In the morning she and Doug set out in the four-wheel-drive Chevy Blazer the Agency had provided for the team. Doug took her out of Nogales on Target Range Road and from there wound west into the hills. It was rugged country all right, and for several hours they followed dirt trails up and down hills, around tight switchbacks, down dry washes and along ridge lines.

Doug stopped several times to show her spots where men had been picked up who were suspected of smuggling drugs. In each case, he told her, the man had apparently ditched whatever he was carrying and could not be held.

At the first such spot Dema opened her shaman awareness to the surroundings, looking for something out of place other than their own presence. She walked to a nearby gully and found a small bag behind a rock, hidden by some dry brush.

She gave it to Doug and he opened it, identifying the contents as marijuana. He was so astounded at her "luck" that she didn't retrieve the things she sensed in the other places he pointed out.

They ate the lunch they had packed near the crest of a bluff overlooking the border. At least, Doug said, it should be the border. He knew it was down there somewhere, but was not exactly sure where. "I doubt if even Coyote Joe would know," he said. "The border between Mexico and Arizona is just a line on a map. There's no river bed or other natural boundary to define it."

To Dema's sense, it was all of a piece, one rugged, desolate landscape where life clung to what existence it could manage with striking intensity.

"Is Joe...Juan...really a good tracker?" she asked.

"It's hard to tell. He gets the job done. But I think of a tracker as someone who reads sign, you know, scratches in the dirt, broken twigs and stuff.

"Maybe Joe does that, but when I've been with him he just walks straight ahead, with Pup jumping around his heels or running ahead like any dog, and then eventually he stops walking and says 'This is the place,' or something, and I'll be damned, he's right.

"So it's hard to tell if he's really tracking, or just knows the land that well, or maybe it's just dumb luck, like when you found that bag of marijuana this morning."

Dema smiled. She knew exactly what kind of dumb luck told Juan where he was.

Dema wanted to go farther, to get deeper into the badlands. She had a vague sense of something unsettled there, and she had an urge to try to pin it down. But Doug insisted they had already gone far enough. He said if they went any farther they could lose daylight on the way back and have trouble following the trails. So they turned back.

Hours later, they were finally nearing Nogales. Doug had been getting irritable, especially after he started to make a couple of wrong turns and Dema had corrected him.

She did it as gently as she could, but the Blazer's air conditioner seemed to be failing and that did not help. He was hot, sweaty, and tense, but he relaxed visibly when they reached Target Range Road.

A minute later Doug said, "I'll be damned, there's Coyote Joe and Pup. Shall we give them a lift?"

"Sure," said Dema. She was smiling. She had already known he would be there.

Juan and Pup jumped in the back seat, and Doug drove on.

"What did you find?" asked Juan.

"Not a thing," said Doug. "Well, Dema did stumble on a bag of marijuana someone had dropped. But aside from that it was all rocks and dirt, just like Chuck said it would be."

"I think we needed to go deeper," said Dema. "I felt like I was beginning to understand some things, but I need more time out there."

"Dema, I think Chuck was right," Doug argued. "And you said it too. We're not going to catch any bad guys this way."

"I'm not trying to catch them, I'm just trying to get a feeling for how they have to operate. I can go alone. I know the road now, and my Jeep can handle it."

"Maybe you know the roads we took, but one wrong turn could get you lost for hours. Going alone is out of the question. You need a guide."

"I could guide her," Juan offered quietly.

Dema brightened. "He could at that, Doug. How about it? I can go again tomorrow, and you're off the hook!"

Doug glanced at her, and she knew she had him. "Well, okay," he said. He looked back at Juan. "Meet us at the station in the morning, okay?" Juan nodded. They dropped him and Pup off at the edge of town, and drove back to the station.