LLAMA DREAMS

He arrived in early fall. I missed his birth, which was out in the hillside meadow sometime in the night. My first glimpse of him was after dawn, as he wobbled after his mom, all spindly-legged, seeking her nourishment and her protection. He thought it was spring, but then he would have, not knowing what had been changed from the DNA program of coming attractions he'd been swimming in until that first tumble into the world, and the first rush of warm milk .

I watched for a few days before going over to the fence wire and introducing myself. (I'm his neighbor, diagonally.) He began life in joyful pronking, sliding in the mud too near the tractor shed; and puffing smoky dragon-breath snorts in the cool morning air. Mom showed him where the good grass grew. Only ... the air kept getting cooler instead of warmer, and the grasses were slowing down for winter hibernation, not billowing up to feed his hunger. And this was his first comprehension that something was not right. I saw it in his expression when he realized the DNA program was not accurate in its forecasts. Mom didn't have the heart, yet, to tell him. But his pronking diminished into a too-early-in-childhood mature grace as he grazed. I knew he was figuring it out.

"You thought it was Spring!" I yelled the accusation at him over the fence one day in October.

"I did!," he admitted, "I did! That's when we're born!!"

Except for my dog, Darwin, the llama kid would have come a lot closer, grinned a bit harder, and perhaps taken the apple I held out over the fence wire. Not that the apple was very exotic, it came from the tree that grew along our shared fence line. He'd had plenty already.

"Where YOU come from, the days would be getting longer." I said.

"Where I come from it would be getting warmer! September IS Spring!" he replied, eyeing the dog. "Dogs aren't so big there, neither."

"He's a Lab mix, maybe some Dane in him." I replied, "I guess in the Andes, they're all those little brown throwbacks."

"I guess," he mused. "Mommy won't say. But she says it's a lot higher there. Mountains are taller, too."

"Air's thinner there," I guessed. "But September is Spring, that's for sure."

"Yes," he said. "Air's cleaner, I think. And ... and .. somehow I know that there's a cross in the sky and just the point of Orion's sword, which shines on Summer nights."

"Turned you upside down, I guess?" I said.

"Something like that, too early to tell," he turned away, following Mom back to the canvas-covered frame that served as their barn. "We might go back ... she says we do in her dreams."

In the rest of the days of October, we'd spend a few moments in the crisp morning air, when it wasn't raining, when Darwin wasn't racing about like a madman, searching for The Ball.

Since they grow up fast, it wasn't long before he knew how the world was different than DNA advertised. The smells, the sounds, all different, all strangely out of place, and .. not making lots of sense. The human children weren't serious enough, animals -- especially llamas -- were mostly a temporary passing fancy, not valued as they would be in some Andean valley where their worth was all or most of a family's wealth. Where their lives and their utility was respected, where they were not "toys". We talked about it. There weren't any llama totems among our tribes up here. Nobody dreamed in "Keeshwah".

Soon there was not much I could explain to him of the Northern Hemisphere. He did have a bit of a false start when he began to get caught up in some kind of mirror-image thinking that his mom couldn't talk him out of for a few days. You know -- black is white and left is right, that kind of bipolar stuff. Maybe it was the bass-ackwardness of the magnetic resonance betraying him. Wasn't where it was supposed to be. But he got over it and learned the northern stars.

I'd begun by teasing him, but in the end I taught him we weren't so different. We both were just born to a world that had somehow gone alien, foreign; covertly violating all the laws of nature. Well, ... violating a bunch of them anyway.

"I was a teenager when my world-change happened," I told him one day. "A bit older in human years than you got llama years." By now he would butt up against Darwin, and munch the apples and the sage branches we'd slip through the fence wire.

I convinced him I really could understand how disorienting it was to be a llama up here, I supposed; waking up -- your spirit being born and expecting to find the world tilted in one direction, only to feel it slipping in orbit, veering around to a totally different angle. Expecting Chile or Peru and finding you're living in muddy Oregon. No Incas, not even any tribes, nor even Conquistadors. Just pickups and beer cans tossed into the grass beside asphalt roads, not quartz-strewn mountain paths. And the spirits so far away that you can't even hear the echo of their singing, or remember the songs of your ancestors, their hopes, their ghosts.

"I expected to find different spirits too," I said. "Cleverness and cynicism are here where there should of been hope; tortured despotism where once was leadership; families, tribes, ... whole cities that "got it" about life ... and a future so bright you hadda wear shades. Now ... phantom wars."

"Shades?" he asked.

I shrugged, "Forget it."

Darwin shot off across the pasture, chasing something.

"And I'm not even half a world away, like you are," I reminded him. "But I grew up just the same, wrong world, wrong dimension, like a llama in the wrong hemisphere. There was something in those three bullets that must of changed the physics of the world."

"Parallel universes?"

"Wouldn't go that far," I told him.

"Goblin spirits cursing the land?" he ventured. "Maybe it's just that you northerners don't have the sacred music of the flutes playing in your blood."

I shrugged, again "Blood ...."

And I quit, staring off down the fence line toward forty years ago.

"Yes, I dream a different world, too," he said, "Nothing like this. Mom says in dreams the grass tastes sweeter. All I know is that in my dreams the grass is growing ...."

We both agreed it was still a long time until Spring.

I watched him as he grazed back toward the treeline. Darwin returned, and dropped The Ball at my feet.