Biak Bay
A witty friend,
upon seeing photos of the Alpaca
who’ve come to live with us,
exclaimed her astonishment
at their wondrous features:
“Are you sure
they aren’t from outer space?
That they weren’t left here
by whoever made those crop circles?”
We think of the Alpaca
as being from Peru.
And indeed,
they live there
and the garments made by Peruvians
from their silky wool
are beautiful
and warm.
But the fact is
Alpacas, members of the camel family,
developed on the Great Plains of North America
in pre-historic times
and later moved
into the Southern Hemisphere.
The Alpaca
are from here.
They grazed the prairie,
with its shoulder-high grasses and occasional broad-leaf trees,
over thousands of years,
pre- and post- Ice Age,
alongside their cousins, Lllama and One-Hump Camels,
as well as miniature rhinos, ancestral horses,
saber-toothed cats,
long-jawed dogs,
ancient beavers
and rabbits.
In her book Prairie: A Natural History,
Candace Savage describes
the freezing and melting of water
in the Bering Sea’s land bridge
and further south through the Canadian Plains
that allowed the migration from the north
of mammoths and mastodons,
grizzlies, elk, moose
and the steppe bison.
Across those frozen land masses,
ancestral camels and some horses moved north,
but the Llama and Alpaca moved south.
So it is no wonder
that they fit so well
on the prairie they left some 10,000 years ago.
They were here
long before we were.
Sometimes, we think they look at us
like we’re from outer space.
Biak, Cha Cha and Mr. Darcy
