Mother was gone, so the girl would have to care for herself now. The girl had known that this day would come, sooner or later. Her mother was a free spirit, a coyote of the desert. Caring for her Secret had been a burden to her, even when she had told her Secret otherwise. The girl supposed that now that she was a year old, her mother had decided she was old enough to abandon. Secret knew how to hunt small game, how to hide from danger, how to shelter from bad weather, how to find water in a drought. She did not need a mother anymore. She had waited a week before moving on, but when Bird, her mother, had not come back, she had given up waiting. 

She followed the river farther north and now she was standing on the pebble-strewn shoreline of a lake. It was not hot now because the sun was quickly going down, but Secret could tell that it would be hot here during the day. She bent to drink from the lake, small pink tongue lapping at the water, but her ears swiveled this way and that, rather like a cat’s, ever-alert for danger. It was an instinct her mother had forced into her from a young age. There were those that would take advantage of her small size and the fact that she was half-coyote. She had to be careful. Always.