(Part 2: An Inauspicious Beginning)
Georgina M Byrne
We'd arranged to trade stud services with our friends the Herrmans, so when Goldie's baby, Isobel was a month old, Susan and Richard brought her to our place to be mated to Tikus. It was to be his first mating, but given the gentle nature and obvious experience of his paramour there should not have been any problems.
The four of us still were very new in our llama ownership, as indeed were all the WA llama and alpaca owners. Our family had kept sheep for many years, and had endured a brief and disastrous period of donkey ownership. I'd been a horse-mad teenager but had always ridden other people's animals. Llamas were the first herbivores to be owned by the Herrmann family.
Had any of us owned or agisted horses, for example, that experience might have helped us avoid the disaster which was about to overtake us all.
Our properties were approximately the same size, but very different in layout and particularly in vegetation. The Helena Valley property, which we'd owned, by that time, for some 17 years, was essentially a small farm, with pastured paddocks, most of which bordered the Helena river and were permanently green. The Darlington property was 50% natural bush, with the rest parkland-cleared, with only a small grassed area, which dried off each summer. This meant that whilst our llamas were fed mostly on green pasture, theirs were accustomed, in summer and autumn, to a diet of mainly hay and grain.
It was the end of May and winter rains had wrought their magic, even upon our summer-brown hillside. The Herrmans drove their precious cargo to the gate of a paddock thick with new, lush greenery. We decanted Goldie and her baby from the float and stood watching as she gobbled in obvious delight. We congratulated ourselves on the favour we'd done her, by combining her upcoming tryst with a gourmet holiday. We decided to let her acclimatise that afternoon, pen her with our females that night and attempt a mating the following day.
It occurred to none of us (though horse owners we spoke to afterwards, were well aware of it), that the effect of such a sudden change in diet could be horrendous.
The evening passed uneventfully. She ate her grain and settled in with the others without any problems. The following morning, however, it was obvious that all was not well with Goldie. I found her sitting forlornly in the corner of the paddock, near the gate by which she'd entered the day before. She seemed unwilling to rise. Her baby was clearly hungry, so I tried to hoist her to her feet, finding to my dismay that she was sitting in a pool of diarrhoea. I raced to 'phone Susan and Duncan, the vet. Both arrived in rapid succession. After a joint and determined effort we managed to walk her into the llama yard and treatment began immediately.
Several more visits were made by the vet and by Susan that day but we were unsuccessful in persuading Goldie to stay on her feet for more than a few minutes at a time. Her passionate interest in the pasture and mothering had transformed into a complete disinterest in food, drink or feeding her baby. None of the medication seemed to be working. Clearly she was in dire straits and fighting for her life. The survival of Isobel, for the moment at least, was up to Susan and me.
Phone calls were made to local lama and alpaca owners, although few had had any more experience than we. Faxes flew back and forth to Victoria seeking advice on the feeding of orphaned camelids. We decided to try goat's milk and took it in turns to visit local health food stores, stripping them of their supplies. A very reluctant, but by now desperately hungry Isobel was started on a bottle.
Meanwhile, the imminent arrival of Snowy's cria was entirely forgotten.
One of the on-going problems at our property was that of drainage, a subject about which Michael had become quite passionate. The soil was mostly gravelly clay with a tendency to become water resistant, particularly when compacted. Next door, and slightly uphill from us, was a riding stable which at the time, housed quite a number of ponies and horses. Our neighbour's driveway ran along the Western boundary, where, adjacent to the llama's yard, the fencing was made of corrugated fibro sheeting. Over time, soil had built up on the neighbours' side of the fence and had been sown with kikuyu lawn. In wet weather, the runoff from their horse-yards and driveway collected in the lawn and soaked through our fence, turning the llama yard into a quagmire. In order to combat this problem, Michael had dug a substantial ditch the full width of the llama yard. He'd intended to install drainage pipe the following next weekend.
In the interim, it rained, not heavily but continually and the water began to rise.
The morning after Goldie's collapse, I was tending to her, and Michael was raking up the llama poo-pile when we noticed something protruding from what was now a mini-moat. Closer inspection revealed a filthy little llama, lying on her back in the water, with all four legs in the air. Snowy was hovering nearby, hoping a miracle would deliver her newborn from the depths of the ditch. In her anxiety, she'd failed to notice or prevent Goldie's desperate daughter from helping herself to her milk.
We snatched up the newcomer and turned her over. To our amazement she was strong enough to walk, and did so, staggering to her mother to claim her place at the milk-bar. Who knows how long the baby had been in the ditch, how long she'd have survived if we'd not seen her when we did, or whether she might have done better, had the hungry Isobel not been at hand?
I rushed to bring dry towels to clean and dry her, iodine for her umbilicus (somewhat pointless in the circumstances), and the bathroom scales to check her weight. She weighed 11kilos, the same as our firstborn, Aria, but there the resemblance ended. Whereas Aria had been sturdy and fluffy and clean, with beautiful banana ears, this bedraggled little creature was bedecked in wispy wool of as yet indeterminate hue, had front legs which appeared to emerge from the same hole and ears which whilst shapely, were sagging at the tips.
Continuing our musical naming theme, we decided on "Balalaika" or "Laika" for short, overlooking the fact that her pet namesake was the poor little dog whose fate it was to be left to die in an early Russian spacecraft. Could that have been an omen for misfortune? At the time we had other things to think about. Susan and Duncan had arrived to tend to Goldie. He pronounced the newcomer to be healthy, in spite of her inauspicious arrival and unaesthetic appearance. He gave her a vitamin injection before returning his attention to his patient.
Fortunately the rain had stopped and Laika was restored to her mother, who rewarded our efforts on the baby's behalf with a squeal of rage and a face-full of spit. Feeling better for that, Snowy with her now dry, slightly cleaner, but no more prepossessing offspring beside her, turned on her heels and sailed off to join the others in the bottom paddock.
We managed to lift Goldie and her baby onto a trailer to send her home, but she died that afternoon, of acute enterotoxaemia, possibly triggered by the sudden change in diet. Of course we'll never know for sure, but needless to say, the mental trauma for both the bereaved owners and the hapless hosts was intense. Isobel, thankfully, continued to thrive, in spite of everything. She's now a healthy and successful mama llama. Great care has been taken by all, since then, to ensure that animals being moved from dry to green feed are introduced very gradually to it. Ditch-digging and llama births are no longer combined. And what of Laika..? Well, she had quite a journey ahead of her, much of it on a very rocky road indeed.
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