In Arizona: Tracks in the Desert

By James Willwerth

As the dusty truck loaded with guns and radio gear rolls down the Arizona highway south toward Nogales and the Mexican border, Bernell E. ("Bernie") Lawrence points toward a range of mountains. "O.K.," he drawls in a desert-dry voice, "where's the place up there you'd look for lion tracks?" He already knows. "Lions like the backbone of a set of mountains. They'll cross where two canyons meet. For them it's like climbing stairs." Lawrence is 48. For much of his life he tracked and killed mountain lions, bears and coyotes. Then society's shifting values made it less trouble to hunt men.

His tracking skills came down from a grandfather who hunted wolves in Texas around the turn of the century and a father who ranched and trapped in Arizona. Bernie turned family tradition into a steady paycheck: hiring out to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as a "predatory control officer." "Mostly I followed the sheep," he reminisces. "Something's always killing sheep." It was Lawrence's job to find the right rogue: one bear feeding off cattle among 30 who lived peacefully on Arizona's White River Apache land. A single lion killing sheep among a dozen living near one edge of the Grand canyon. "If I killed the wrong one, I wasn't doin' my job," he explains. "I'd lave to study a cat, learn where he fed, where he went to water, where his scent stations were."

For years, Lawrence says, "anybody that could track a lion or a bear was looked on as something outstanding." But when everybody went into the ecology kick, "they figured people like me were worse than the lion or the bear." Lawrence adds with a bitter edge on his voice, "I had people from two agencies at a time following me around to see if I was doing right. I quit to get away from the harassment." Eventually he found work as a range detective with the Mojave County sheriffs office, and that led him to a job doing "crime reconstruction" at county headquarters in Kingman. His analyses of bloodstains and footprints at murder scenes and burglaries sent scores of killers and thieves to jail.

In the early '70s when narcotics traffic from Mexico increased, he reluctantly became a "narc." For about five years, Lawrence and a select team stalked the desert like a posse out of the Old West. They seized millions of dollars' worth of drugs and airplanes, and scores of smugglers who had figured the harsh, 13,000-sq.-mi. wastes of the desert could serve as a safe private landing field. In one successful two-week camp-out near a remote airstrip, his team bagged a DC-10, two tons of marijuana, a four-wheel-drive truck and four smugglers.

Lawrence's biggest coup was the locally famous Norman-Taylor case. In 1975 nearly 20 agents gave up on a remote airstrip vigil when a smuggler's plane coming in was accidentally spooked and did not return. Changing tactics, Lawrence followed the faint tracks of two trucks that had passed by the site. Forty miles away at 4 a.m. he found tire marks where an airplane had landed on the concrete highway, then a roadside spot marked by footprints, broken shrubbery and more tire tracks. Ten miles later at a dirt turnoff, he found fresh tire tracks that matched imprints left by the suspicious trucks at the first airstrip.

Lawrence followed the tracks deep into the desert to a low adobe house behind a big stand of sagebrush. "It hit my mind that gray sage don't grow that tall," he remembers. "I dropped to the ground and rolled under my truck with my gun. I figured I was about to get my head blowed off." The sagebrush was piled on top of more than a thousand pounds of marijuana. But the smugglers had gone to town for some sleep. Lawrence and a dozen agents were waiting when they got back.

This morning Lawrence is bound for Nogales with Partner Bill Morgan to give a lecture on tracking. The class is a mix of state narcs, Tucson cops and customs officers. Lawrence and his desert lore are a curiosity to most of the audience. But they know his specialty means more than following a fleeing outlaw. Carefully catalogued tire tracks and footprints can be used as evidence in court. Twelve people were convicted in the Norman-Taylor case simply because Lawrence linked tire tracks and footprints to the drug cache, the airplane flying that night, and other trucks used for hauling contraband. Two of the smugglers were prominent Tucson restaurant owners, Marc and Mike Norman. When the case went to court, a judge had quashed a defense motion to suppress evidence by writing: "These defendants were done in by a skilled and experienced tracker."

Even so, Lawrence often wishes he were back hunting lions. Most marijuana smugglers bring in hard drugs as well, and they kill people who get in their way. Known smugglers often park on the street opposite Lawrence's home. He is convinced they have "studied" every member of his family down to his eight grand children. He has survived more than a dozen shootouts with high-powered guns He has been offered bribes up to $250,000 "The whole thing is greed," he snorts "You have to meet 'em head-on."

In Nogales, backed by charts and diagrams, he tells the cops how he once tracked a burglar along a concrete road by watching for traces of footprints in "little stringers" of wind-blown sand. Though he shares such knowledge happily, he has found that tracking and desert work require a patience that is disappearing from America. He has camped out for weeks at desert airstrips with his dog Baron. "It's hard to keep the younger guys staked out like that," he laments. "They're gung-ho at the start, but two trips out is about all they can take."

Even in two trips a newcomer picks up a good deal of lore. Pigeon-toed prints usually mean a man is running. You can tell which predator killed an animal by the way the carcass was entered: dogs and wolves eat through the back, lions enter through the rib cage. An old man's tracks tend to be more regular than a young man's. Because shoes conform to a man's feet, you can later identify in court the feet that made a track, even if the shoes used during the crime were thrown away: the distinctive "pressure patterns," "wear points" and the "triangle" between the big and second toe are dead giveaways. You can track a man walking on rocks to disguise his trail by looking for stones separated from the surrounding soil.

After the lecture, Lawrence takes his class down to a border trail where he has previously set down tracks to simulate smugglers carrying drugs, hiding them, resting, running. Soon he has more than a dozen policemen poking around in the scrub and examining markings in a dry river bed, imagining scenarios of varying accuracy. Lawrence's respect for the desert is hard as rock yet almost mystical. "It has a life it lives under certain rules," he says. "It's harsh enough that people don't crowd in." And he adds, "When the big crisis comes, the only people who'll survive are people who can live like varmints -- people who can root hog or die." By now, the law enforcement class has gathered round, "panting like lizards," as Lawrence would say, tired and thirsty in the 95DEG heat. "O.K.," the old scout asks, "anybody here who thinks this was a waste of time and is man enough to say it?" No one speaks. The desert with its varmints and cactus and barren rock mountains in the distance presses in around them.

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