Georgina M Byrne
We had an incredible llama drama last Thursday night. It had been an unseasonably wintry, wet and windy day. I'd moved the sheep with their lambs up the back that morning, walking through the llama yard to avoid upsetting them, and returning via the laneway. Late in the afternoon, when the rain had stopped just as it was getting dark, all the female llamas had been stirred up and were racing and pronking all over the place, apparently having a wondrous time. I regretted that I was the only one to have seen it.
Michael was not long home from work and I was preparing dinner, when a strange woman suddenly appeared on our doorstep. "Do you own a herd of about forty llamas and one sheep? I've just seen them milling around on Toodyay Road. A few galloped up this driveway, so I followed them here, thinking that they might be yours."
Can you imagine how we felt?!
Trucks and cars come around the bend and speed up along the straight, past our driveway, doing 110 Ks and often more. Visibility that night was terrible and the road was slippery after a week or so of warm, dry October weather
I'd had visitors, that afternoon; the ladies from the Gidgegannup Book Club. We hadn't been able to walk about outside on our usual garden and llama-viewing routine because of the weather, so I was dressed in good clothes, including a favourite pair of green suede, german-made shoes I rarely wear. Michael was wearing his suit.
We all dashed out of the house, to find a total of six llamas (Aria, Princess, Polly, Mamacoca, Olwen and Iris) and two of our alpacas, Victoria and Pimpinella, standing quite calmly by the open gate leading into (and from) the llama yard. Absolutely NO sign of anyone else. So, the lead llama (Aria) and Princess, her 2IC, had returned, leaving a leaderless group of presumably panic-stricken animals, some separated from their mothers and all alone in the oh,so dangerous dark.
I rushed into the barn, grabbed some lucerne hay and said to our Good Samaritan, "Can you take me, please?" and off we sped. Michael grabbed more hay and took off in the Verada, turning right into Toodyay Road, as we turned left.
I was enormously relieved to find that there were no broken bodies or smoking wreckage to be seen on the roadway or on the verges in either direction. "When the others came up your driveway", she said, "the rest of the herd ran off the road and charged along the verge, towards Gidge village. I'd have stayed to see where they went, but I wasn't sure where they'd come from and needed to tell you what I'd seen. Perhaps I should have got out of my car to try to herd them, but I thought that I might be hit." She was dressed in black. There are, of course, no street-lights. "I'm hugely relieved that you didn't." I said
As we passed our next door neighbours' driveway, we looked to see if the animals might have gone in there, but the gate was shut. So off we went...nearly as far as the village, a mile away. No sign. Left into Reserve Road for a couple of Ks. No sign. Of course it was pitch dark and raining again, many of the missing animals are brown or black, so in dense bush, or up someone's driveway, we wouldn't have seen them anyway. "Can you take me back, please, to see if they've come home?"
The eight were still there, munching merrily on my roses. There was no sign of the others. I got out of the car, shoed them into the yard and closed the wretched green wooden gate I'd neglected to shut properly that morning.
Michael had come back too. "I've been up Stoneville and Reen Roads and there's no sign of anything. I'm going to grab some halters and check the bush over the road," he said.
"Maybe someone at the village has seen them", said the woman "Would you like me to take you there?" I must admit that I was letting fly with a few pithy swear words about the situation and had not even found out her name. What a marvel she was, and is. She ignored my unseemly words and kept calmly reminding me that as yet we'd seen no sign of damage. All sorts of thoughts were battering at my fevered brain...what if we did find them... 20-odd, presumably petrified llamas, one rather elderly alpaca and an overweight, extremely woolly camouflage-coloured sheep, milling about a mile or two up the road? How on earth would we get them home in the dark, across several crossroads, alongside what's really a two-lane highway?
We stopped at the village. I got out, to ask two somewhat startled truckies who'd stopped for a sandwich, whether they'd seen anything. My new friend called her daughter, an hour's drive away, to explain why she was so late in coming home for dinner. There was another truckie in the deli, travelling in the other direction. I left my phone number with the deli owner. No one had sighted the animals, but they'd know where to come if they did.
There was no sign of Michael.
"Perhaps you'd better take me home", I said. "I feel terrible, keeping you from home and your daughter all this time. I can't remember Michael's new mobile number, so I can call him from home, to see where he is and if he's found them". A handful of halters weren't going to help anyway, even if any were calm enough to catch. The best thing now, might be for us to keep looking together and if we found them, to herd them onto the nearest property and wait till morning to get them home.
By this time, about an hour had passed. To me, it seemed like five.
On our way back up the driveway for the third time, our saviour said, "There's someone out with a torch in next-door's paddock". "I'll call them when I get to the house", I replied. As we came to the bend in the driveway, I could see, by next door's bottom gate, a small forest of woolly necks and furry ears. There they were, waiting to be let in. Waiting to come home. They'd been there all the time. Next door. Just a hundred metre dash along the verge and a left turn into another gravel driveway, parallel to ours: precisely the most sensible thing for them to do. Our neighbour Joyce had heard a noise outside and had found her garden full of llamas. She'd done what any farmer would do. Fearing their return to the roadway, she'd snuck past them and shut the front gate, moved her pet sheep to an adjacent paddock and then herded the interlopers over the hill and into the paddock nearest our driveway, ready to be reclaimed.
Her message, of course, was on our answering machine, but we hadn't gone back inside. Having seen that their gate was shut, we'd assumed that the animals could not be there. Her husband Peter, she told me later, had been standing in the rain, vainly flashing his torch as the two cars rushed past in both directions several times. "Bloody Idiots", he said. And of course, from his perspective, I suppose we were.
I asked Margaret (that was her name, she said) for her address, so that I could send her something really special. "You don't need to", she said, the passenger side of her little car liberally decorated with hay and her petrol tank considerably emptier. "Oh but I do", said I. "How can I ever thank you enough for all you've done?"
We could see Michael's lights in the distance, coming back. The llamas had left the corner and were charging enthusiastically along the fence-line. I hadn't yet learned that their front gate was still closed. I opened the gate into our bottom paddock and ran up the muddy firebreak, brandishing my hay and calling on them to follow me. Aussie Gold, obviously relishing her long coveted role as leader, brought them back. They all marched calmly, in convoy, through Burnett's bottom gate, across the driveway and into our paddock. There was no sign of Marsha. She can stay next door until morning, I thought, so I shut the others in.
Michael, his car rather the worse for wear after its headlong passage through the bush, then picked me up and took me back to the house. All that remained, was to abandon our ruined shoes and don our gum boots, to slosh through the sodden paddocks and shut them out of the one containing his latest row of as yet unprotected trees. On our way back, I passed the glum little group of llamas who'd come home alone. "Baaaaa" came a gravelly voice from ground level, and there was Marsha. I had a vision then, of them all tearing back up our long and hilly driveway, with Marsha, little black legs a'twinkle, panting frantically in hot pursuit. Heaven only knows how she'd managed to keep up, but she had. I didn't see her when I herded them back through the gate. No doubt she was already back inside. She's been even more static than usual, in the past few days. No doubt she's still recovering from her thrilling night-time escapade. And so are we.
[Back to Articles Index]