Cloud bank looming over the eastern ridge delays today's sunrise even longer than usual. My second mug of strong tea nearly ready for gulping. The under-desk heater broils the flesh of my feet while my upper body shivers.

This is a strange time.

The owner of this place turned up last Monday and pitched a small tent next to the pumphouse, parked his pickup at the bottom of the herb garden, and began a new bridge across the creek. He is a man of 55-60 years, a builder given to extemporaneous spot-on Bob Dylan impressions (with an impeccable memory for lyrics). He works hard and for the most part unassisted. We've factored in his every-other-day shower and so far, so good. "It's too bad about the water," he has said, and in a quiet voice so sincerely regretful that I can't be vexed with him about it. Not that I was, particularly.

Yesterday an intact male llama who is the mirror image of my Lorenzo (a gelding) turned up east of the pasture. He and Lorenzo lunged at each other through the feeble strand of barbed wire for a while, and I feared eventually he'd either make his way through or tempt Lorenzo to find a way out. I chased him up the ridge. He climbed around the north end of the field, and the two of them resumed their aggressions at the western perimeter. The stray llama belongs to the meat-goat people about a mile downstream, who use llamas as guard animals for their flocks. Their gates are always down or left open for one reason or another, but before now none of their animals ever has made it this far over. I phoned them a couple of times, but they weren't there, and so I left a couple of unhappy messages.

It took some doing but the dogs and I managed to harass and coax the animal up onto the road, and then it was just a matter of driving him home, so to speak. But it was 92 degrees out, around 1pm, and I was alone in this endeavor. The only thing more frustrating than trying to herd a llama is trying to do so by oneself. Llamas hate canines of every stripe, and so my dogs didn't pursue so much as flee. It was good that Sally and Apple galloped ahead together so nicely, as the stray then chased them (with my steady encouragement from the rear) in a neat line three-quarters of a mile up the road and around a corner and another quarter-mile down into the low area where his pasture lies--where his goat-charges awaited his return so obediently--and inches from the opened gate. Just there he turned and dashed past me all the way back up the hill and then two-thirds of the way on the road back to my place. I was by this time close to heat stroke, out of breath, and really annoyed. I trudged back up to the road and headed east, defeated, in the smug wake of the now-sauntering wanderer.

About halfway home I spotted a blue-clad figure in a white cowboy hat observing us from the far side of the creek. I waved my arms and called out, and the figure crossed over the trickle of water, and as he approached through the long grass he was revealed to be a tall slender older man in denim and chambray. He climbed over the fence and up to where we all stood stalled together on the road--the llama, the two dogs, and I. He is a kindly elder named Clarence, I learned, a newcomer who is living on his just-purchased property with his wife and their three housecats in a travel trailer while their house is being built. He learned that I am not the owner of the llamas who keep wandering through his horse pasture, as he had believed, and so we can be friends after all. Clarence helped me redirect the llama--not toward its home but at least off the road and back into the hills, and then we gave up. Neither of us is in very good shape.

When the meat-goat people finally came home yesterday evening they called to tell me that their bad llama was back home with his goats and his llama girlfriend. They also informed me (a little frostily) that although the uncastrated male llama did indeed live with them, he wasn't theirs really; he turned up there one day just after they moved in about a year ago, and he had chased away their own gelded male, and since no one had claimed him they let him stay. I dunno. I think if you let an animal stay with you, you assume responsibility for it, even if you didn't invite it. But anyway I was by then showered and well-iced-tea'd, cool and recovered, and the conversation ended amicably.

Still, I worry now about that poor homeless gelding out there somewhere, and I wonder what's become of him, and how he fared all winter and through the flood and now in the heat.
9:19:20 AM    comment []