DON’T PISS OFF AN ALPACA IN THE ANDES – 1978

The second story for today is about another of the camp “pets” up in the mountains of Peru. It was owned by our Canadian Project Manager’s wife. This was my introduction to the Peruvian version of a camel, and was called an alpaca, I believe. I never could quite tell the difference between them and llamas. She said Alpacas were “cuter”. Yeah, right. So she finds this young Alpaca and has to bring it home as a pet. Anyway she thinks this is the most beautiful thing in the world. At the start it was about 3 feet tall. All it wanted to eat was the flowers, planted around the camp by the crews and the couples that lived there. All everyone else wanted to do was free that alpaca into the wild, anywhere outside of our camp.

Well it started to eat and grew about 3 more feet in a couple of months. Not so cute now you might say. No shit! On top of that it was stubborn like a Peruvian woman! The Alpaca did pretty much as it pleased. The guards especially, disliked, this Alpaca, as well as everyone else in the camp. They had the task of fetching that beast out of gardens, flower beds, and anywhere else that it might roam. I always remember fondly, the Saturday morning that we were up in camp and outside puttering around. The beast, chose this morning to get stuck into the Deysi’s flower bed.

She let out a shriek and the security guard came running in all his splendor. A crisp, clean freshly starched “wanna be” policeman’s shirt complete with all the bells and whistles. This was an officious group of people with whom I had constant issues. They thought they were the gestapo. Many times I had to break them. Couldn’t break a 5 foot Peruvian woman but these asses were not a problem.

Anyway he appeared on a run slid to a halt, snapped his heels and whacked himself on the side of the head with a crisp salute. Deysi is yelling “get it out of here, get it out of here”. This in an extremely high pitched shriek. He grabs the rope and gives that “pet” a vicious jerk. I did not know until later but if you get an alpaca or llama extremely upset they will spit on you. Well it did. It hocked up a big green, slimey, steaming, stinking mass of chewed up flowers, bile and other unpleasant things. Then reared back and let the guard have it!

All over that beautiful uniform. From neck to stomach he had this great, foaming stinking pile of green goo running down his chest. The look he gave us was beyond price. It could not have been better than if someone (like me) didn’t stop at the gate on the way into camp and sign his sheet for the 4000th time. It was priceless! I fell down gasping for breath and rolled around a bit, until he gave me a look that said “if they gave me a gun, you and that animal would be outta here now”.

He turned and marched stiffly away. You could smell him all of the way to the gate. Even though it was not my “pet” that guard had a hate for me as long as I remained there. Every time I passed through the gate I laughed! The moral to this story is, that even though an alpaca is a pacifist, just piss it off one inch over the line and see what it will do to you.