On the ground: Fewer crossings, more deaths

As Jim and Sue Chilton weave their truck down a winding dirt road through their 50,000-acre ranch, which includes a 51⁄ mile slice of the Mexican border, they carry a .223 rifle with a 20-round clip, a 12-gauge shotgun, and water and food for migrants they may meet. In the past five years, the Chiltons put in 13 water fountains on their wells and on the water lines leading to cattle troughs throughout their ranch, in hopes that migrants will use the fountains instead of damaging the pipes to get clean water.

“There’s nothing worse than running into people who are desperate, which we’ve done many times,” says Jim. He’s 74; Sue is 70. They’ve owned their ranch for 27 years, and Jim is a fifth-generation Arizona rancher.

One recent afternoon, they lead two journalists on a vigorous hike up a brush-studded gully to a hillside where last December Jim found four backpack-sized bales of marijuana, abandoned by smugglers who apparently fled when they saw him coming. Clothes and water bottles still litter the site. Farther up another hill, under a large overhanging mesquite tree that shields anyone under it from being seen from the air, more water bottles and other garbage carpet the ground.

Both Chiltons can tell tale after tale of encounters. One of their favorites is recent: In December, they let an NBCtelevision crew place a camouflaged, motion-sensor video camera near where they found the marijuana.

“That thing was so well disguised, there’s no way you could have spotted it from the trail,” Jim says. But when he retrieved the camera and sent it to the network a week later, the video showed someone had walked up about 40 minutes af-