The justice of Gideon

by Eleanor Gates

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.

They fought furiously, rolling over and over, sending the sand into the air, tearing up the greasewood, mingling their cries of pain and rage. From the edge of the cactus patch, the female watched them, rather indifferently, however, and with frequent hungry glances in the direction of the goats.

The gaunt stranger was no match for the guardian of the flock. Very soon the battle was over. Then Little Watcher looked up, and at the female. There she was at the summit of the gentle rise, apparently waiting, and turning her head prettily this way and that. Little Watcher loped toward her. She let him come close, then wheeled and sped away through the cacti. He followed.

He was back before nightfall, and lay down at the feet of the aged Navajo, his eyes furtive, as if he were conscious of neglected duty, his tongue lolling with a long, hard run. Alternately scolding and caressing him, the Old Woman gave him a few laps from her gourd shell, and presently he sought out his foster mother and rested beside her until the goats sought the cottonwoods.

But thereafter he often left his charges to go bounding away toward the mountains, and not even the proffering of food could tempt him to stay. Sometimes of a night he would rise and sneak off. Sometimes of a morning he would trot to the top of a near-by rise, stop, look round upon the goats, give a troubled whine—and disappear.

Then, one day, as suddenly as these excursions had begun, they came to an end. He was returning to the flock after a long jaunt, when, not far to his right, there appeared a moving figure, wound in a blanket and topped with white. It was not unlike a yucca, crowned by a cream-coloured bloom. Now, in a new posture, it was not unlike a stumpy saguaro with one outspread branch. The curiosity of his kind impelled him to halt. As he did so, placing his forefeet on a rock, the better to see, he caught the familiar scent of the Boy, and saw that the latter was holding out toward him a long, strange something upon which the light glinted. The next moment there was a puff of smoke—a report—and Little Watcher fell to the sand.

He lay flat upon his side for a short space, his tail limp and thin, his eyes closed. Then, striving to rise, he found himself able only to control his forelegs, for his hinder ones would not obey his will, and at the small of his back was a spot that stung. This he could reach, and he alternately snapped round at it with a doleful cry or licked it tenderly.

It was early morning then, and he did not mind the heat. But later, as the sun mounted and burned the sand, he pulled himself along to some spiny buck brush, and spent the rest of the day in its meagre shade. He knew the flock was not far, for their rank odour was borne to him on the wind. And so, the sun gone, leaving only great strokes of orange upon the sky and a fire-edged hill where its last light rested, he took his way toward home, dragging his hind quarters.