She crashed like the fury of the sun into the draw, her hackles raised, her eyes like burning coals, and her claws like threshing scythes. But this time, Coyote was between her and the wall. This time, Coyote was threatening her cub. She struck at him like lightning and fire, swatting him as though he were a troublesome gnat, sending the loathesome, laughing creature sprawling. As his blood wet the ground, so too did the late summer rains, and the sky broke with lightning.
The water arrived from above like a stampede of bison, rushing down between the Lioness and her helpless quarry, Coyote thrashing his way up the side of the draw and out into the wind-whipped plains. Raccoon scrambled up in turn, trying to reach the path to his canyon home even as the water in the draw began to rise. His mother leapt effortlessly up to the ledge and clutched him about the scruff of his neck in her powerful but deliberate jaws and drew him up onto higher ground, even as the water had come up to his backside beneath them.
When she deposited him on the ground in front of her, her gaze changed. The coals in her eyes glowed hot again, and Raccoon knew a new fear entirely, one that ran deeper than any he had felt before, and as the sky darkened and crackled with bursts of white fire, he felt as though the rage of the Sun was upon him. He looked down in shame and fear, and saw his tail, soaked from the rising water, the golden dust washed from it, his dark black rings showing once more. His Trick was done and so, he assumed, was his life.
But his adoptive mother's rage at deception warred- as all things did, with her- with the months that she had spent knowing him as her cub, and raising him with her own, and fashioning him into a feline in his own right.
"Who are you, really?" she asked in a tone that, as always, brook no argument.
"I am not Trick," he confessed. "I am Raccoon, come from the woods, to live in the prairie."
And she looked at him, her eyes lingering on his tail, and she said, "You are my Trick. But you are no Lion. And you are not Raccoon, because you know the rocks and the grass, and you have forgotten your woods. You are Ringtail."
He liked the sound of this, though he still withered at the shadow of rebuke in her voice and the smoldering embers in her eyes.
"Go into the canyon, wear your golden fur, and wear your rings, and live as you have learned. But do not enter my temple, and do not live in the Sun. Your brothers will kill you, and they will be right to. But if you move in the shadows, you will always have a place here," she spoke, and then she spoke no more.
Ringtail nodded his understanding, thanked her for her mercy, and fled deep into the rocks, moving like a cat, eating like a raccoon, and living like himself.