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Story Seventeen I received a call last night from the person who schedules our daily patrols. A young man has lost his brother out in the desert fifty miles west of Tucson and is worried sick about it. He has been separated from family. Our job will be to try and find him in the great stretch of desert west of the Baboquivari Mountains. It will be next to impossible, but we shall see what we can do. Today is a day of “making merit.” In Thailand, the most common form of honoring this Buddhist doctrine is to offer food to monks when they make their early-morning rounds. The gift is amplified according to the level of the person with whom one makes merit. This “amplification ” will increase good karma—but the recipient, not the donor, is the amplifier. What this means is that if I offer food to a thief or a robber, not nearly as much good karma will befall me as if I had offered the food to a saint. I arrive at the church and a young woman is there. I don’t know her. My partner is last week’s young traveler, the one I had gone on patrol with. She is heading out alone in her personal car to look for the longlost brother and gives us specific directions when we get to the area in the desert where she thinks he may be. “You go north,” she says, “and I’ll head south.” We are heading out to the Tohono O’odham Nation today. I’ve gone out there only once. The rules are different. You must stay on paved roads and cannot cross the barbed wire that stretches endlessly on either side of the road. The tribe will not allow Humane Borders to put water stations on their land. The number of migrants who die crossing the reservation is higher than in any other area. The Nation, with its huge swaths of uninhabited desert, draws large numbers of migrants all the same. The Tohono O’odham land stretches 92 stories from the migrant trail north from the border of Mexico nearly seventy-five miles at its widest and is more than one hundred miles long. Out in that desolate desert, the chances of being spotted by the Border Patrol decrease dramatically. So do a person’s chances of survival. My cell phone rings. It is another group of Samaritans out of Green Valley. They have been ordered out to the reservation as well and don’t really know who they are looking for and what they are to do with him if they find him. I tell them to look for a migrant in a red hat with a mustache named José Meneses. That is all the information I have. The man we are looking for was with a group of seventy who crossed on the west side of the Baboquivaris, walked for three nights, and then got separated. There is nothing north of the border on the west side of this range for many miles until you get to Route 86 apart from a couple of small Indian villages. Once people get to the highway, they have to wait for a ride on a road that is crawling with Border Patrol or continue north for another fifty miles of desert to Interstate 8. Four miles west of Three Points, and with the cold of morning at its greatest, we see four people on the side of the road. They are a family, two brothers and a sister, along with the wife of the youngest brother. The sister is a jovial woman even in these circumstances, and she has a bright smile with lots of silver teeth. The wife has wrenched her knee pretty badly and cannot walk any longer. Her shoes are off as well, and that tells me she has blisters. We help her into the back seat of the truck and I gingerly pull off her socks. The left foot has a large blister on the big toe and the heel. The right foot has a large blister on the heel. None of the blisters have broken yet, so we give her clean socks. Her left knee is giving her a lot of pain, and she cannot put much weight on it. It is first light and very cold, so we get all four in the truck and keep it running with the heater on full blast. They...

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