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If it was the Border Patrol’s job to apprehend lawbreakers, it was equally their duty to save the lost and the dying.
All the agents seem to agree that the worst deaths are the young women and the children. Pregnant women with dying fetuses within them are not uncommon; young mothers have been found dead with infants attached to their breasts, still trying to nurse. A mother staggers into a desert village carrying the limp body of her son; doors are locked in her face. The deaths, however, that fill the agents with deepest rage are the deaths of illegals lured into the wasteland and then abandoned by their Coyotes.
If bug-sign crosses over a walker’s footprint, the cutter knows the walker has passed nearer to midnight than to dawn. If, however, the footstep flattens the bug-sign, the cutter knows the walker has recently passed, and is in the immediate area, and is probably in trouble.
Officer Friendly considered all this a steaming pile of Bravo-Sierra.
OTM—Other Than Mexicans—covers all the Central and South Americans swelling the ranks of the walkers. Many Americans don’t know that Chinese and Russian refugees cross Desolation as well.
Indians calling Indians Indians.
In North America, the myth tends west: the cowboys, the Indians, the frontier, the wild lands, the bears and wolves and gold mines and vast ranches were in the west. But in Mexico, a country narrow at bottom and wide at the top, the myth ran north.
