RICHFORD, Vt. – Earlier this year when the principal of the local high school spotted two men with guns getting out of a vehicle near the school, he locked down the building and called the state police.

It could have taken half an hour for a trooper to reach the school, so the state police turned to one of its most trusted allies along Vermont’s border with Quebec: the Border Patrol.

Within four minutes, four armed agents were at the school, located about a mile south of the Canadian border, said Michael Flanagan, the Border Patrol agent in charge of the Richford outpost.

It turned out the two men were hunting and did not pose a threat to the public, but no one knew that until the agents tracked the men into the woods and then brought them back to the school where they all waited for the state police to arrive.

“We are here. The state police are usually somewhere else,” said Flanagan.

Law enforcement officials near the Canadian frontier across northern New England and New York say the Border Patrol has always been helpful. But since the border security enhancements after the attacks on the United States in September 2001, the number of agents along the U.S.-Canadian border has tripled.

“As we get more resources we can offer them more resources,” said Roland Richardson, a spokesman for the Border Patrol in Fort Kent, Maine.

And it’s more than just manpower. Last month, a Border Patrol helicopter as well as agents on the ground helped the Vermont State Police search for what was reported to be a suspect who had shot a man in West Charleston. The man later admitted he had shot himself accidentally.

“They have been indispensable. They can have people on scene faster than I can get additional troopers there,” said state police Lt. Rob Evans, the commander of the St. Albans barracks, which is responsible for the area along the border in northwestern Vermont, including Richford.

For the Border Patrol, helping reduce crime in border communities is a formal part of its mission. There is no limit on how far away from the border agents will go to help, but farther away from the border it becomes less likely the agents can get there faster than traditional police backup, officials said.

Mark Henry, a spokesman for the Border Patrol’s Swanton Sector, which runs 295 miles from Ogdensburg, N.Y., to the Maine-New Hampshire line, said agents across the country regularly help domestic law enforcement agencies.

“I can’t imagine there is a Border Patrol agent who has spent more than six months on the road who hasn’t been called,” he said.

During his 30-year Border Patrol career, Henry said he had been to murders, bank robberies, traffic accidents, sexual assaults – every type of crime a state or local officer would handle.

Border Patrol agents are quick to say state and local police officers help them, as well. In 1999, two state police dogs helped the Border Patrol search the car of a Canadian woman suspected of having terrorist connections after she was arrested in Beecher Falls.

And it can be dangerous helping U.S. police. In 1997, a Border Patrol agent was shot and seriously wounded in Bloomfield as he helped police from New Hampshire and Vermont find Carl Drega, a man who had earlier that day shot and killed two New Hampshire state police troopers, a judge and a newspaper editor before crossing into Vermont where he was killed in a shootout.

Richard Lapoint, the police chief in Pittsburg, N.H., the state’s only community that borders Quebec, said he worked regularly with the Border Patrol.

A few years ago, Border Patrol officers helped him bust a marijuana growing operation along the border. “They helped me sit on the plants and stuff, and were able to apprehend a couple Canadians that were responsible,” he said.

In New York and Maine, it’s the same thing.

Henry said in 2002, Border Patrol agents apprehended a bank robber in Champlain, N.Y. Last fall in western New York, a Border Patrol helicopter helped search the Buffalo suburb of Clarence after a mother of four went missing. Ground searchers later found the woman murdered.

Police Chief Kenneth Michaud in Fort Kent, a Maine town of about 4,300 along the state’s northern border with Canada, said that for him there’s no one else to turn to with Canada on the north and so few towns in other directions. And the extra agents who have arrived since 2001 are just that much more support.

“The Border Patrol, they’re everywhere,” Michaud said.

Richford, a town of about 2,300 right in the middle of Vermont, contracts for part-time police coverage from the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department.

When the deputies aren’t available, it can take troopers half an hour to get there in an emergency, said Town Clerk Gary Snider.

But the small Border Patrol outpost is located in the post office building.

“We are kind of blessed to have the Border Patrol here,” said Snider. “They will come running. They are fantastic.”