I come now to the time he killed my mother and I won a brief freedom. The weather had been murderously hot. From January to July no drop of rain fell and our hills grew sullenly naked and brown. Sloan’s spring ceased its flow. He did not discover that for two days, being stupefied, and we were terribly wasted when he turned us out to find water for ourselves. There was no grass. The earth showed gray as the rocks and as bare, and the rocks gave back the heat in shimmering waves. Where the ground had cracked under the sun, giant fissures gaped for the feet of the unwary. Five miles from home we saw some cows stumbling hopelessly out of a cañon and learned that there, too, the water had failed. Their dried skins drew tight over their bones and the panic of desperation glared from their eyes. One prodded at my mother as we passed, refusing to give place as cattle do to horses, then sank weakly to the ground. Later she stretched out on her side, and we knew that the end was near. Turkey buzzards strutted everywhere, gorged to apathy. They would cluster on a carcass, unwinking and insolent, and watch us nosing in quest of a bite to eat. Fires had ravaged the lower ridges, and trees and brush were stripped clean. To remain here meant slow death, and we fared higher. We met with cattle on the upper slopes, spent and picking their path with care. A heifer slipped and rolled downward almost beneath our feet. There were many orphan calves, bawling impotently against echoing cañons’ walls, and carrion-crows hung soundlessly in flocks, their shadows flitting swiftly over the earth in front of us. We came on the body of a horse at a dried waterhole. He had plunged from a ledge in his exhaustion, to die helplessly in sight of the place he sought. Crows had torn out the eyes. But I would not let my mother become disheartened. All these creatures were moving downward, and some propelling force has always driven me upward in time of stress. So I led her far among the peaks. It was desolate enough, of a certainty--so barren that my poor, tottering mother wanted to go back, though she knew well that the homeward stretch was beyond her strength--but I urged her forward. We came at last to four peaks, away up in those mountains, and threading a defile, emerged into a cuplike draw among them; and there were mesquite in profusion and many green things. And more precious than all, a tiny spring bubbled behind a boulder at the north end. It would not water more than four head, but it sufficed, and we tarried on its edge all of one evening. For forty days we stayed in our random home and gained in flesh and in strength. Then, one hot, sticky evening, great banks of mist surged upward and massed around our beloved peaks, and the rain broke from the press and drenched the hills. We turned our backs to the driving torrents, clamped our tails and let the cool water soak into our crackling hides.