We built sheds for the llamas. We moved our trailer to a less exposed spot, bought a second old trailer with fine wood panelling, and began building a large greenhouse/living room between the two. I was sorry to move the trailer. I had grown accustomed to seeing Levi looking in our bedroom window early in the morning. It was a nice routine, and I would miss it. But the trailer did seem to fit well into the new spot, still near the llama fields but on the other side of them.

The first morning there, I opened my eyes and looked out the window. Levi and Tumbleweed were sitting as close to our bedroom window as they could get. Levi was gazing in. I was delighted, even though I recognized that their interest in our movements stemmed, in part at least, from a desire for breakfast.

Sometimes Levi was balky on our walks. One evening, we took him out with Posey, leaving Tumbleweed behind. Levi didn’t like leaving his buddy, and after a while he just sat down. He wouldn’t budge. I tried running at him, which I’d heard would get a sitting llama up, but he was imperturbable. As soon as I started to walk back toward the field where Tumbleweed was watching, Levi stood up and followed me.

All we wanted that evening was a lazy stroll, so we took Posey by herself. “We’d better do more training with Levi,” I suggested as we wandered along Llama Lane.

“How do you propose we teach him to do what we want, instead of whatever he pleases?” asked Kelly wryly.

“I don’t know. Just practice, I guess.”

My confidence increased as I succeeded in little things. One evening when Kelly led Posey, and I had both males, the tarp covering the tractor flapped in the breeze and startled Posey. She reared up, and the males ran sideways. Levi headed off to the right, while Tumbleweed angled away from him. I held on tight, spinning around with their lead ropes in my hands. I was ready to let go if I really had to and pleased when they stopped and I was still there.

As I became more comfortable around them, my love for the llamas increased Yet at times I felt frustrated: here were these incredibly woolly animals, and I just wanted to cuddle them. Posey liked a cuddle now and then, but you had the challenge of catching her first. The males were not into cuddles

But we couldn’t give up the llamas as well as the ranch, all at once. It would be too hard. Or would it?

When he told me of his thoughts, I burst into tears. I could hardly bear to think of not looking out the window at woolly faces. How could I wake up in the morning, without my llama fix? I was an addict.

“There’s no way I could sell them all,” I pronounced.

“Remember that tee-shirt I told you about?” I threatened. I had giggled over a tee-shirt that showed a woman saying, “He told me it was him or the animals.” In a second frame, she’s surrounded by pets and saying, “Sometimes we miss him.”

I didn’t want my animals without Kelly. I wanted it all.

Could we board our llamas somewhere? But where? It would have to be a situation where the people already knew a lot about their care. I wasn’t one to be casual about who took care of my animals; that had made it hard to find people to stay even for a weekend.

“What about Linda and Nelson?” Kelly suggested.

“Hey, good idea. I wonder if they’d be interested.”

We had met Linda Rodgers and her husband Nelson Leonard a few years earlier. Like us, they had moved to southern Oregon from California, where Linda was a nurse practitioner and Nelson an archaeologist. Like us, they had bought undeveloped land and a few llamas. Yet to have any baby llamas, they were just getting started.

As our friendship had developed, we had been to their place several times. Elk Hill was very secluded and peaceful. The driveway was three-quarters of a mile off a little-used gravel road. The weather was warmer than at Juniper Ridge.

We’d met their first llamas, Twister, Duchess and her daughter Querida, and Bethany. We’d walked down to their spring and to the ancient apple trees which Nelson had pruned. They showed us where they were building a house, right where there had been homesteaders a hundred years earlier. Linda and Nelson were living in a charming old mobile home, graced by stunning antiques, while they built their new house and developed their llama facilities.

I called Linda and asked if they might be interested in boarding our llamas. “We thought of it ourselves,” she said.

We talked it over. They would have to do more fencing and to build a barn that they were planning to do anyway. They were willing to drop their other projects and tackle these. It took a while, but we figured out possible financial arrangements. Kelly and I didn’t know how soon we’d leave–we still hadn’t decided for sure that we were going to! But it was a wonderful feeling that if we needed them to, Linda and Nelson would be delighted to care for our herd. We knew how committed they were to llamas.

Soon we decided. We would buy a house in town, keep Thundercloud and our ladies at Elk Hill, and sell our other males. If we missed our llamas too much, we would move again. It was reassuring to think that no decision was set in concrete. We did know people who had sold all their llamas, only to buy more within a year.

We put our place on the market. The day that we listed it with a realtor, we went into town late in the afternoon. It had been a hot summer day, and after signing the papers, we walked around in some of the neighborhoods that interested us and had a late supper at a restaurant. It was after dark when we got home.