In Arizona: Tracks in the Desert

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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.