Pecked to death by ducks (31 page)

On a good day, with the sun hanging low, Jim Grasky has used shine to track men for miles. In an airplane.

With the sun behind us, however, the tracks were not visible at all. Grasky told us to always keep the tracks between you and the sun. If possible, track early or late in the day to get the best angle.

We wanted to see where the tracks started, so we followed them backward for one hundred yards. Just under the ridge the tracks ended in an area of elaborate compression. Then hoof-prints led away to the west. Someone had ridden a horse to the area under the ridge. When he knew he wouldn't be visible from below, he dismounted. It looked as if he had tethered the horse to a stout bit of sage—the sage was surrounded by a circle of shine.

"What can you tell me about this horse?" Grasky asked us. Someone who knew a lot more about horses than I did noted that the animal was shod front and back. Judging by the size and depth of the hoofprint, it was decided that the horse must have weighed about a thousand pounds and stood perhaps fifteen hands high: a medium-size saddle horse.

We followed the shine forward this time. The prints were definitely those of a western boot. There was a pattern of thirteen forward-facing chevrons on the sole, and five reverse-facing chevrons on the heel. We got out our tape measures and took some notes. This very distinctive boot measured twelve and a half inches long and four and a half inches across at its widest point: Judging by the size, this was a man's track. The stride length was thirty-three inches, which seemed to indicate a relatively long-legged man. The straddle, the distance between the inner side of one shoe and the inner side of the other, was about six inches. A fat person will tend to walk with a wide straddle of, say, ten or twelve inches. As a person becomes fatigued, his straddle increases. This was a fair-sized fellow in decent shape. Maybe six feet tall, 180 pounds.

The body by the fence had been found the previous evening. How old were these tracks? We got down on our hands and knees,

265 a OTHER PEOPLE'S LIVES

eyed the prints from the side, and compared them with our own fresh ones. There was a bit of loose, unflattened dust in the depressions made by the Western boots. Our own tracks were clean. There had been no rain in the past twenty-four hours, but it had been a windy night. It was a fair guess that the wind had blown loose dust into these tracks.

Indeed, the western boot tracks were not quite as distinct as our own. The ridges around our heels were, at eye level, as distinct as vertical cliffs. But the chevron tracks had collapsed slightly, much the way a cliff wall will collapse over the centuries. There were tiny scree slopes below the heel ridges.

I moved along the shine and found a place where our man had stepped on a small, scrubby bit of living sage. There was a distinctive five-chevron heel print, but where the sole must have landed, I could see only a few flattened branches. Their bark, however, was abraded. The inner flesh of the plant was white, but the wound was brown around the edges. I stepped on another branch. The bark came off in the same way, but the inner flesh was entirely white. It would take a full day before the wound I had created would brown up around the edges.

All of us felt pretty confident that the tracks were about a day old, that they dated almost precisely to the time the person had been shot down by the fence.

"All right," said Grasky, "line him out and send a team on a box cut." We could pretty much see our man's line of travel by the shine. A three-man team walked perpendicular to this line, then turned and walked forward, parallel to the direction of travel. At about three hundred yards, they cut back and looked for tracks. Frequently used by search-and-rescue teams, this leapfrog approach to tracking is a fast way to find a lost hunter, a wandering child.

Law-enforcement personnel, on the other hand, are in the business of collecting evidence. They must track step by step. Otherwise, they may find themselves in some courtroom telling a clever defense attorney that, yes, the defendant might have made a sharp right-hand turn, and that, yes, someone else with a thirty-

three-inch stride wearing twelve-inch-long boots with thirteen chevrons on the sole and five reversed on the heel might have walked to the scene and committed the crime. It was possible, the officer would have to admit, because he didn't track his man step by step.

In 1981 the Supreme Court explicitly okayed tracking as an investigative technique. The facts, in U.S. v. Cortez, were these: In Arizona, along the Mexican border, Border Patrol agents kept finding the prints of anywhere from twelve to twenty people on weekend nights when the moon was full. Finding the prints wasn't difficult: The Border Patrol maintains a dirt drag-trail along the border fence. A dusty lane just ten feet wide, it is smoothed twice a day by dragging tires behind a couple of cars.

The prints on the drag road were almost all made by tire-tread sandals, bare feet, or a kind of inexpensive Mexican-made shoe that leaves a print that Border Patrol officers call an Aztec. Each crossing incident left a different mix of prints, though one set of tracks was always the same, made by a more expensive boot with a distinctive chevron design. On different occasions the tracks came through the fence in different places. They always moved north about thirty-eight miles, and ended at different places along a paved road leading into Tucson.

The Border Patrol deduced that a guide wearing the chevron-design boots was bringing illegal aliens across the border and taking them overland. Once he got to the road, he probably piled them into a van or a pickup with a shell, then drove them into the city. Because the tracks were generally found at the border fence just after midnight, the officers inferred that the guide and his charges would spend the next day traveling overland and hiding, getting to the road just before dawn.

The next time the guide's tracks were found at the fence, the Border Patrol set up a trap. Just after dawn on a weekend morning, along the guide's customary road, they stopped a pickup with a shell. Inside was a Mr. Cortez in his chevron boots, along with about a dozen illegal aliens.

Cortez maintained that there had been no probable cause to stop him, and that the Border Patrol was therefore guilty of ille-

Z6j A OTHER PEOPLE'S LIVES

gal search and seizure. The Supreme Court, however, decided that "inference and deduction," which "may elude an untrained person," constituted sufficient probable cause.

Grasky himself once worked the Mexican border, where the tracking is heaviest and where he developed "a lot of respect" for the illegal aliens. In contrast to the local bandits who preyed on the illegals, and the drug smugglers who might shoot an officer just for the prestige, they were brave, even admirable, people. "We had a saying," said Grasky. "The illegal alien is your only friend."

These days Grasky is stationed near the Canadian border in Havre, Montana, where the investigative pace is different. But he is often called in by local sheriffs to track bad guys, and he and the other Border Patrol officers often give classes in the discipline to other enforcement agencies, and to search-and-rescue teams. Which is why Grasky was teaching this course in Livingston, Montana. About half the students were police officers. The rest of us were search-and-rescue volunteers.

Another Border Patrol officer, Dave Walker from Twin Falls, Idaho, was watching Grasky teach. They had been screaming for man-tracking classes down in Idaho, said Walker, ever since they'd lost the deaf-mute child several years ago. He had wandered away from a picnic, and searchers had a line of travel on him. It should have been easy. Ordinarily, you take the position last seen and draw a circle around it, enlarging that circle for every day the person has been missing.

The search area is like a big pie. If you have a line of travel, you can cut that pie down to a slice. With enough people working a grid search, you'll find the lost person. But because this child could neither hear the searchers nor call out to them, they found him, days later, dead of exposure. One search team had passed within a few hundred yards of him. If they had been better versed in tracking, the boy might be alive today.

That was the kind of work I wanted to do—finding lost children—but there was something about Grasky's crime scene that kept tugging at my mind. Something vaguely familiar.

"Hey!" It was the team that had leapfrogged ahead. "We got tracks, but they're different. Flats. Almost like bare feet."

My team stayed on the original line, tracking step by step. It went over a sloping area of small stones. We could see the dirt that our man had tracked onto the stones. It gave us a line of travel, but after four or five steps, he'd walked the dirt off his boots. The line stretched out over the bare rocks. We'd need our sign-cutting sticks for this part.

Mine was a ski pole with no basket and a rubber band wrapped around it thirty-three inches back from the point. It measured the length of the stride. We knelt on the rocks where the dirt ended and measured off where the next step might have fallen. And there it was, just ahead of the point of the pole: a dark rock lying bottom side up. It must have been kicked over with the toe of the boot. Measuring the stride from there turned up a rock that had been imbedded along the same line of travel. You couldn't just see these small clues because, as Grasky put it, the eye tends to "flock shoot." You see too much, which, in the end, means you lose the track. The sign-cutting stick had pinpointed the footfall.

It took us a long time to follow the tracks, step by step, but when our man moved back out into the dirt, we could fairly run along the shine until we came upon a large, inexplicably compressed area. New prints led away from it. They were flat, almost like barefoot tracks. It took us a minute to realize that the killer had sat down to take off his boots. He had known the victim was down near the fence, and didn't want to make any noise. He had gone the rest of the way in his socks.

The scenario was becoming very familiar. The sock prints led to a promontory that overlooked the gravel pit. There was a long flattened area there, and up front were two small cuplike depressions in the dirt. Behind them and to the right lay a spent rifle cartridge. At the end of the flattened area were two shallow trenches in the mud.

Our man had laid out full length. He'd dug his toes into the dirt behind him, and leaned on his elbows as he sighted the rifle.

The compressed area—from toe line to just above the elbows— measured six feet. Someone who knew about rifles studied the shell. It was a thirty-thirty. I looked down at the fence, where the hypothetical victim had been found. It was at least 250 yards away; Grasky said 238. Anyone who could shoot a man through the heart with a thirty-thirty at that range was an incredible marksman, whatever else he was.

Our rifle expert noted that the shell had been found to the right and behind the elbows. The only thirty-thirty he knew that ejected shells over the shoulder and to the right would be a Winchester model 94.

"Okay," said Grasky, "what do we know about this guy?"

We knew that last night, before dark, a man about six feet tall, riding a medium-size saddle horse, had dismounted not far away. He probably weighed somewhere between 170 and 190 pounds, was in good shape, and was a hell of a shot. He used a thirty-thirty, a Winchester 94.

"Iron Mountain, Wyoming, mean anything to you folks?" asked Grasky. "Think July 1901." It's a famous story in Montana and Wyoming: In that year a fourteen-year-old boy was shot with a Winchester 94 from 238 yards. The cattle regulator, Tom Horn, was eventually convicted of the murder, mostly on the kind of evidence we had discovered. Horn rode a medium-size saddle horse, shod front and back, was six feet tall, and known to be a hell of a shot. He owned one of only two known Winchester 94s in the territory. He was hanged for the murder in 1903.

It was a moment in western history, no doubt about it, and a lot of people still think the evidence was manufactured or falsified and that Horn was innocent. Either way, however, I was more interested in finding lost people and bringing them back alive. I found myself thinking of some of the classroom work we had done earlier in the course. With the help of some slides, Grasky had discussed techniques for tracking at night, with flashlights; he'd told us how to track people through streams, over ice, and through tall grass. There was one shot I particularly liked in Grasky's slide show. It was taken in the brown October grass of northern Montana. The sun was low, the angle was right, and

you could see that the grass was covered with a fine layer of dust. In the center of the frame was a straight line where the dust had been kicked off the grass—a grass trail.

"You search-and-rescue folks," Grasky said, "I can't tell you how this feels." He pointed up the trail in the slide to a small boy huddled under a tree. The boy stared at the camera, clearly alive.

"That's your reward," he said.

PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A 272

skipped work. Was supposed to hike with a friend, but apparently went alone. Possible areas are Granite Peak [in Park County] or the Amphitheater area [in Yellowstone Park]. The Park Service did not have much information at this time, but are in the process of tracking down a few leads, one of which is a person named 'Mike' from the same [New Jersey] town as Mc-Gee. 'Mike' works for the Park Service in Mammoth and was supposed to be the person that was hiking with McGee. Joe Fowler told me that he would try to check the Amphitheater area out by helicopter on July 31st, in the morning. Park Service will call with any new information as they receive it. Al Jenkins advised at 2140 hours."

Al Jenkins heads up the search-and-rescue team in Park County, Montana, where I live. Early the next morning, a Sunday, he was on the phone, contacting members of the team. I was still asleep when he called. How soon I could get down to the sheriff's department with gear enough for an overnight run into the Beartooth Mountains?

Jenkins said the situation was urgent. The missing hiker was supposed to be back at work on Friday afternoon. It was now Sunday morning. Fortunately, it had been unusually warm in the mountains the last few nights. The guy had a good chance if we got out there quick. I'm not a skilled searcher, not really the guy you'd pick first for your team, but the search-and-rescue crew needed as many bodies as possible, and they needed them right away. The little bit I know about search-and-rescue work indicates that the first forty-eight hours are the most important.