From the Archives:  May 2012–The Street Value of Keystone Light

I was spending a morning of my “stay-cation” down at Rancher’s Supply in Picabo, picking up some fence rails and a few other items and chatting it up with star employees Tina and Karen.  Tina and Karen are awesome–they are super helpful and help us keep things going down here at the ranch.  During our first season of lambing (see Gong Show on the Ranch: Lambing), Tina gave us her personal cell number and walked us through a couple of different situations.   On top of their top notch customer service, they’re also two of the funniest ladies I’ve met in a while.  When I came in that morning, Tina was attaching a sticky note to a tampon.  Intrigued, I asked her what she was doing.  “My friend’s son is graduating from high school.  He has a little Toyota we call ‘The Tampon’ so I’m making him a graduation present.”  I told her he was clearly lucky to have her around.

The conversation soon turned from tampons to predator protection, as it often does.  She had helped me work out some electric fence challenges in the past but agreed that a fence won’t really keep out a determined wolf or four.  The ranch where we take our ewes to breed (known to us as “Spring Break” and “The Mazatlan of Idaho”) has a guardian llama and hasn’t lost a single animal to predators in several years, so I asked the ladies about llamas.  “George has two,” Karen offered.  “Let’s call George.”  Before I could say a word, we had George on speakerphone.  I’ve never met George, don’t know who he is and felt slightly hesitant to talk llamas with a guy I had never met.

“George, it’s Tina and Karen.  Do you still have those llamas?”

George answered, “Yup.  Still here.”

As I repeatedly tried to get a word in like “wait,” Karen stated “We’ve got a taker here.  It’ll be a really nice home for them, George.”

Finally I was able to butt in.  “Uh…hi George.  My name is Ross.  I don’t need two llamas.  I’m not really sure I need any, actually.”

To which George answered, “Yeah you do.”

Now I’m not really sure what George was thinking, other than he finally had a taker for his bastard llamas that he hadn’t been able pawn off on anyone for several years.

“Okay.  If I decide I’m interested, can I take just one?  I really don’t need two.  I need a guardian and they don’t guard shit if they’re in a pair.”

“They’re a pair,” George answered.   At this point their was a small crowd of customers gathered around the speaker phone on the counter.

“George, it’s Tom.”  The man next to me apparently knew George and wanted to participate in the collective bargaining.  “This guy is right.  He only wants one.”

George remained silent.

“George, it’s Karen.  How much are you looking to get for the llamas?’

“But I only need one llama.”  Notice at this point that they had somehow taken me from asking about llamas to proclaiming their necessity in my life.

“I’ll just give them to you.”

We finally got off speaker phone.  Karen gave me George’s number and I drove back to the ranch and finished repairing a section of fence, adding a gate and doing some other work.  Jake came down that evening and I told him about the llama debacle.  He agreed that one might be cool.  I called George the next day and he told me one of the llamas was really mean and the other was more biddable.  He agreed to sell me one llama and keep the other.  He had purchased them from a woman, hoping to turn them into pack animals but simply hadn’t had the time.  “The one, she’s really easy.  But the other won’t do shit.  If you try to trailer her and she doesn’t feel like going, why she’ll just lie down and maybe spit on you.  At that point it’s game over.”  I asked if I could have the friendly one and he said sure.  I told him we were in between stock trailers right now which was sort of lie because we’ve never owned one but borrowed a few, and asked if he could deliver the friendly llama.  “Sure, no problem.  How about now?”  I was not expecting that.  I didn’t now if I had some prep work to do, making a llama friendly environment.  Maybe some welcome signs or a reception where all the sheep do a meet and greet.  I should at least tell Phil what was happening.  “Sure.”  I gave him directions and asked if I could compensate him for his time and gas, at least buy him a beer.  “I drink Keystone Light, ” George answered.

George showed up about an hour later.  He opened his horse trailer and walked out with a very large, white, startled llama. Phil and Steve were in the back of my truck and both of them immediately started barking, which didn’t help to put the llama at ease.  We chatted for a while about llamas and George turned out to be a really nice guy.  He told us that they don’t require much of anything–they eat like sheep and don’t eat very much.  To get them to do anything, put some grain in a bucket and bribe them.  “They’re actually smart as shit,” George said.  “They know when you want them to do something and they’ll avoid you.  They’ll lie down if they can.  But you can almost always bribe them with grain.”  With that he opened the pasture gate and let her loose.  She immediately started mowing the grass, periodically looking at us, then eating more.

About an hour late, Jake and I decided to put the llama into the pin with sheep.  We wanted to see how both parties would react.  We grabbed the grain bucket and headed out to the pasture where the llama hadn’t moved much.  As soon as we walked out, she trotted to the other side.  Jake shook the grain bucket and the llama looked up, then looked away in disdain.  Clearly the seeds of mistrust had been sewn.  We tried a few times.  Any attempt at walking at her made things worse.   At one point she trotted deliberately at Jake and I thought he was going to get served up a beating, llama style, but it was a bluff.  We left her there and drove the sheep into the pin.

Needless to say, she’s still out there.  I’ll report back tomorrow, but I never thought a case of Keystone Light would ever get me much of anything, much less a llama.