Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

by Christopher McDougall

  The boys hit the river at full speed, churning through as though they were being chased by demons. Which, they gasped to Ángel when they made it to the schoolhouse, they probably were.

  They’d been out herding goats on the mountain, they said, when a weird creature darted through the trees above them. The Creature had the shape of a man, but was taller than any human they’d ever seen. It was deathly pale and bony as a corpse, and had shocks of flame-colored hair jutting out of its skull. It was also naked. For a giant, nude cadaver, the Creature was pretty quick on its feet; it vanished into the brush before the boys could get more than a glimpse.

  Not that they hung around for more glimpsing. The two boys hightailed it back to the village, wondering who—or what—they’d just seen. After they reached Ángel, though, they began to calm down and catch their breath, and they realized who it was.

  “That’s the first chuhuíI ever saw,” one of the boys said.

  “A ghost?” Ángel said. “What makes you think it was a ghost?”

  By this point, several Rarámuri elders had ambled up to see what was going on. The boys repeated their story, describing the Creature’s skeletal appearance, its wild shocks of hair, the way it ran along the trail above them. The elders heard the boys out, then set them straight. The canyon shadows could play tricks on anyone’s mind, so it was no surprise the boys’ imaginations had run a little wild. Still, they shouldn’t be allowed to panic the younger kids with wild stories.

  “How many legs did it have?” the elders asked.

  “Two.”

  “Did it spit on you?”

  “No.”

  Well, there you had it. “That was no ghost,” the elders said. “That was just an ariwará.”

  A soul of the dead; yes, that did make a lot more sense. Ghosts were evil phantoms who traveled by night and galloped around on all fours, killing sheep and spitting in people’s faces. Souls of the dead, on the other hand, meant no harm and were just tidying up loose ends. Even in death, the Tarahumara are fanatics about elusiveness. After they die, their souls hustle around to retrieve any footprints or stray hair the body left behind. The Tarahumara technique for getting a trim was to pull their hair taut in the crotch of a tree and saw it off with a knife, so all those leftover hanks had to be picked up. Once the dead soul has erased all signs of its earthbound existence, it can venture on to the afterlife.

  “The journey takes three days,” the elders reminded the boys. “Four, if it’s a woman.” So naturally the ariwará is going to look a little bushy, what with all that chopped hair jammed back on its head; and of course it’ll be moving top speed, with only a long weekend to knock out a ton of chores. Come to think of it, it was pretty impressive the boys managed to spot the ariwará at all; Tarahumara souls usually run so fast, all you see is swirl of dust sweeping across the countryside. Even in death, the elders reminded the boys, they’re still the Running People.

  “You’re alive because your father can run down a deer. He’s alive because his grandfather could outrun an Apache war pony. That’s how fast we are when we’re weighed down by our sapá, our fleshiness. Imagine how you’ll fly once you shuck it.”

  Ángel listened, wondering if he should bother pointing out another possibility. Ángel was an oddity in Muñerachi, a half-Mexican Tarahumara who had actually left the canyon for a while and gone to school in a Mexican village. He still wore traditional Tarahumara sandals and the koyera hairband, but unlike the other elders around him, Ángel had on faded work pants instead of a breechcloth. He’d changed on the inside, as well; though he still worshipped the Tarahumara gods, he had to wonder if this Wild Thing in the Wilderness wasn’t just a chabochi who’d wandered in from the outside world.

  Granted, it was probably even more of a long shot than sharing the trail with a traveling spirit. No one ever penetrated this far unless they had a very good reason. Maybe he was a fugitive hiding from the law? A mystic seeking visions? A gold digger driven mad by the heat?

  Ángel shrugged. A lone chabochi could be any of the above, and still not be the first of his kind to surface in Tarahumara territory. It’s a natural law (or supernatural, if you’re so inclined) that weird things appear where people tend to disappear. African jungles, Pacific islands, Himalayan wastelands—wherever expeditionary parties go missing, that’s where lost species, Stonehengey stone idols, the flitting shadows of yetis, and ancient, unsurrendering Japanese soldiers are sure to pop up.

  The Copper Canyons are no different, and in some regards, considerably worse. The Sierra Madres are the middle link of a mountain chain that stretches practically uninterrupted from Alaska to Patagonia. A desperado with a knack for backcountry navigation could hold up a bank in Colorado and slink to safety in the Copper Canyons, darting across desolate passes and desert ranges without coming within ten miles of the next human being.

  As the best open-air safe house on the continent, consequently, the Copper Canyons not only spawn bizarre beings but also attract them. Over the past hundred years, the canyons have played host to just about every stripe of North American misfit: bandits, mystics, murderers, man-eating jaguars, Comanche warriors, Apache marauders, paranoid prospectors, and Pancho Villa’s rebels have all shaken pursuit by slipping into the Barrancas.

  Geronimo used to skeedaddle into the Copper Canyons when he was on the run from the U.S. Cavalry. So did his protégé, the Apache Kid, who “moved like a ghost in the desert,” as one chronicler put it. “He followed no pattern. No one knew where he would show up next. It was unnerving to work cattle or mine a claim when every shadow, every slight noise, could be the Apache Kid closing in for the kill. One worried settler said it best: ‘Usually, by the time you saw the Apache Kid it was entirely too late.’”

  Pursuing them into the maze meant running the risk of never finding a way back out again. “To look at this country is grand; to travel in it, is Hell,” a U.S. Cavalry captain named John Bourke wrote after barely surviving another unsuccessful pursuit of Geronimo into the Copper Canyons. The click of a tumbling pebble would echo around crazily, getting louder and louder rather than fainter, the sound bouncing from right, to left, to overhead. The rasp of two juniper branches would have an entire company of cavalrymen yanking out their pistols, their own shadows contorting monstrously against the stone walls as they searched wildly in all directions.

  More than just echoes and jumpy imaginations made the Copper Canyons seem haunted; one torment could transform into another so quickly, it was hard not to believe the Barrancas were guarded by some wrathful spirit with a sadistic sense of humor. After days of baking under a merciless sun, soldiers would welcome the relief of a few dark clouds. Within minutes, they’d be trapped in a surge of flood-water as powerful as a fire hose, scrambling desperately to escape up the slippery rock walls. That’s exactly how another Apache rebel named Massai once wiped out an entire cavalry squad: “By bringing them into a shallow gorge just in time to be swept away by a mountain cloudburst.”

  The Barrancas were so treacherous, even a quick sip of fresh water could kill you. The Apache chief Victorio used to lead U.S. Cavalry troops on a cat-and-mouse chase deep into the canyons, then lie in wait by the only water hole. The cavalrymen must have known he’d be there, but couldn’t help themselves. Lost and crazed by the heat, they would rather risk a quick bullet in the head than a slow choking from a thirst-thickened tongue.

  Not even the two toughest hombres in U.S. military history were any match for the Barrancas. When Pancho Villa’s forces attacked a town in New Mexico in 1916, President Woodrow Wilson personally directed both Black Jack Pershing and George Patton to haul him out of his Copper Canyon lair. Ten years later, the Jaguar was still on the loose. Even with the full might of the U.S. armed forces at their disposal, Patton and Pershing had to be bewildered by ten thousand miles of raw wilderness, with their only possible information source, the Tarahumara, disappearing at the sound of a sneeze. The result: Black Jack and Old Blood and Guts could whip the Germa
ns in two world wars, but surrendered to the Copper Canyons.

  Over time, the Mexican federales learned to take a more be-careful-what-you-wish-for strategy. What was hell for pursuers, they realized, couldn’t be a whole lot nicer for the pursued. Whatever happened to the fugitives in there—starvation, jaguar attack, dementia, a life sentence of voluntary solitary confinement—was probably more ghastly than anything the Mexican court system would have meted out. So, often as not, the federales would rein in their horses and allow any bandit who reached the canyons to try his luck in the prison of his own making.

  Many adventurers who slunk in never slunk back out again, giving the canyons their reputation as the Bermuda Triangle of the borderlands. The Apache Kid and Massai galloped over Skeleton Pass into the Copper Canyons one last time and were never seen again. Ambrose Bierce, the celebrity newspaper columnist and author of the satiric hit The Devil’s Dictionary, was reportedly en route to a rendezvous with Pancho Villa in 1914 when he strayed into the Copper Canyons’ gravitational pull and was never seen again. Imagine Anderson Cooper vanishing on assignment for CNN, and you get the sense of the search that was launched for Bierce. But no trace was ever found.

  Did the lost souls of the canyons suffer a terrible fate, or wreak terrible fates on each other? No one knows. In the old days, they’d be killed off by mountain lions, scorpions, coral snakes, thirst, cold, hunger, or canyon fever, and you could now add a sniper’s bullet to that list. Ever since the drug cartels had moved into the Copper Canyons, they’d guarded their crops through telescopic scopes powerful enough to see a leaf quiver from miles away.

  Which made Ángel wonder if he’d ever see the Creature at all. A lot of things could kill him out there, and probably would. If the Creature didn’t know enough to keep his distance from the marijuana fields, he wouldn’t even hear the shot that took off his head.

  “¡Hoooooolaaaaaa! ¡Amigoooooooooos!”

  The mystery of the lone wanderer was solved even sooner than Ángel had expected. He was still squinting into the sun, watching out for returning schoolkids, when he heard an echoing yodel and spotted a naked guy waving and running down the trail toward the river.

  On closer inspection, the Creature wasn’t entirely naked. He wasn’t exactly dressed either, certainly not by Tarahumara standards. For a people who prefer not to be seen, the Tarahumara always look fantastic. The men wear bright blouses over a long white cloth bound around the groin and left hanging, skirtlike, in the front and rear. They cinch it all together with a rainbow-colored sash, and accessorize with a matching headband. Tarahumara women are even more magnificent, wearing brilliantly colored skirts and matching blouses, their lovely umber skin highlighted by coral-colored stone necklaces and bracelets. No matter what kind of fancy hiking duds you’ve got on, you’re guaranteed to feel underdressed among the Tarahumara.

  Even by sun-crazed-prospector standards, the Creature was seriously shabby. He only had on some dirt-colored chabochi shorts, a pair of sandals, and an old baseball cap. That was it. No backpack, no shirt, and apparently no food, because as soon as he reached Ángel, he asked in awkward Spanish for agua and made shoveling gestures toward his mouth—maybe he could have something to eat?

  “Assag,” Ángel told him in Tarahumara, gesturing for him to sit. Someone produced a cup of pinole, the Tarahumara corn gruel. The stranger slurped it down hungrily. Between gulps, he tried to communicate. He pumped his arms and let his tongue loll like a panting dog.

  “¿Corriendo?” the teacher asked. You’ve been running?

  The Creature nodded. “Todo día,” he said in pidgin Spanish. “All day.”

  “¿Por qué?” Ángel asked. “¿Y a dónde?” Why? And where to?

  The Creature launched into a long tale, which Ángel found highly entertaining as performance art but barely intelligible as narrative. From what Ángel could make out, the lone wanderer was either totally nuts or not so lone after all; he claimed to have an even more mysterious sidekick, some kind of Apache warrior he called Ramón Chingón—“Ray, the Mean Motherfucker.”

  “¿Y tú?” Ángel asked. “What’s your name?”

  “Caballo Blanco,” he said. The White Horse.

  “Pues, bueno,” the teacher said, shrugging. Good enough.

  The White Horse didn’t linger; once he’d gulped some water and a second cup of pinole, he waved good-bye and went trotting back up the trail. He stomped and shrieked like a wild stallion as he went, amusing the kids, who laughed and chased at his heels until he disappeared, once again, back into the wild.

  “Caballo Blanco es muy amable,” Ángel said, concluding his story, “pero un poco raro.” The White Horse is a good guy, in other words, if you like ’em a little loony.

  “So you think he’s still out there?” I asked.

  “Hombre, claro,” Ángel said. “He was here yesterday. I gave him a drink with that cup.”

  I looked around. There was no cup.

  “The cup was there, too,” Ángel insisted.

  From what Ángel had picked up over the years, Caballo lived in a hut he’d built himself somewhere across the Batopilas mountain. Whenever he turned up at Ángel’s school, he arrived with just the sandals on his feet, the shirt on his back (if that), and a bag of dry pinole hanging from his waist, like the Tarahumara. He seemed to live off the land when he ran, depending on korima, the cornerstone of Tarahumara culture.

  Korima sounds like karma and functions the same way, except in the here and now. It’s your obligation to share whatever you can spare, instantly and with no expectations: once the gift leaves your hand, it was never yours to begin with. The Tarahumara have no monetary system, so korima is how they do business: their economy is based on trading favors and the occasional cauldron of corn beer.

  The White Horse looked and dressed and sounded nothing like the Tarahumara, but in a deeper way, he was one of them. Ángel had heard of Tarahumara runners who used the Horse’s hut as a way station during long journeys through the canyons. The Horse, in return, was always welcome to a meal and a place to rest when he came roaming through Ángel’s village on his rambling runs.

  Ángel waved his arm, a brusque sweep of his arm out thataway— beyond the river and the canyon top, toward non-Tarahumara country whence no good can come.

  “There’s a village called Mesa de la Yerbabuena,” he said. “Do you know it, Salvador?”

  “Mm-hm,” Salvador murmured.

  “Do you know what happened to it?”

  “Mm-HM,” Salvador replied, his inflection conveying Hell, yeah.

  “Many of the best runners were from Yerbabuena,” Ángel said. “They had a very good trail which would let them cover a lot of distance in a day, much farther than you could get to from here.”

  Unfortunately, the trail was so good that the Mexican government eventually decided to slick it with asphalt and turn it into a road. Trucks began showing up in Yerbabuena, and in them, foods the Tarahumara had rarely eaten—soda, chocolate, rice, sugar, butter, flour. The people of Yerbabuena developed a taste for starch and treats, but they needed money to buy them, so instead of working their own fields, they began hitching rides to Guachochi, where they worked as dishwashers and day laborers, or selling junk crafts at the train station in Divisadero.

  “That was twenty years ago,” Ángel said. “Now, there are no runners in Yerbabuena.”

  The Yerbabuena story really scares Ángel, because now there’s talk that the government has found a way to run a road along the canyon floor and right into this settlement. Why they would put a road in here, Ángel doesn’t have a clue; the Tarahumara don’t want it, and they’re the only ones who live here. Only drug lords and illegal loggers benefit from Copper Canyon roads, which makes the Mexican government’s obsession with backcountry road-building rather bewildering—or, considering how many soldiers and politicians are linked to the drug trade, rather not.

  “That’s exactly what Lumholtz was afraid would happen,” I thought to myself. A cen
tury ago, the farseeing explorer was already warning that the Tarahumara were in danger of disappearing.

  “Future generations will not find any other record of the Tarahumares than what scientists of the present age can elicit from the lips of the people and from the study of their implements and customs,” he predicted. “They stand out to-day as an interesting relic of a time long gone by; as a representative of one of the most important stages in the development of the human race; as one of those wonderful primitive tribes that were the founders and makers of the history of mankind.”

  “There are Rarámuri who don’t respect our traditions as much as Caballo Blanco,” Ángel lamented. “El Caballo sabe—the Horse gets it.”

  I slumped against the wall of Ángel’s schoolhouse, my legs twitching and head pounding from exhaustion. It had been grueling enough to get this far, and now it looked like the hunt had just begun.

  CHAPTER 6

  “WHAT A CON JOB.”

  Salvador and I set off the next morning, racing the sun to the rim of the canyon. Salvador set a brutal pace, often ignoring switchbacks and using his hands to scrabble straight up the cliff face like a convict scaling a prison wall. I did my best to keep up, despite my growing certainty that we’d just been tricked.

  The farther we left Ángel’s village behind, the more the idea nagged that the weird White Horse story was a last line of defense against outsiders who came nosing around in search of Tarahumara secrets. Like all great cons, the story of a Lone Wanderer of the High Sierras teetered between perfect and implausible; the news that there was a modern-world disciple of the ancient Tarahumara arts was better than I could have hoped for, which made it too good to believe. The White Horse seemed more myth than man, making me think that Ángel had gotten tired of my questions, dreamed up a decoy, and pointed us toward the horizon knowing we’d be hundreds of hard miles away before we wised up.