The wait is over: it is time to return to the subject of llamas
Emily is ten months old. She is beautiful, and full of the joys of summer. She has the wide eyes of the young, long eyelashes, a shy but inquisitive nature, and a frisky little tail. Emily is my latest llama.
It is the habit of us columnists to tell readers excitedly about new ventures and then to neglect to follow the subject up. When we lose interest in a project or fail at it, we tend not to announce the fact, trusting that our readership has a small attention span and will have forgotten the column anyway.
But my experience belies that. Disconcertingly, a Spectator reader will often lob me a detailed question about some claim or observation I had almost forgotten making, and ask for an update. ‘What happened to your bees?’ (they flew away); ‘Did you ever hang-glide off the top of that volcano in Bolivia?’ (no); ‘Did you maintain your sixmonth boycott of the railway to Sheffield after they refused to give you a cup of water at the buffet?’ (yes).
And it is years since I wrote here about my small collection of camelids. Readers who remember the column and have heard nothing since may perhaps think I grew bored with exotic South American pets, sold my herd, and reverted to sheep. Not a bit of it. The story continues.
When I last wrote it was to tell you about Knapp. He is my magnificent male from Berkshire. Ordell Safran of Ordellamas told me, when she sold him to me, that he was named after the vet, Simon Knapp, who saved his mother’s life. His uncle (the llama’s, not the vet’s) was pictured in The Spectator being led on a halter and head collar down a smart London street by a gorgeous woman, advertising fashionable clothing. Knapp has since appeared with me in a Country Life feature about people and their pets. I was looking fabulous, and Knapp didn’t come out too badly either.
But in one respect he has overperformed. Ordell told me Knapp was highly sexed as we loaded him into the horse-box for his journey to the Derbyshire Peak District where I live; but I may not entirely have taken on board the implications. Many years, and much grunting and humming and dribbling later, I have.
It wouldn’t matter if his attentions were confined to his wives. Llesley (who comes from Staffordshire) is a fine mother: strong, big-boned and placid. She is grey, tan and white (he is white and tan) and has produced an offspring every year since he arrived, without fail. The period of gestation with camelids is 11 months; we try to arrange that the young will be born in spring or summer; and mostly we succeed.
Imp is a more troubled llama. In my view prettier than Llesley (she is smaller, more delicate and almost entirely chestnut in colour), there is something of the deer about her, reminiscent of the swift, graceful vicuñas who live in the wild on the Andean plateaux, or the deer-like guanacos of Peru and Patagonia, from which the domesticated llamas and alpacas are descended. Imp, however, knows nothing of the Andes, but comes from Kniveton in Derbyshire, where Jane Methuen breeds llamas.
She (Imp, not Jane) has never really cared for the male of the species and spits at Knapp whenever he looks at her. This does not stop him (as we say in Derbyshire) ‘bothering’ her, though she stares into the middle distance with a kind of bored irritation, grinding her teeth, while the bothering is going on. Most years she too produces an offspring, rather grudgingly. No problem there, except from Imp’s viewpoint.
The problem is with Knapp’s daughters. He bothers them too, from about eight months on. Treading delicately, I should explain that in the camelid community there are not the same taboos about incest or indeed paedophilia as happily apply in our own home lives. In the Andes incest goes on all the time and, providing the herd is large enough to keep the genes varied, seems to produce few ill effects. The dangers of in-breeding must, I think, be a little oversimplified in our own folk wisdom. On Kerguelen in the sub-Antarctic I tracked some of the 3,000 cats which live in holes and in appalling weather. They are all descended from two breeding pairs that escaped from captivity. Fine figures of cats they all are — I saw no three-eyed ones at all. And every gerbil in Britain is said to have descended from 11 of the creatures brought from the Sahara many years ago.
Still, people do not want to buy llamas with dodgy pedigrees, so it becomes my worrisome task to try to keep the younger girls away from their father. I feel like the parent of errant teenagers on a sink council estate.
We have two fields: an upper field and wood, and a lower one. Imp is childless this year; Emily (who is Llesley’s daughter) needs to be trained for separation from her mother when I sell her, so the obvious solution is to leave Llesley with her husband in the top field, and place Imp with Emily in the lower pastures. But this is easier said than done. Llamas have a very, very strong herd instinct. Knapp grazes separately from the females, but always keeps them within vision. The females tend to graze together, but are happy to wander away so long as they know there is no physical bar to their re-gathering. Place a fence and a 50-yard garden between them, however, as I have, and they go wild.
The worst of it is that they can see each other. So for the last two months Imp has been standing at her fence, stamping her foot and staring mournfully at Knapp, who is standing at his fence staring back and humming or pacing the perimeter. They just look at each other for hours. It breaks my heart. Occasionally Imp spits. She does not like her husband at all, but somehow she cannot live without him.
Emily, meanwhile, is confused by all this distracted parental behaviour. She has just accepted her first head collar and must learn the habits both of docility and independence, and herd dysfunction is getting in the way.
At least, however, she is not pregnant. Emily is one of the most beautiful llamas we have reared. She is almost completely white. She is advertised for sale in the next edition of the Camelid’s Chronicle and, though I don’t want to lose her, I think she ought to go. She looks at me uncomprehendingly with her deep, shallow eyes, and I so wish I could explain.
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