On the morning of Nov. 27, 1998, Philip True, the Mexico City correspondent for the San Antonio Express-News, walked out his front door to a waiting taxi summoned from the corner sitio. Martha, his Mexican-born wife, stood by and watched as the driver wrestled True's heavy backpack into the car's small trunk for the ride to the airport and his flight to Guadalajara. Not yet showing, Martha was four months pregnant with their first child.

It was the Friday after Thanksgiving Day. The American holiday is not celebrated in Mexico, but True had scrounged through Mexico City's open-air markets, tracking down everything he needed to prepare an elaborate farewell feast of roasted goose with all the trimmings. Before every great trip, Philip always told Martha, a great meal.

At age 50, True had a rugged, weathered face, but was boyishly lean and fit, an outdoors devotee bound for a long awaited 10-day trek into the remote canyon country of western Mexico. True's outing would be both wilderness quest and journalistic exploration of the reclusive Huichol Indians, whose small villages and outlying ranches were spread along the deep folds of the Sierra Madre Occidental.

True gave his wife one last kiss as they embraced, and then climbed into the taxi.

"If I'm not back in 10 days, come looking for me," he said, then waved goodbye through the open window as the taxi disappeared from view up the steep, winding street.

No one who knew True ever saw him alive again.

True was my reporter. I was his editor. We were not close friends, but we shared much in common: difficult home lives we fled as teenagers, years of blue collar work as rootless young men, and a back door entrée into newspaper reporting that gave each of us a new start in life. The many intersections of our two lives began long before we met.

We came from very distant corners of the United States, yet somehow made our way to the same small daily newspaper in the same small city on the Texas-Mexico border. More than a decade separated our arrival in Brownsville. But it was there, where the muddy waters of the Rio Grande flow downstream and empty into the Gulf of Mexico, that each of us began to pursue a reporter's life working south of the border. Our paths crossed for the first time in San Antonio in 1992; soon afterwards, True and I found ourselves working together at the same South Texas newspaper. My own rise from reporter to senior editor positioned me to send True to live and work south of the border, just as I had once lived and worked south of the border. Years later, fate led me south once more, this time not on assignment, but in search of my lost reporter.

Philip True was a journalist with working class roots and no known family other than Martha; someone who had little to say about his own past life. He was openly skeptical of anyone in power, in government and even at his own newspaper. He wrote with great craft and empathy about the poor and the powerless. It was his keen appreciation for the redeeming qualities of people living on the margins that made his best stories so memorable.

Only after his disappearance did I learn that True was a devoted walker, in the wilderness definition of the word. He savored every opportunity to leave behind his everyday existence to venture into the unknown, sometimes with a friend or girlfriend, but usually alone. Retracing his life much later, I figured that True had spent an entire year sleeping outdoors on treks, camping and cycling trips, and hitchhiking adventures. He never stopped.

"Walking in the wilderness," True told his Mexico City therapist, Sara Delano Rojas, in one particularly revealing remark, "helps me put back together the pieces of my broken soul."

News of True's long-planned trek caught me by surprise when I learned he was missing. I had covered civil wars and repression in Central America in the 1980s, so his disappearance was deeply unsettling news. I knew what could befall a reporter traveling alone in the lawless backcountry. I wondered why True had set out without a companion.

As Martha and the newspaper launched a search, I realized I could not stay in San Antonio while others went into the mountains. So I went looking for True, fearing the worst, hoping for the best. Only one thing was certain: We were going to find him, no matter what.

Days after his reported disappearance, our small search party came upon True's remains in a hidden grave, deep in the Chapalagana Canyon, which translates from the Huichol language to Canyon of the Twisted Serpent. He had been murdered, the first accredited U.S. journalist to suffer such a fate in Mexico in modern times.

Many of Mexico's ancient peoples such as the Olmecs and the Aztecs have disappeared, declined or assimilated. Others, such as the Maya or the Zapotecs, have somehow survived even as they have suffered the theft of ancestral lands, the indifference of a distant central government and the twin burdens of poverty and prejudice. Even in a country with hundreds of identifiable indigenous groups that are mere remnants of once thriving societies, the Huichols remain Mexico's most isolated and preserved native people.

There are only about 30,000 Huichols, scattered in small settlements throughout the Sierra Madre, but they remain fiercely resistant to outside forces and devoted to their history and traditions. They speak their own language, are known for their traditional dress and folk art, and live a simple, if impoverished agrarian life. The Huichols worship gods found in nature, and their shamans, some like priests, some more like witch doctors, are the keepers of an oral history that is thousands of years old, recounted and passed down from one generation to the next in long singsong chants.

The Huichols ritually travel hundreds of miles to find and gather peyote, a button-shaped cactus that induces hallucinations when ingested, for use in their sacred rituals. Huichol shamans, chanting ancient creation myths, gaze through this hallucinatory window into space and time, where the past and the future are both at hand. They believe they are descended from deer, and peyote connects them to their animal ancestors who they call on for wisdom and guidance. They experience the mystical transformation of man into beast, and are unleashed to roam the sierra on all fours.

Following True's footsteps through the Huichol lands was its own strange, sometimes dreamlike odyssey. After our hike into one of the Sierra Madre's most forbidding gorges, we descended into an even deeper labyrinth, the Mexican judicial system. Our search for a missing reporter became a search for missing justice in a country where the rule of law is as fleeting and elusive as the passing spirit of a man-deer in the canyon country.

The gruesome killing of a reporter metamorphosed into a larger drama, one steeped in the unresolved historical grievances that simmer in the hearts of so many Mexicans. Few Americans know that the United States seized 40% of Mexico's territory in a war that ended with the Mexicans' capitulation and the signing of the Treaty Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, regarded by many historians on both sides of the border as a blatant "Manifest Destiny" land grab. American textbooks largely ignore such history, but every Mexican student studies this defining historical episode, one that was followed by two more cross-border military incursions in the 20th century. Cross the border to the south, even now, and you do not need peyote to sense the memories of defeat and resentment hovering in every room like ghosts. Such feelings lay beneath the surface in the True case, like shifting sands, always undermining forward movement.

Trail of Feathers took shape slowly as I lost faith in Mexico's justice system. One year, two years, five years slipped by after True's murder, the case languishing in Mexican courts while his killers went free. We met with presidents, ambassadors, governors, judges, lawyers, and investigators, all actors in the drama. All vowed justice, but none could deliver. Meanwhile, many came to believe that True was a victim of his own bad decisions when, in fact, he was murdered in cold blood. This book began as my own final argument in the court of public opinion.

Along this path, I found the story of True's "other life," before he became a newspaper reporter at the relatively advanced age of 41. It was a story that editors had gleaned only in its vaguest outlines while he was alive. True kept that story at the bottom of his backpack, hidden from view. Finding it became the key to giving deeper meaning to his life and death.

I came to know True far better in death than in life, just as I came to know and admire Martha as a widow far better than I knew her as True's wife. In telling her husband's story, I had to choose between the truth and airbrushing his disturbing family life and years as an unfulfilled young man. I also had to share enough of my own unhappy upbringing to help readers understand the deep psychological attachment I felt to True as we pursued his killers. Digging up the past can be hurtful, but such revelations illuminate what otherwise would remain in the dark, unfathomed and beyond grasp.

The Philip True I came to know was a self-reliant, somewhat fatalistic sojourner, and at times a risk-taker who gave too little thought to the potential consequences of his actions. He was driven to know what lay over the horizon, and while he was no fool, True remained an idealist into middle age, a man who regarded every stranger as a friend. As a journalist, True was a sensitive, caring witness in a part of the world where justice and hope are as scarce as water in the desert. It is a cruel irony that such a good friend of Mexico and its people died in pursuit of a story he was willing to walk through a wilderness to find and bring home.

True went in search of a threatened people and culture. What he found was very different than his own idealized vision of indigenous life. Some of True's decisions on the trail, and the motive of his killers, remain the subject of speculation. I draw my own conclusions, but I am not an objective observer. I was True's editor, his advocate in Mexico's courts, and ally of his widow, Martha.

Trail of Feathers is a story about a quest. True's descent into the Chapalagana was the last solo trek in a lifelong journey to leave behind his past, a final walk before embracing his future as a father and husband, as a man who would no longer walk alone. Some will conclude that True's own hubris led him forward on his fatal peregrination, a trespasser on closed, communal lands where distrust of strangers is born from centuries of resisting outside forces. Perhaps so, but True had visited the Huichols more than once. He believed he was welcome.

There is far more to it, something deeper even than anything found at the bottom of a dark canyon. Powerful life forces breed independent spirits like True and cause them to venture forth into the unknown. Until the very end, he went searching for something he never quite found back in civilization. By journey's end, we learn from reading his journal, True realized what he sought was no longer to be found on the trail, but was waiting for him back home: a loving wife carrying his baby, a family he could finally call his own. By then it was too late.

Excerpted from Trail of Feathers by Robert Rivard Copyright© 2005 by Robert Rivard. Excerpted by permission of Perseus Books, a division of Foregin Affairs, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.