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bite. It’s a riot.
    There are other games the Border Patrol guys play. Sometimes they toss a recently shot rattlesnake, dead but still writhing and rattling, into the cage with the captured wets. Ha ha—that’s a funny sight, watching them go apeshit in the back of the truck. And they get it, right? Old José has a good sense of humor about it. He pissed his pants and screamed at first, but then he laughed and called the agent “Pinche Migra!” and swear to God, he peeled that snake right there and ate it!
    An agent out of Wellton once pulled a classic practical joke on his load of clients out near 25E. One of his boys had been taking potshots in the desert, and he’d plugged a jackrabbit. “Hey,” the agent told him, “I’ve got an idea.” He took the big jack and tucked it into some bushes near the road.
    Later in the day, he had some Mexicans in the back, and he was tooling along, taking them back to the station holding pens.
    Suddenly, he stopped the car and said, “Muchachos, un conejo!” A rabbit!
    They crowded the front of the cage and said, “Donde?”
    “Allí, allí. Mira. Es grande!”
    They squinted and frowned, but nobody saw no stinking rabbit.
    “Right there, man!” the agent cried.
    A vast plain of saguaro and dry brush and ironwood stumps.
    “I’m going to shoot it,” he told them. “I’ll show you how good the Migra is with our
pistolas
.”
    He hopped out of the truck and squeezed off a shot with his pistol.
    “
Chinga’o!
He’s shooting!” They flinched. Ducked. He holstered his weapon and got in the truck.
    “Got him!” he said. “Let’s go see.”
    He drove—they thought it was fifty yards, maybe. But he drove past that. And then he drove a mile. They were muttering and whistling. Then another mile. Then another damn mile. He pulled up to the saguaro cluster where he’d stashed the carcass, parked again, jumped out and dug the rabbit out of the bushes. He held it up so they could see it.
    They cried out in shock and awe.
    “I told you the Migra were good shots!” he told them.
    The guys at the station laughed for years about that one.
    Drags are created by bundles of five car tires attached to a frame, looking somewhat like the Olympic rings. Every few days, a truck chains a drag to its back end and drives the roads, ironing the sand into a smooth surface. The drags tend to cut east/west. Since the illegals head north, they are forced, sooner or later, to cross a drag. The Devil’s Highway itself is the Mother of All Drags.
    The fiendish ploys of the Coyotes offer you many opportunities to hone your signcutting skills. The whole game for their team is to pass by invisibly, and the team on this side is paid to see the invisible. The Coyotes score when they make it, and the Migra scores when they don’t. Like pro wrestling, there is a masked invader who regularly storms the field to disrupt the game. This, of course, is La Muerte.
    The illegals try to leap across the drags, but the drags are often wide enough to make jumpers hit the ground at least once. They walk backward, hoping to confuse cutters. You have to be good to confuse a veteran. An Indian reservation cop says, “Them trackers can probably tell you what color the guy’s hair was, and that he had eighty-nine cents in his left pocket. Then they can tell you the last time he got laid.”
    Lately, foamers have been walking the desert. Foamers tape blocks of foam rubber to their feet, thus leaving no prints. Or so they think. Foam blocks make small right-angle dents in the soil at their corners. And sooner or later, the heel of the walker will wear through the foam, and the cutter can see a weird pattern, like a small half-moon hoof in a picture frame. Your classic foamer sign.
    Every Coyote team relies on the old Apache trick of the brush-out. Last man through walks backward, brushing the tracks away with a branch of some bush. It’s such a standard move that Border Patrol agents call giving civilians and