Simon has just emerged from the recently organised garage (there is now cat-swinging room, at last) where he has been employing his new-found joinery skills in the reconstruction of the sorry wardrobe that fared somewhat disastrously in the infamous trailer trip to our dream life. Apparently, I was meant to be doing a llama-related blog, to update folks on the post-escape situation, rather than indulging in a personal, (although literary) rambling on the nature of Past, Present and Parenthood. So....
Since my return to Roquetaillade on Monday, things have been as they should be. It is tempting to fantasize that Valentine had missed me during my five-day absence, and was looking for me when he escaped, but even egocentric me recognizes this as a bit unlikely. However, his Houdini-like escapades remain a mystery.
We have still found no evidence of fence-breaching, and the possibility that an uninvited visitor may have either accidentally or deliberately let him out of the gate is a possibility from the Realm of Paranoia, which we refuse to entertain. Given that Valentine appears to be a 'follower' rather than an independent spirit, we can only therefore conclude that:
a) it was a freak occurrence, (such as him rolling downhill when taking a dust-bath and inadvertently sliding underneath the bottom wire), orFaced with the prospect of yet another hot, hard day's work adding two more lines of wire around the whole perimeter to make the fence 'more secure', I attempted to discourage Simon from this (his favoured) course of action on the grounds that, if it was a) above, it would be unlikely to happen again, and if it was b) adding intermediate wires would do nothing to stop him jumping over the top.
b) he was spooked by something (recollections of low-grunting noises spring to mind) and jumped over the fence in panic.
So Simon settled for putting in some extra wires in the area near the gate, (where the relative flatness of the land, and the open area outside the fence, made a potential 'squeezing-through-the-gap escape' seem remotely more possible) and rather than risk wasting further energy on pointless, knee-jerk reactions, we agreed to 'monitor the situation'. I've always been a fan of the Wait-and-See approach to Life's apparently troubling events. But then I am naturally very lazy (not always a bad thing), and I wasn't here last Sunday to suffer, first-hand, the immediate panic induced by Valentine's extra-curricular activities, and so was less concerned than Simon about potential worry-related sleep loss.
Every day since then, on our regular visits to supply Duc and Valentine with llama-style junk food and human interaction, we have approached their home ground with varying degrees of trepidation. And, as if to string out this wherethehellarethey? moment for us as long as possible, the little beasties have taken to hiding deep in the undergrowth, right at the furthest, highest extreme of the land.
To be fair, they do (generally) come bounding down the land in response to the enticing sound of grain rattling in a bucket, or even, on a good day, to the hearty call of "Here, Llamas!" But there are the odd times when, for what seems like an eternity, we can only spy one bundle of whitish wool in the sea of green, and the adrenalin meter starts to buzz. Oh, for an open field of flat grass. Or a small-holding where all the fields are inside your own land boundaries.
Still, as we so often seem to be saying these days, so far, so good. They are both still there, still healthy (Valentine's injured foot looks better and better each day), and still happy to come to us when summoned. The next step (groan - more work!) is to build a catch-pen near their gate, and get into the regular practice of taking them for walks (which, after-all, was meant to be the whole goddamn point of all this!).
The other llamas are behaving impeccably in their accustomed llama style. Elif is still being aloof, and being a dominatrix par excellence. Pedro is still being more aloof than Elif, cultivating his Clint Eastwood 'Man Alone' persona, which is only slightly marred by his tendency to run like a scared rabbit whenever we approach him with outstretched arms. Fatma continues to eat like a vacuum-cleaner, to resist Pedro's further attempts at romantic coupling, and to fart spectacularly whenever silence decends. Anna continues to be utterly approachable and adorable, and has recently discovered that she can get her whole neck, up to her shoulders, through the third square down in the wire fence, and can therefore happily graze on all the low-down greenery outside, that is unreachable by the rest of the gang.
And little Capucine gets bigger every day, eating grass and hay as well as her mother's milk, and continues to terrorize all the others with her relentless and childish antics. Only she can jump repeatedly on Pedro's back and remain unscathed. Only she can lean on Elif's legs and not be spat at. Only she can stop grown men in their tractors, as she races wildly along the fence line and pirouettes in the dust bowl, like Bambi in a woolly baby-gro.
So, we still have to clip Pedro's toe-nails (somehow), and get Anna over to the Rough Land, and pour Pour-On anti-parasite stuff on to all their flighty backs. Oh and there's the garden to fence, and the chicken-house to build.....
And there was silly me thinking I had time to sit and read great works of French literature.
1 comment:
I went on a llama trek with Surrey hills llamas. They had an escaping llama problem. Everyday when they went up to get the llamas one of them was the wrong side of the fence. He never went too far as being herd type creatures he just stayed near his mates. It took them ages to work out how he did it until one day they saw that he had actually learnt how to open the gate and lift up the loose bit of fencing and climb over in the way that the humans did!
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