father, who was staying behind. “They get lost out there, we’ll never see them again. That’s no joke.”
Eric and I cinched tight our hydration packs, and I pulled a bandanna over my head. It was already steamy. Caballo slid through a gap in the retaining wall and began picking his way over the boulders to the edge of the river. Barefoot Ted pushed ahead to join him, showing off how nimbly he could hop from rock to rock in his bare feet. If Caballo was impressed, he wasn’t showing it.
“YOU GUYS! HOLD UP!” Jenn and Billy were sprinting down the street behind us. Billy had his shirt in his hand, and Jenn’s shoelaces were untied.
“You sure you want to come?” Scott asked when they panted up. “You haven’t even eaten anything.”
Jenn tore a PowerBar in two and gave half to Billy. They were each carrying a skinny water bottle that couldn’t have held more than six swallows. “We’re good,” Billy said.
We followed the stony riverbank for a mile, then turned into a dry gully. Without a word, we all spontaneously broke into a trot. The gully was wide and sandy, leaving plenty of room for Scott and Barefoot Ted to flank Caballo and run three abreast.
“Check out their feet,” said Eric. Even though Scott was in the Brooks trail shoe he’d helped design and Caballo was in sandals, they both skimmed their feet over the ground just the way Ted did in his bare feet, their foot strikes in perfect sync. It was like watching a team of Lipizzaner stallions circle the show ring.
After about a mile, Caballo veered onto a steep, rocky washout that climbed up into the mountain. Eric and I eased back to a walk, obeying the ultrarunner’s creed: “If you can’t see the top, walk.” When you’re running fifty miles, there’s no dividend in bashing up the hills and then being winded on the way down; you only lose a few seconds if you walk, and then you can make them back up by flying downhill. Eric believes that’s one reason ultrarunners don’t get hurt and never seem to burn out: “They know how to train, not strain.”
As we walked, we caught up with Barefoot Ted. He’d had to slow down to pick his way over the jagged, fist-sized stones. I squinted up at the trail ahead: we had at least another mile of crumbly rock to climb before the trail leveled and, hopefully, smoothed.
“Ted, where are your FiveFingers?” I asked.
“Don’t need ’em,” he said. “I made a deal with Caballo that if I handled this hike, he wouldn’t get mad anymore if I went barefoot.”
“He rigged the bet,” I said. “This is like running up the side of a gravel pit.”
“Humans didn’t invent rough surfaces, Oso,” Ted said. “We invented the smooth ones. Your foot is perfectly happy molding itself around rocks. All you’ve got to do is relax and let your foot flex. It’s like a foot massage. Oh, hey!” he called after us as Eric and I pulled ahead. “Here’s a great tip. Next time your feet are sore, walk on slippery stones in a cold creek. Unbelievable!”
Eric and I left Ted singing to himself as he hopped and trotted along. The glare off the stones was blinding and heat kept rising, making it feel as if we were climbing straight into the sun. In a way, we were; after two miles, I checked the altimeter on my watch and saw we’d climbed over a thousand feet. Soon, though, the trail plateaued and softened from stones to footworn dirt.
The others were a few hundred yards ahead, so Eric and I started to run to close the gap. Before we caught them, Barefoot Ted came whisking by. “Time for a drink,” he said, waving his empty water bottle. “I’ll wait for you guys at the spring.”
The trail veered abruptly upward again, jagging back and forth in lightning-bolt switchbacks. Fifteen hundred feet… two thousand … We bent into the slope, feeling as though we only gained a few inches every step. After three hours and six miles of hard climbing, we hadn’t hit the spring; we hadn’t seen shade since we left the riverbank.
“See?” Eric said, waving the nozzle of his hydration pack. “Those guys have got to be parched.”
“And starving,” I added, ripping open a raw-food granola bar.
At thirty-five hundred feet, we found Caballo and the rest of the crew waiting in a hollow under a juniper tree. “Anyone need iodine pills?” I asked.
“Don’t think so,” Luis said. “Take a look.”
Under the tree was a natural stone basin carved out by centuries of cool, trickling spring water. Except there was no water.
“We’re in a drought,” Caballo said. “I forgot about that.”
But there was a chance another spring might be flowing a few hundred feet higher up the mountain. Caballo volunteered to run up and check. Jenn, Billy, and Luis were too thirsty to wait and went with him. Ted gave his bottle to Luis to fill up for him and sat to wait in the shade with us. I gave him a few sips from my pack, while Scott shared some pita and hummus.
“You don’t use goos?” Eric asked.
“I like real food,” Scott said. “It’s just as portable and you get real calories, not just a fast burn.” As a corporate-sponsored elite athlete, Scott had the worldwide buffet of nutrition at his fingertips, but after experimenting with the entire spectrum—everything from deer meat to Happy Meals to organic raw-food bars—he’d ended up with a diet a lot like the Tarahumara.
“Growing up in Minnesota, I used to be a total junk eater,” he said. “Lunch used to be two McChickens and large fries.” When he was a Nordic skier and cross-country runner in high school, his coaches were always telling him he needed plenty of lean meat to rebuild his muscles after a tough workout, yet the more Scott researched traditional endurance athletes, the more vegetarians he found.
Like the Marathon Monks in Japan he’d just been reading about; they ran an ultramarathon every day for seven years, covering some twenty-five thousand miles on nothing but miso soup, tofu, and vegetables. And what about Percy Cerutty, the mad Australian genius who coached some of the greatest milers of all time? Cerutty believed food shouldn’t even be cooked, let alone slaughtered; he put his athletes through triple sessions on a diet of raw oats, fruit, nuts, and cheese. Even Cliff Young, the sixty-three-year-old farmer who stunned Australia in 1983 by beating the best ultrarunners in the country in a 507- mile race from Sydney to Melbourne, did it all on beans, beer, and oatmeal (“I used to feed the calves by hand and they thought I was their mother,” Young said. “I couldn’t sleep too good those nights when I knew they would get slaughtered.” He switched to grains and potatoes, and slept a whole lot better. Ran pretty good, too).
Scott wasn’t sure why meatless diets worked for history’s great runners, but he figured he’d trust the results first and figure out the science later. From that point on, no animal products would pass his lips—no eggs, no cheese, not even ice cream—and not much sugar or white flour, either. He stopped carrying Snickers and PowerBars during his long runs; instead, he loaded a fanny pack with rice burritos, pita stuffed with hummus and Kalamata olives, and home-baked bread smeared with adzuki beans and quinoa spread. When he sprained his ankle, he eschewed ibuprofen and relied instead on wolfsbane and whomping portions of garlic and ginger.
“Sure, I had my doubts,” Scott said. “Everyone told me I’d get weaker, I wouldn’t recover between workouts, I’d get stress fractures and anemia. But I found that I actually feel better, because I’m eating foods with more high-quality nutrients. And after I won Western States, I never looked back.”
By basing his diet on fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, Scott is deriving maximum nutrition from the lowest possible number of calories, so his body isn’t forced to carry or process any useless bulk. And because carbohydrates clear the stomach faster than protein, it’s easier to jam a lot of workout time into his day, since he doesn’t have to sit around waiting for a meatball sub to settle. Vegetables, grains, and legumes contain all the amino acids necessary to build muscle from scratch. Like a Tarahumara runner, he’s ready to go any distance, any time.
Unless, of course, he runs out of water.
“Not good, guys,” Luis called as he trotted back down. “That one’s dry, too.” He was getting worried; he’d just tried to piss, and after four hours of sweating in 95- degree heat, it came out looking like convenience-store coffee. “I think we should run for it.”
Scott and Caballo agreed. “If we open it up, we’ll be down in an hour,” Caballo said. “Oso,” he asked me. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said. “And we’re still packing water.”
“All right, let’s do it,” Barefoot Ted said.
We began running single file down the trail, Caballo and Scott up front. Barefoot Ted was amazing; he was speeding down the mountain hard on the heels of Luis and Scott, two of the best downhillers in the sport. With all that talent pushing up against each other, the pace was getting ferocious. “YEEEEEAAAHHH, BABY!” Jenn and Billy were hollering.
“Let’s hang back,” Eric said. “We’re going to crash if we try to hang with them.”
We settled into an easy lope, falling far behind as the others slashed back and forth down the switchbacks. Running downhill can trash your quads, not to mention snap your ankle, so the trick is to pretend you’re running uphill: keep your feet spinning under your body like you’re a lumberjack rolling a log, and control your speed by leaning back and shortening your stride.
By midafternoon, the heat had bottled up in the canyon until it was over 100 degrees. We’d lost sight of the others, so Eric and I took our time, running easily and sipping often from our quickly emptying hydration packs, feeling our way carefully down the confusing web of trails, unaware that an hour before, Jenn and Billy had vanished.
“Goat’s blood is good” Billy kept insisting. “We can drink the blood, then eat the meat. Goat meat is good.” He’d read a book by a guy whose trick for cheating death in the Arizona desert was to stone a wild horse to death and suck the blood from its throat. Geronimo used to do that, too, Billy thought. Wait, it might’ve been Kit Carson….
Drink the blood? Jenn, her throat so parched it hurt to talk, just stared at him. He’s losing it, she thought. We can barely walk, and Bone-head’s talking about killing a goat we can’t catch with a knife we don’t have. He’s in worse shape than I am. He’s—
Suddenly, her stomach clenched so badly she could barely breathe. She got it. Billy didn’t sound crazy because of the heat. He sounded crazy because the only sane thing left to talk about was the one thing he wouldn’t admit: there was no way out of this.
On a good day, no one in the world could have dropped Jenn and Billy on a measly six-mile trail run, but this was turning out to be a pretty bad day. The heat, their hangovers, and their empty stomachs had caught up with them before they’d made it halfway down the mountain. They lost sight of Caballo on one of the switchbacks, then they hit a fork in the trail. Next thing they knew, they were alone.
Disoriented, Jenn and Billy wandered off the mountain and into a stone maze that webbed in every direction. The rock walls were mirroring the heat so hideously, Jenn suspected she and Billy were just going whichever way looked a little shadier. Jenn felt dizzy, as if her mind were floating free of her body. They hadn’t eaten since splitting that PowerBar six hours before, and hadn’t had a sip of water since noon. Even if heat stroke didn’t wipe them out, Jenn knew, they were still doomed: the 100- plus degree heat would drop, but keep on dropping. Come nightfall, they’d be shivering in the freezing dark in their surf shorts and T-shirts, dying of thirst and exposure in one of the most unreachable corners of Mexico.
What weird corpses they’d make, Jenn thought as they trudged along. Whoever found them would have to wonder how a pair of twenty-two-year-old lifeguards in surf baggies ended up at the bottom of a Mexican canyon, looking like they’d been tossed in from Baja by a rogue wave. Jenn had never been so thirsty in her life; she’d lost twelve pounds during a hundred-mile race before and still didn’t feel as desperate as she did now.
“Look!”
“The Luck of the Bonehead!” Jenn marveled. Under a stone ledge, Billy had spotted a pool of fresh water. They ran toward it, fumbling the tops off their water bottles, then stopped.
The water wasn’t water. It was black mud and green scum, buzzing with flies and churned by wild goats and burros. Jenn bent down for a closer look. Ugh! The smell was nasty They knew what one sip could do; come nightfall, they could be too weak with fever and diarrhea to walk, or infected with cholera or giardia or guinea worm disease, which has no cure except slowly pulling the three-foot-long worms out of the abscesses that erupt on your skin and eye sockets.
But they knew what would happen without that sip. Jenn had just read about those two best friends who’d gotten lost in a canyon in New Mexico and became so sun-crazed after a single day without water that one stabbed the other to death. She’d seen photos of hikers who’d been found in Death Valley with their mouths choked with dirt, their last moments alive spent trying to suck moisture from scorching sand. She and Billy could stay away from the puddle and die of thirst, or they could swallow a few gulps and risk dying from something else.
“Let’s hold off,” Billy said. “If we don’t find our way out in one hour, we’ll come back.”
“Okay. This way?” she said, pointing away from Batopilas and straight toward a wilderness that stretched four hundred miles to the Sea of Cortez.
Billy shrugged. They’d been too rushed and groggy that morning to pay attention to where they were going, not that it would have mattered: everything looked exactly the same. As they walked, Jenn flashed back to the way she’d scoffed at her mother the night before she and Billy had left for El Paso. “Jenn,” her mother had implored. “You don’t know these people. How do you know they’ll take care of you if something goes wrong?”
Dang, Jenn thought. Mom nailed that one.
“How long’s it been?” she asked Billy.
“About ten minutes.”
“I can’t wait anymore. Let’s go back.”
“All right.”
When they found the puddle again, Jenn was ready to drop to her knees and start slurping, but Billy held her back. He swirled aside the mold, covered the open mouth of his water bottle with his hand, then filled it from the bottom of the puddle, half hoping the water would be a little less bacteria-ridden beneath the muck. He handed his bottle to Jenn, then filled hers the same way.
“I always knew you’d kill me,” Jenn said. They clinked their bottles, said “Cheers,” and started to gulp, trying not to gag.
They drank their bottles dry, refilled them, and started walking west again into the wilderness. Before they’d gotten far, they noticed deep shadows were stretching farther across the canyon.
“We’ve got to get more water,” Billy said. He hated the idea of backtracking, but their only chance of surviving through the night was getting to the puddle and hunkering down till dawn. Maybe if they chugged three bottles full of water, they’d be hydrated enough to climb up the mountain for a last look around before dark.
They turned and, once again, trudged back into the maze.
“Billy,” Jenn said. “We’re really in trouble.”
Billy didn’t answer. His head was killing him, and he couldn’t shake a line from “Howl” that kept beating in time to the throbbing in his skull:
… who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry….
Disappeared in Mexico, Billy thought. Leaving nothing behind.
“Billy,” Jenn repeated. They’d put each other through some bad times in the past, she and the Bonehead, but they’d found a way to stop breaking each other’s hearts and become best friends. She’d gotten Billy into this, and she felt worse for what was about to happen to him than what would happen to her.
“This is for real, Billy,” Jenn said. Tears began trickling down her face. “We’re going to die out here. We’re going to die today.”
“SHUT UP!” Billy screamed, so rattled by the sight of Jenn’s tears that he erupted in a total non-Bonehead frenzy. “JUST SHUT UP!”
The outburst stunned both of them into silence. And in that silence, they heard a sound: rocks clattering somewhere behind them.
“HEY!” Jenn and Billy shouted together. “HEY! HEY! HEY!”
They began running before realizing that they didn’t know what they were running toward. Caballo had warned them that if they faced one danger out there greater than being lost, it was being found.
Jenn and Billy froze, trying to peer into the shadows below the canyon’s crest. Could it be the Tarahumara? A Tarahumara hunter would be invisible, Caballo had told them; he’d watch from a distance, and if he didn’t like what he saw, he’d disappear back into the forest. What if it was drug cartel enforcers? Whoever it was, they had to risk it.
“HEY!” they shouted. “WHO’S THERE?”
They listened until the last echo of their voices died away. Then a shadow split from the canyon wall, and began moving toward them.
“You hear that?” Eric asked me.
It had taken us two hours to pick our way down the mountain. We’d kept losing the trail, and had to stop to backtrack and search our memories for landmarks before continuing. Wild goats had turned the mountain into a web of faint, crisscrossing trails, and with the sun fading below the canyon lip, it was getting hard to keep track of which direction we were going.
Finally, we spotted a dry creek bed down below that I was pretty sure led to the river. Just in time, too; I’d finished my water half an hour before and was already pasty mouthed. I broke into a jog, but Eric called me back. “Let’s make sure,” he said. He climbed back up the cliff to check our bearings.
“Looks good,” he called. He started to climb down—and that’s when he heard voices echoing from somewhere inside the gorges. He called me up, and together we began following the echoes. A few moments later, we found Jenn and Billy. Tears were still streaking Jenn’s face. Eric gave them his water, while I handed them the last of my goos.
“You really drank out of that?” I asked, looking at the wild burro dung in the puddle and hoping they’d confused it with another one.
“Yeah,” Jenn said. “We were just coming back for more.”
I dug out my camera in case an infectious-disease specialist wanted to see exactly what had gotten into their bowels. Foul as it was, though, that puddle had saved their lives: if Jenn and Billy hadn’t come back for another drink at precisely that moment, they’d still be walking deeper and deeper into no-man’s-land, the canyon walls closing behind them.
“Can you run a little more?” I asked Jenn. “I think we’re not that far from the village.”
“Okay,” Jenn said.
We set off at an easy trot, but as the water and goo revived them, Jenn and Billy set a pace I could barely keep up with. Once again, I was amazed at their ability to bounce back from the dead. Eric led us down the creek bed, then spotted a bend in the gorge he recognized. We doglegged left, and even with the light getting dim, I could see that the dust ahead of us had been tromped by feet. A mile and a half later, we emerged from the gorges to find Scott and Luis waiting anxiously for us on the outskirts of Batopilas.
We got four liters of water from a little grocery store and dumped in a handful of iodine pills. “I don’t know if it will work,” Eric said, “but maybe you can flush out whatever bacteria you swallowed.” Jenn and Billy sat on the curb and began gulping. While they drank, Scott explained that no one had noticed that Jenn and Billy were missing until the rest of the group had gotten off the mountain. By then, everyone was so dangerously dehydrated that turning back to search would have put them all in danger. Caballo grabbed a bottle of water and went back on his own, urging the others to sit tight; the last thing he wanted was for all his gringos to go scattering into the canyons at nightfall.
About half an hour later, Caballo ran back into Batopilas, red-faced and drenched in sweat. He’d missed us in the branching gorges, and when he realized the hopelessness of his one-man search party, he’d returned to town for help. He looked at Eric and me— tired but still on our feet—and then at the two ace young ultrarunners, exhausted and distraught on the curb. I could tell what Caballo was thinking before he said it.
“What’s your secret, man?” he asked Eric, nodding toward me. “How’d you fix this guy?”