It is now December, and much has happened at Arroyo Seco Alpacas. We had fifteen healthy babies this summer-- eight males and seven females. All beautiful, with the kind of fiber I've been aiming for since I began breeding alpacas.
Our gray female, Viccoyo, who has given us the majority of our saleable crias, died last week. She was so brave, but she couldn't get up. We gave her a respectful end, and I cried a lot when the vet came, but I felt that she had a fitting demise and a happy last ten years. Unfortunately, the next day we found Hedwig, our llama, dead. Did she have some mystical connection with Viccoyo that we didn't know about?
The alpacas have secrets that they don't tell us, try as we might to tease them out. They are so curious about us, that we don't remember what we wanted to know about them in the first place.