The Alpaca

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 7, 14 February 1907, Page 33

The Alpaca

It was in a blinding storm on the desolate tablelands of the Peruvian Andes (writes a traveller) that 1 first saw a ludicrously ungainly beast pop up from behind a rock, as the stumbling feet of my mule sent, some loose stones noisily down a precipice. The brute surveyed me for an instant, then shook his hairy head, gave a loud snort, and vanished. The echoes Ojf. the lonely pass bore to my ears a singular noise, as if an army of barefooted men were flying down the mountain. 1 had startled a herd of grazing alpacas, and their sentry had warned them of my approach. The noise was the beating of their huge cartilage padded feet on the rocky ground. The alpaca, which many people'eonfuse with the llama, possibly because it is very closely allied to it in form and characteristics, is the gold mine of the Indians of the Andes, especially those of Peru, fcJoliviia, anft Ch'ili. It* is an extraordinary biruUe in more senses than one. Its appearance with full coat of wool is supremely ridiculous. It is as large as a big sheep, with a neck like a small giraffe, a mere bundle of hair carried round on four legs, terminating in feet resembling those of an ostrich. Its legs are powerful and inappropriately graceful in comparison with the body they support and the feet in which they terminate. If the alpaca is absurdly ugly "With its hair on, it is a burlesque after it has been fully sheared. It is sheared like a sheep>, only its head Is left covered. It is sometimes sheared once a " year, yielding a six to eight inch fleece, but the more provident alpaca farmers shear only once in two years, when they get wool from fifteen to thirty inches long. The wool is - found ranging from white, through grey, yellow, and brown, to black. The animal looks black, however, as the fleece exudes in oil and mats with the dust-~of the mountain pastures in which it roams at large. The fleece is very fine in texture, metallic Jn lustre when clean, and the fibre is very strong.