Jackal

A jackal as a willing ally is creative, but the desert-scout framing carries it. A nomad ranger has hand-fed a half-tame pack and follows them across the wastes; a dawn-temple acolyte has bound a single jackal to a leash of beads as a guide spirit; a clan shaman keeps three jackals as messengers between camps.

Use jackals as scouts, trackers, and alarms. A jackal in the dark hears a footstep at 200 ft. and reacts to it; a jackal on a leash will pull toward water, toward carrion, toward any movement upwind. Send three of them ahead of the party through a ruin and they will come back or they will not, and either result tells the party something useful. They do not fight. The handler should be explicit about that up front.

The pack works for the handler, not for the party. Without that handler the jackals lose interest in two days, drift back to wild, and start treating the party's leftovers as their own again. This is borrowed company, not permanent.

Give the lead jackal a name and one habit. Players will love a beast that licks the wizard's hand once per night and is otherwise indifferent to everything else.

A jackal alone is background noise. CR 0, 3 HP, a Bite attack at +1 doing 1d4-1 damage, walk speed 40 ft. Any PC kills a single jackal in one hit if it lets them get close, and a jackal almost never lets them. Run jackals in packs and run them as harassment, not as an encounter.

Six to twelve on the perimeter of a desert camp are not there to win a fight; they are there to bleed the party of sleep, arrows, and nerve over a long night. Stealth +4 keeps them mostly invisible in scrub at night. The 40 ft. speed lets a pack dart in to snatch a loose ration, a bedroll, or anything left unguarded, then scatter before the party gets a torch lit. Priority is easy prey: the dropped waterskin, the sleeping mage's pouch, the kill the party was planning to butcher in the morning. Two jackals working together is the tactic; once one PC chases the first jackal, the second is already running with the actual prize.

Jackals panic and vanish the moment a real weapon comes out. Drop one with a hit and the others are gone in three rounds, regrouping on the next ridge to watch. They will follow the party for days and the paranoia is the real encounter.

Have the players roll one Survival check before they sleep. On a failure, they wake up missing one specific thing each. Being picked at all night lands harder than any combat math.