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current taking him by surprise. Silvia had strong and limber legs that secured her footing. She dug her toes in and took one step at a time, holding one foot in the sand as an anchor, and soon each step was firmer and took her upper body out of the water.
    Many become paralyzed with sudden fear and go off their feet and drown in three feet of water. Any page of any record of the United States Border Patrol has columns filled with lists such as this:
NAME
COUNTY
CAUSE OF DEATH
Unknown
Maverick
Drowning
Unknown
Maverick
Drowning
Unknown
Uvalde
Unknown
Unknown
Kinney
Drowning
Jeronimo Mendoza Guzman
Zavala
Drowning
    Del Rio Patrol Sector
NAME
COUNTY
CAUSE OF DEATH
Raul Martínez Delgado
Maverick
Exposure—Heat
Unknown
Maverick
Exposure—Heat
Raul Albarran
Maverick
Exposure—Heat
Unknown
Maverick
Exposure—Heat
Unknown
Dimmit
Unknown
Jorge Cabrera Tovar
Uvalde
Exposure—Heat
Unknown
Kinney
Unknown
    Silvia and the group were now in Kenedy County, Texas, and in fact on the Kenedy Ranch, 230,000 acres of mesquite and sandy soil and emptiness, in whose hollows were sometimes found the bleached bones of those who have tried to hide from the sun. She wore two pairs of jeans to protect against the snakes that coiled across the land. These snakes are mostly diamondback rattlers as thick as a fuel hose.
    They walked at night, starting at 9 P.M . These were old trails. Often there would be a warning sound from the coyote leading them, and they would promptly fall onto the dirt and, looking up, see a Border Patrol wagon jouncing along.
    Somewhere in the night, Silvia was on the ground when the guy nearest her made a motion with his hand. Silvia heard the snake, a hissing sound as it moved over the dirt. If she stood and ran from it, the Border Patrol would see her and probably all the others, and they would be sent back to Mexico—and she was not here to be in Mexico. If she stayed down, the snake could be on her. It was the same as all the other snakes, but it hissed rather than its tail rattling like a gourd. Was it so much closer? The patrol wagon rocked and roared. Was it ever going to get farther away?
    “I got ready to kick at the snake,” she remembers. “That is all I could do.”
    Soon the Border Patrol was gone, and she crawled rapidly away from the snake.
    Sometime later they came to railroad tracks that suddenly appeared in the mesquite. There were no signs or gates or poles. Just railroad tracks in the emptiness of the night.
    “These are good,” somebody said. “Snakes don’t go on tracks. We’ll stay on these for a while.”
    Records of the county coroner show that the sixth young man to die in a six-month period in Kenedy County, Texas, stopped on the railroad tracks running through the flat hot land, and he and the guy with him intended to rest with their heads on the rails. Mexicans on the trudge north believe that snakes recoil from steel tracks. Instead of resting, they fell asleep with their heads on the rail. A freight train running fast, with no crossing to worry about, no lights, no horns, roared down the tracks. One of the two on the tracks got up and fled. The other was still asleep as the train engineer tried to stop the freight, but he needed a mile for that and he cut through the young guy on the tracks like a steak knife. On another night, a mile away, on the same tracks, a train came rushing up on three who were sleeping. Two rolled away; one stayed and was left in ribbons. Then six were asleep on the tracks when a 105-car Union Pacific freight train carrying scrap metal and paper came through the night at fifty miles an hour and wiped them out. The engineer thought he saw something on the tracks, but there was no way of stopping.
    The record was set at Kingsville, where forty Mexicans were walking north on a railroad trestle in the middle of a Saturday night when a train came around a curve and directly at them. Some jumped into a creek four stories down. Some tried to outrun the forty-three-car