But despite my suspicion that I’d just been Castanedaed, one odd incident helped spur me to stay on the hunt. Ángel had let us spend the night in the only room he had free, a tiny mud-brick hut used as the school’s infirmary. The next morning, he kindly invited us to join him for a breakfast of beans and hand-patted corn tortillas before we set off. It was a frosty morning, and as we sat outside, warming our hands around the steaming bowls, a torrent of kids came swarming past us out of the schoolhouse. Rather than having the cold kids suffer in their seats, the teacher cut them loose to warm up Tarahumara-style—meaning I’d lucked into a chance to witness a rarájipari, the Tarahumara running game.
Ángel pulled himself to his feet and divided the kids into two teams, girls and boys together. He then produced two wooden balls, each about the size of a baseball, and flipped one to a player on each team. He held up six fingers; they’d be running six laps from the schoolhouse to the river, a total distance of about four miles. The two boys dropped the balls into the dust and arched one of their feet, so the ball was balanced on top of their toes. Slowly, they coiled themselves down into a crouch and …
¡Vayan! Go!
The balls whistled past us, flip-kicked off the boys’ feet like they’d been fired out of a bazooka, and the kids went stampeding after them down the trail. The teams looked pretty evenly matched, but my pesos were on the gang led by Marcelino, a twelve-year-old who looked like the Human Torch; his bright red shirt flowed behind him like flames and his white skirt whipped his legs like a trail of smoke. The Torch caught up with his team’s ball while it was still rolling. He wedged it expertly against the front of his toes and zinged it down the trail with barely a hitch in his stride.
Marcelino’s running was so amazing, it was hard to take it all in at once. His feet were jitterbugging like crazy between the rocks, but everything above his legs was tranquil, almost immobile. Seeing him from the waist up, you’d think he was gliding along on skates. With his chin high and his black hair streaming off his forehead, he looked as if he’d burst straight out of the Steve Prefontaine poster on the bedroom wall of every high school track star in America. I felt as if I’d discovered the Future of American Running, living five hundred years in the past. A kid that talented and handsome was born to have his face on a cereal box.
“Sí, de acuerdo,” Ángel said. Yes, I hear you. “It’s in his blood. His father is a great champion.”
Marcelino’s father, Manuel Luna, could beat just about anyone at an all-night rarájipari, the grown-ups’ version of the game I was watching. The real rarájipari was the heart and soul of Tarahumara culture, Ángel explained; everything that made the Tarahumara unique was on display during the heat of a rarájipari.
First, two villages would get together and spend the night making bets and pounding tesgüino, a homemade corn beer that could blister paint. Come sunup, the villages’ two teams would face off, with somewhere between three and eight runners on each side. The runners would race back and forth over a long strip of trail, advancing their ball like soccer players on a fast break. The race could go on for twenty-four hours, even forty-eight, whatever had been agreed to the night before, but the runners could never zone out or relax into an easy rhythm; with the ball ricocheting around and up to thirty-two fast-moving legs on all sides, the runners had to be constantly on their toes as they surged, veered, and zigzagged.
“We say the rarájipari is the game of life,” Ángel said. “You never know how hard it will be. You never know when it will end. You can’t control it. You can only adjust.”
And, he added, no one gets through it on their own. Even a superstar like Manuel Luna couldn’t win without a village behind him. Friends and family fueled the racers with cups of pinole. Come nightfall, the villagers spark up sticks of acate, sap-rich pine branches, and the runners race through the dark by torchlight. To endure a challenge like that, you had to possess all the Tarahumara virtues— strength, patience, cooperation, dedication, and persistence. Most of all, you had to love to run.
“That one’s going to be as good as his father,” Ángel said, nodding toward Marcelino. “If I let him, he’d go like that all day.”
Once Marcelino reached the river, he wheeled around and drilled the ball to a little six-year-old who’d lost one sandal and was struggling with his belt. For a few glorious moments, Little One-Shoe was leading his team and loving it, hopping on one bare foot while grappling to keep his skirt from falling off. That’s when I began to glimpse the real genius of the rarájipari. Because of gnarly trails and back-and-forth laps, the game is endlessly and instantly self-handicapping; the ball ricocheted around as if it were coming off a pinball paddle, allowing the slower kids to catch up whenever Marcelino had to root it out of a crevice. The playing field levels the playing field, so everyone is challenged and no one is left out.
The boys and girls were all hurtling up and down the hilly trail, but no one really seemed to care who won; there was no arguing, no showboating, and, most noticeably, no coaching. Ángel and the schoolteacher were watching happily and with intense interest, but not yelling advice. They weren’t even cheering. The kids accelerated when they felt frisky, downshifted when they didn’t, and caught an occasional breather under a shady tree when they overdid it and started sucking wind.
But unlike most of the other players, Marcelino never seemed to slow. He was tireless, flowing uphill as lightly as he coasted down, his legs scissoring in a surprisingly short, mincing stride that somehow still looked smooth, not choppy. He was on the tall side for a Tarahumara boy, and had the same thrill-of-the-game grin that always used to creep across Michael Jordan’s face as the clock was ticking down. On his team’s final lap, Marcelino fired a bank shot off a big rock to the left, calculated the ricochet, and was in position to receive his own pass, picking the ball up on the fly and covering fifty yards in a matter of seconds over a trail as rocky as a riverbed.
Ángel banged on an iron bar with the back of a hatchet. Game over. The kids begin filing back inside the schoolhouse, the older ones carrying wood for the school’s open fireplace. Few returned our greeting; many had only heard their first words of Spanish the day they started school. Marcelino, however, stepped out of line and came over. Ángel had told him what we were up to.
“Que vayan bien,” Marcelino said. Good luck with your trip. “Caballo Blanco es muy norawa de mi papá.”
Norawa? I’d never heard the word before. “What’s he mean?” I asked Salvador. “Caballo is a legend his dad knows? Some kind of story he tells?”
“No,” Salvador said. “Norawa means amigo.”
“Caballo Blanco is good friends with your dad?” I asked.
“Sí.” Marcelino nodded, before disappearing inside the school-house. “He’s a really good guy.”
Okay, I thought later that afternoon. Maybe Ángel would buffalo us, but I gotta trust the Torch. Ángel told us Caballo might be heading to the town of Creel, but we had to hurry: if we didn’t catch him, there was no telling where he’d turn up next. The Horse would often vanish for months at a time; no one knew where he went or when he’d be back. Miss him, and we might not get another chance.
And Ángel sure hadn’t lied about one thing, as I was discovering by the surprising strength in my legs: just before we began our long climb out of the canyon, he’d handed me a dented tin cup full of something he promised would help.
“You’ll like this,” he assured me.
I peered inside. The cup was full of gooey slime that looked like rice pudding without the rice, lots of black-flecked bubbles I was pretty sure were frog eggs in midhatch. If I were anywhere else, I’d think it was a gag; it looked exactly like a kid had scooped the scum out of his aquarium to see if he could trick me into tasting it. Best guess, it was some kind of fermented root mixed with river water— meaning if the taste didn’t make me hurl, the bacteria would.
“Great,” I said, looking around for a cactus I could dump it behind. “What is it?”
“Iskiate.”
That sounded familiar … and then I remembered. The indomitable Lumholtz had once staggered into a Tarahumara home looking for food while he was in the middle of a grueling expedition. Looming ahead was a mountain he had to summit by nightfall. Lumholtz was exhausted and despairing; there was no way he had the strength left for the climb.
“I arrived late one afternoon at a cave where a woman was just making this drink,” Lumholtz later wrote. “I was very tired and at a loss how to climb the mountain-side to my camp, some two thousand feet above. But after having satisfied my hunger and thirst with some iskiate,” he went on, “I at once felt new strength, and, to my own astonishment, climbed the great height without much effort. After this I always found iskiate a friend in need, so strengthening and refreshing that I may almost claim it as a discovery.”
Home-brewed Red Bull! Now this I had to try. “I’ll save it for later,” I told Ángel. I poured the iskiate into a hip bottle that was half full of water I’d purified with iodine pills, then tossed in a couple of extra pills for good measure. I was dog tired, but unlike Lumholtz, I wasn’t desperate enough to risk a yearlong bout of chronic diarrhea from waterborne bacteria.
Months later, I’d learn that iskiate is otherwise known as chia fresca—“chilly chia.” It’s brewed up by dissolving chia seeds in water with a little sugar and a squirt of lime. In terms of nutritional content, a tablespoon of chia is like a smoothie made from salmon, spinach, and human growth hormone. As tiny as those seeds are, they’re superpacked with omega-3S, omega-6S, protein, calcium, iron, zinc, fiber, and antioxidants. If you had to pick just one desert-island food, you couldn’t do much better than chia, at least if you were interested in building muscle, lowering cholesterol, and reducing your risk of heart disease; after a few months on the chia diet, you could probably swim home. Chia was once so treasured, the Aztecs used to deliver it to their king in homage. Aztec runners used to chomp chia seeds as they went into battle, and the Hopis fueled themselves on chia during their epic runs from Arizona to the Pacific Ocean. The Mexican state of Chiapas is actually named after the seed; it used to rank right up there with corn and beans as a cash crop. Despite its liquid-gold status, chia is ridiculously easy to grow; if you own a Chia Pet, in fact, you’re only a few steps away from your own batch of devil drink.
And a damn tasty devil drink at that, as I discovered once the iodine had melted enough to risk a few swigs. Even with the medicinal after-bite from the pills, the iskiate went down like fruit punch with a nice limey tang. Maybe the excitement of the hunt had something to do with it, but within minutes, I felt fantastic. Even the low-throbbing headache I’d had all morning from sleeping on a frosty dirt floor the night before had vanished.
Salvador kept pushing us hard, racing daylight to the canyon rim. We almost made it, too. But when we had a good two hours’ worth of climbing still ahead, the sun vanished, plunging the canyon into darkness so deep that all I could make out were varying shades of black. We debated rolling out our sleeping bags and camping right there for the night, but we’d run out of food and water over an hour earlier and the temperature was dropping below freezing. If we could just feel our way up another mile, we might catch enough light above the rim to make it out. We decided to go for it; I hated the idea of shivering all night on a sliver of trail on the edge of a cliff.
It was so dark, I could only follow Salvador by the crunch of his boots. How he was finding the turns on those steep switchbacks without straying over the edge, I didn’t really want to know. But he’d proven me wrong with his psychic navigation when he was driving us through the woods, so I owed it to him to shut up, pay careful attention to his every move, and … and …
Wait. What happened to the crunching?
“Salvador?”
Nothing. Shit.
“Salvador!”
“¡No pases por aquí!” he called from somewhere ahead of me. Don’t go this way!
“What’s the prob—”
“Calla.” Shut up.
I callaed and stood in the dark, wondering what the hell was wrong. Minutes passed. Not a sound from Salvador. “He’ll be back,” I told myself. “He would have screamed if he had fallen. You’d have heard something. A crash. Something. But damn, he’s taking a long—”
“Bueno.” A shout came from somewhere above me and off to the right. “Good here. But go slow!” I twisted toward the sound of his voice and slowly inched along. To my left, I felt the ground drop abruptly away. How close Salvador had come to stepping into empty air, I didn’t want to know.
By ten that night, we’d made it to the rim of the cliff and crawled into our bags, chilled to the bone and just as weary. The next morning, we were up before the sun and fast-hiking back to the truck. By the time dawn broke, we were already well on the bouncing, meandering, word-of-mouth trail of the White Horse.
Every time we came to a farm or tiny village, we hit the brakes and asked if anyone knew Caballo Blanco. Everywhere—in the village of Samachique, at the schoolhouse in Huisichi—we heard the same thing: Sí, of course! He passed through last week … a few days ago … yesterday…. You just missed him….
We came to a little cluster of ramshackle cabins and stopped for food. “Ahhh, ten cuidado con ese,” the old woman behind the counter of a roadside stand said as she passed me a dust-covered bag of chips and a warm Coke with her thin, trembly hands. “Be careful with that one. I heard about that Caballo. He was a fighter who went loco. A man died, and he went loco. He can kill you with his hands. And,” she added, in case I’d forgotten, “he’s loco.”
The last place he’d been spotted was the old mining town of Creel, where a woman in a taco stand told us she’d seen him that very morning, walking the train tracks toward the edge of town. We followed the tracks to the end of the line, asking all the way, until we reached the final building: the Casa Pérez hotel. Where, I was both thrilled and nervous to hear, he was supposed to be at that moment.
Maybe it was a good thing I fell asleep on the corner sofa. That way, at least, I was hidden in the shadows and managed to get a good look at the lone wanderer—before he saw me, and bolted right back into the wild.
CHAPTER 7
LUCKILY, I WAS closer to the door.
“Hey! Uh, do you know Ángel?” I stammered as I stepped between Caballo and his only way out. “The teacher at the Tarahumara school? And Esidro in Huisichi? And, um, Luna, Miguel Luna …” I kept shotgunning names, hoping he’d hear one he recognized before body-slamming me against the wall and escaping into the hills behind the hotel. “… No, Manuel. Not Miguel Luna. Manuel. His son said you guys were friends. Marcelino? You know Marcelino?”
But the more I talked, the more his scowl deepened, until it looked downright menacing. I snapped my mouth shut. I’d learned my lesson after the Debacle at the Quimare Compound; maybe he’d cool out if I kept quiet and gave him a chance to size me up on his own. I stood silently while he squinted, suspicious and scornful, from under the brim of his straw campesino’s hat.
“Yeah,” he grunted. “Manuel is an amigo. Who the hell are you?”
Since I didn’t really know what was making him skittish, I started with who I wasn’t. I wasn’t a cop or a DEA agent, I told him. I was just a writer and busted-up runner who wanted to learn the secrets of the Tarahumara. If he was a fugitive, that was his own business. If anything, it boosted his credibility: anyone who could dodge the law for all these years with no getaway vehicle except his own two legs had sure made his bones as a wannabe Rarámuri. I could set aside my obligations to justice long enough to hear what had to be the escape tale of a lifetime.
Caballo’s scowl didn’t fade—but he didn’t try to get around me, either. Only later would I discover that I’d gotten extraordinarily lucky and stumbled across him at a strange time in his very strange life: in his own way Caballo Blanco was looking for me, too.
“Okay, man,” he said. “But I’ve got to get some beans.”
He l
ed me out of the hotel and down a dusty alley to a small, unmarked door. We stepped over a little boy playing with a kitten on the doorstep and right into a tiny living room. An old woman looked up from an ancient gas stove in an adjoining alcove, where she was stirring a fragrant pot of frijoles.
“Hola, Caballo” she called.
“¿Cómo está, Mamá?” Caballo Blanco called back. We took seats at a rickety wooden table in the living room. He’s got “mamás” all over the canyons, he said, little old ladies who’d fill him up on beans and tortillas for only a few centavos during his rambling vagabond runs.
Despite Mamá’s nonchalance, I could see why the Tarahumara were spooked when Caballo first came whisking through their woods. Fantastic feats of endurance under an unforgiving sun have left Caballo a little on the savage side. He’s well over six feet tall, with naturally fair skin that has weathered into shades ranging from pink on his nose to walnut on his neck. He’s so long-limbed and lean-muscled, he looks like the endoskeleton of a bulkier beast; melt the Terminator in a cauldron of acid, and Caballo Blanco is what comes out.
The desert glare had scrunched his eyes into a permanent squint, leaving his face capable of only two expressions: skepticism or amusement. No matter what I said for the rest of the night, I could never tell if he thought I was hilarious or full of shit. When Caballo turns his attention on you, he locks in hard; he listens as attentively as a hunter tracking game, seeming to get as much from the warbles of your voice as from the meaning of your words. Oddly, though, he still has an abominable ear for accents—after more than a decade in Mexico, his Spanish clanged so badly it sounded as if he were sounding it out from phonics cards.
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