Today, Ed and I went to visit Lily, the llama. Our friends, Heidi and Tor, brought Lily over on a relatively small boat from Blaine a week or so ago to stand guard over their small herd of small goats (pygmy angoras). Lily's previous work was as a B&B llama. Now she has a new job.
I wrote about the arrival of the first three goats a couple of months ago. In the interim, the friends have learned how to shear pygmy goats, what kind of home pygmy goats need, and what kind of protection pygmy goats need. With respect to the last, Point Roberts is home to the occasional loose dog and, much more important, home to the not infrequent coyote. In a contest between goat and coyote, there is no contest. So, also in the interim, our friends have been looking for a reliable guard llama. And it is Lily.
We were not available to welcome her when she made her sea journey to Point Roberts and then, one thing or another had kept me from going to meet her. I've no particular experience with the knowing of llamas. I see them occasionally on the side of the road on the highway between Vancouver and Bellingham, and once we went to visit an alpaca farm. That visit, of course, taught me nothing about llamas because all I saw were alpacas. But it probably got transferred into my brain as something like:
llamas, probably a lot like alpacas. Correction: probably not.
So what was most surprising upon seeing Lily was how very big she is. She stands easily six feet tall at the top of her head, and more with her amazingly shaped and decorated ears. And not only big, she also is shaped in a most elaborate way. If they made llama animal crackers, it would be my favorite because the shape would be so distinctive. Her chest is very deep at the front, and very high at the back. Her hooves are (relatively) small with exquisitely distinct toes that look as if they might articulate like fingers and would surely function at a very high level of impact if she chose to aim them at you. Her pair of lower front teeth, which look from a few yards like a discreet tongue stud must have some functional purpose, but I've surely never seen teeth like them. (There are no corresponding upper teeth.) Her neck ruff is so elegant it is easy to imagine that she has a beautician doing the hair styling thing on a monthly basis. And gorgeous eyes, surrounded by nice eyelashes.
When we first saw her, we were outside the fence of the animal yard and the animals were all on the inside. The goats came right up to us, but so did Lily. She came right up to me, really closer than I am generally comfortable having almost anyone--human or non-human--come up to me. I did not feel she was going to injure me or anything, but more that she was trying to determine my motivations or the nature of my soul or something. It wasn't at all like when a dog runs up to you and starts jumping on your ankles or licking your hand, which mostly just seems like exuberance. With Lily, it seemed much more planned, much more intentional.
And when we got to the part where we not only touched our foreheads together but also blew into one another's nostrils, well, I was just stunned into adoration. This is very anthropomorphic, I know. But I never had this anthropomorphic sense with any other animal. If I were younger, my first words after the visit would be, "Can we have one of those?" As it happened, after Ed had walked her (with a halter leash) out toward the beach and Tor walked her the rest of the way right down to the water, we walked back to the car, and Ed said, "Should we get one of those?"
The only reasonable answer is probably that everybody in Point Roberts with enough space ought to get one. It could be the start of a wonderful economic development plan. Or at least a way for us all to entertain one another.
