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My 10-year-old daughter was skipping around the garden of indigenous plants at the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park Visitor Center in Southern California and then, a minute later, “MOMMMMY!” from somewhere behind a catclaw acacia.

We could hear his angry rumbling as he moved down through the thickets of catclaw and scrub oak.

It moved here, to remote ranchlands where even the plant names — catclaw, saltbush, snakeweed — sound forbidding.

A few days’ work, while he was waiting for his powder, would clear out the worst of the cactus and catclaws and give him free access to his hole.

She gathered ironwood and catclaw while he watched her vigilantly.