But there was no rest for Little Watcher. Still bristled, he stayed inside the corral, now skirting the goats on fleet foot, now pausing beside his black foster mother, but always licking his chops and mumbling crossly. It was then the season that follows the first rains. A haze of green lay on the desert--a haze touched here by the yellow of sunflower and marigold masses, there by the purple of the larkspur’s slender wand, again by a fleck of gleaming alkali. But all too soon that haze was gone again, melting away with the hot kiss of the sun. Greasewood and mesquite showed the only verdure now, and the flock found the picking poor. So, one dawn, a burro was loaded with blankets, the cooking pottery, and some water bottles filled at the precious spring. Then the squaw said farewell to the Boy, who stayed to tend orchard and corn strips, and drove her bearded company out of the cedar corral. Soon she was well on her way, and the grey and the red sandstone ribbons of the mesa precipice were blending and fading behind her. Finally, when more than a score of camps had been pitched and broken, the goats were stopped near the cottonwood-lined bed of a dry stream. Here the burro was unloaded, the Old Woman made a sun shelter of boughs on the bare gravel of the arroyo, and dug for, and found, water. Grazing was good, and the goats fattened. So did Little Watcher, who fared well on the daily spoil of the squaw’s snares. Here, too, almost in the shadow of the wooded Tunicha Mountains, was peace--for a period. Each night the goats were driven in to the line of cottonwoods, where, bunched together, they lay down. On one side of them was the shelter of boughs, where the Old Woman slept, rousing occasionally to put a length of mesquite root upon her torch fire; on the opposite side, close to his picketed foster mother, dozed Little Watcher, flat upon his belly, his hind legs stretched out straight with his tail, his muzzle on his forepaws. But, like the squaw, he waked now and again, and listened--head high, ears upright and moving, amber eyes glowing in the dark. And he often heard what the other did not--the far-off staccato _yip! yip! yip!_ of the prairie wolf on a scent. Then, for a second time during his term of guarding, enemies appeared--boldly, in broad daylight, when the Old Woman was away looking to her traps. It was now the season when the coyote runs in pairs. And but two appeared, out of a patch of cactus to the mountain side of the goats. From the cacti, they came darting down upon the nearest of the flock--Little Watcher’s black foster mother. But before they could reach her, a streak of tawny grey shot between. And as the she-goat scrambled up, bleating in terror, to join the herd, Little Watcher, all bristled from crest to tail, met the male of the coyote pair and buried his teeth in his flank.