The fourth sign is a case where the names in the different traditions are actively misleading if taken at face value. Yucatec calls it Kan, and the K'iche' daykeepers call the same day K'at, meaning net or snare, while the K'iche' word Kan belongs to a different day altogether, the fifth, which Yucatec calls Chicchan. Anyone moving between a Yucatec source and a highland Guatemalan one has to hold both lists at once.
Central Mexico places Cuetzpalin, the lizard, in fourth position. Yucatec Kan is glossed as seed and also as lizard, so the two traditions overlap here without coinciding, and the seed reading is the one that governs its associations with ripeness and yellow maize.
Kan matters structurally because it is a Year Bearer. In the Postclassic Yucatec system that Diego de Landa set down in the sixteenth century, only Kan, Muluc, Ix and Kawak may fall on the first day of a Haab year, and the year takes its name from whichever of the four bears it. The Classic inscriptions use a different set of four, Ik, Manik, Eb and Kaban, and epigraphers read the difference as a change in counting convention rather than as an error in either system.
The K'iche' gloss repays attention on its own account. A k'at is a net bag, the carrying net in which maize is brought from the field, and daykeepers read the day through both senses of a net, the thing that gathers and the thing that entangles. The Yucatec Kan is at the same time the word for yellow, the colour of ripe maize, so the fourth sign is bound to the harvest in both branches of the tradition by different routes.