The way Bustillos was hunched over like an old man, however, was the result of the spinal damage and broken ribs he suffered last April 20, when a three-ton truck came up behind him on a rural road outside the town of Guachochi, one of the big trading centers in the Sierra Madre, and forced his Ford Bronco over a 300-foot embankment. Hurled from his truck, Bustillos was discovered by friends who were following behind and who rushed him to a hospital just in time to save his life. He underwent hours of surgery on his crushed left arm, but he would never regain the full use of it.

       His skull had nearly mended from an incident on Christmas Day in 1993, when five men-two of whom he claims he recognized as off-duty police officerspulled him out of his car near his home in Agua Azul, beat him senseless, and left him for dead by the road. Bustillos would later become convinced that the attack had been ordered by Ismael Diaz Carillos, the municipal president of Guachochi. A board member of a local bank, Carillos was widely believed to have laundered millions of dollars for the Fontes cartel, a drug organization that Bustillos suspected was also involved in the illegal logging that has defaced much of the Sierra.

       And speaking of the devil, there was Carillos himself, surrounded by three gold-festooned bodyguards, standing no more than 30 feet from us. We had come in on the same plane. "That is the man who tried to kill me," Bustillos muttered, glaring at Carillos with his one good eye.

       EDWIN BUSTILLOS, FOUNDER AND director of a human-rights and environmental organization called CASMAC(the Spanish name translates as Advisory Council of the Sierra Madre), had offered to lead me up into the rugged mountains of southwestern Chihuahua to gauge how profoundly the backcountry has been devastated by both the drug trade and the lumber business in recent years. All across the Mother Range, agents of the drug cartels have systematically coerced Indians into cultivating marijuana and the opium poppy, from which heroin is made. Those who cooperate are sometimes paid in alcohol or corn, though often they're paid nothing at all. Those who refuse to plant the illicit crops, on the other hand, have been intimidated or forced off their land, their food and livestock stolen, their extended families subjected to harassment, rape, and torture. Over the past year, according to CASMAC, an average of four Indians per week have been reported murdered.

       The Sierra Madre boasts the richest biodiversity anywhere in North America and contains about two-thirds of the standing timber in Mexico. But in recent years local logging companies-some of which are believed to be in close association with, and in a few cases owned by, the narcos-have been forcing new roads into remote settlements and cutting the last old-growth forests where families forage for wild berries and nuts and shamans gather ceremonial herbs. In 1994, Mexico's department of agriculture estimates, as much as 300 million board feet of timber was cut from the Sierra Madre, though CASMAC suggests the harvest may have been much bigger. Nearly 20 percent of the timber was sold to the United States as plywood, pulp, or paper. In the most severely deforested parts of the region, the overcutting has resulted in soil erosion, habitat destruction, watershed damage, and the extinction or endangerment of species. The fragile cultures of the loca'l Indians, who have depended on the forests for millennia, have been left hanging in the balance.

       Beginning some 250 miles south of the New Mexico border, this is the jagged, 500-mile range immortalized by Bogart and Huston and celebrated among wilderness lovers for Copper Canyon, a system of tangled, immense chasms, four of which are deeper than the Grand. For the last 2,000 years, it has been home to the Tarahumara, one of the continent's largest tribes, whose simple agrarian culture had until recently remained largely untouched by Western civilization. Officially there are 50,000 Tarahumara in the Sierra Madre, but twice that many may be scattered along the drainages in loose clusters of interrelated families known as ranchos, their flimsy, slapdash dwellings within shouting distance of one another.

       The deeply corrugated topography makes it necessary for the Tarahumara to regularly traverse great distances, and over the centuries they have become worldclass long-distance runners. (Tarahumara is a Spanish corruption of their name for themselves: Raramuri, or "Foot Runners.") Their ancient tribal game, known as rajalipame, involves two teams maneuvering a wooden ball in relays toward a finish line sometimes 100 miles away. In 1894, Swedish explorer Carl Lumholz encountered Tarahumara running as many as 170 miles without stopping. The naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton reported seeing a Tarahumara postman in 1924 "who routinely covered 70 miles a day, seven days a week, bearing a heavy mailbag." Several Tarahumara were drafted to run the marathon for Mexico in the 1928 Olympics. "Apparently," writes ethnographer Peter Nabokov in his book Indian Running, "no one made it clear to them that marathons were only 26 miles, 385 yards long. Minutes behind the frontrunners, the Tarahumaras crossed the finish line and continued running until halted by officials. 'Too short, too short,' they complained."

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