Response to "Uncle Tony's Goat"

This piece was about a young Native American girl and her Uncle's strange attachment to a goat.  The uncle was depicted as a stern disciplinarian, and it seemed the children were somewhat afraid to set a foot wrong with him, like in the beginning when he got on to them for shooting arrows and such.  Toward the end, the narrator had a run-in with Uncle Tony's belligerent goat and then the goat escaped.  The goat seemed to developed somewhat in parallel to the Uncle in that they were both hornary and a bit unreasonable.  It seemed that in the end when Uncle Tony decided to give up chasing the goat, it may have been a way of reconciling with the narrator or "giving up" some of his sternness in some small way.