A Sad Day

                                                                                                                                                                           
I'll start by telling about the sad thing that happened yesterday morning.  Bruce went out to do chores and heard dogs barking in our lower pasture.  When he went down he saw that a pack of dogs were savaging one of the llamas that we let roam on our property.  He recognized them -- one of them was a Great Dane that we have often seen.  The llama was down and they were pulling hunks of its fleece out as it lay.  Bruce shouted at them and they took off, but returned almost immediately.  He went inside, got a gun and shot it close enough to frighten the dogs away and this time they ran home.



He came inside to tell me what had happened.  I was reading a book in bed and had heard absolutely nothing -- not even the gun shot.  The window was shut, but still...how could I not hear a gun shot from outside our bedroom window?

The llama had no blood from any wounds, but didn't seem able to get up.  It was breathing hard and had obviously been run to exhaustion.  I brought it a bucket of water and it drank.  A good sign.  We left it to rest and went inside to call the neighbors who owned the dogs.  The wife was devastated when Bruce told her what her dogs had done.  At first it seemed like the llama would recover, but when I went down to check on him, he drank more water but then groaned and rolled over on his side.   He looked like he was dying.  Our neighbor came over in tears.  She called her vet.  She called a friend who came and brought a sedative to relieve some of the animal's stress.

But the llama died with the neighbor sitting next to him.  He was an old guy and I think that his heart just gave out.  She stroked his face and neck and cried as he lay stretched out.  A little later on the neighbor who owns the llamas came by to see it before it was hauled off by the man who takes away dead livestock.  Later, the woman called to tell me that she was taking two of her dogs that to the vet's to be put to sleep.  She said it was one of the worst days of her life.

And that's the story of why Saturday was not such a good day.


Today Bruce and I went up into the mountains in the truck to get away for a little while.  It did us good.  I'll tell that story tomorrow.