Merry Christmas!!
Hey everyone! Remember me? I’m Maggie 1st Wayfarer! I’m, like, that little cria that sent you that letter last year; now a grown-up yearling (this means I’m kind-a like a human teenager). I’m much better looking than this photo, at least that’s what the good-looking boy llamas say. I live on the Wayfaring Traveler Ranch, run by BJ & Mike Carlson. Mike said that I did such a good job last year with the ranch’s Christmas letter they asked if I’d do it again. I said, “Cool, anytime”.
So I’m, like, helping Mike with his
writing class he’s taking in Burlington for 3 graduate credits, whatever that
means. He’s having a hard time and I
thought, like, “Hey dude, way cool, I can help out by letting people see my
perspective of 
what
goes on around here. Because I’m,
like, in the “know” of all the activities.
So, like, where should I start? Mike says I should collect all my way cool memories starting from January. Cool man, I can do that!
Well, the
first thing that happened was, like, we got these weird looking birds put in
the small corral one day. My mom,
Lilly of the Valley, and my aunts Nichaja and Titapa sauntered up to the small
corral for a drink of water while the rest of us stayed in the lower
pasture. They stopped dead still by
the manure pile and started, like, giving us an alarm call. It sounds like a braying donkey; at least
that’s what I’m told, because I’ve never heard a donkey bray. When the rest of us heard it we all came a
runnin’. Then my uncles Chico, White
Knight, and Radar did the same thing.
I came up and squeezzzzzed through all those bodies. When I got to the other side of them I
couldn’t figure out what was go-in down.
Everyone was braying the alarm call.
I tried, like, looking where everyone else was looking, but since I was
only 5 months old then I wasn’t, like, very tall and couldn’t see over the
fencing. Mike came out and saw I was
having a hard time getting a look-see.
He left and came back with a halter and lead for me. He took me over to the part of the fence I
could see through. Then it was, like,
HEL-lo!!! There were, like, these
great Big HUGE birds Mike calls ostriches. I was, like, No-way was I going to get any
closer !!! These dudes were, like, 3
times taller then I was and as big as my mom Lilly. Mike pushed me closer to the fence, and I was, like, putting on
all 
four
brakes. But Mike was more persistent,
and, after a bit, they didn’t look so menacing. Yep, they were way cool!
In fact I figured they were “All Right!” So I 
poked
my head through the fence to their side.
This brown colored bird took it’s own head from waaaayyyyyy up in the
sky, and like a feather, floated down to my nose level. Cowabunga Dude, was this thing
uglyyyyyyyyyyyy! Like, I was so
absorbed with this thing I didn’t know Mike had let go of me and had stepped
back. The next thing I knew my mom,
Lilly, was standing next to me. Since
she saw me so close, and, like, nothing was going wrong, she figured these two
big birds, Gertrude and Heathcliff, were radically cool too. Now, every one of us llamas kind-a likes
these guys. About the only thing I
don’t like is when I’m eating grain from one of the feeders next to the ostrich
corral and I get this beak peckin’ where my nose is. I spit at them, 
but
it doesn’t have the same effect as spittin’ at llamas.
At night, when I’m just getting to sleep, there’s this strange noise coming from the ostrich corral. The first time I heard it, I thought we were being invaded by some strange Martian Llamas! The sound, that only Heathcliff makes, kind-a is like this: “Woo!, Woo!, Woo!. Woo!, Woooooooooooo!! I’ve tried to communicate with Gert and Heath but they don’t say much. So maybe we’ll never know what it means. We’ve had some Great Horned Owls nest right over where I sleep at night, but they got nothin’ on Heathcliff. You’ll have to come to the ranch to really experience his weird call.
You wanta’ know
about some other way cool things that happen around here?
I was,
like, in a couple of parades this summer.
BJ and Mike took us over to Cody for the Stampede Parade 
held
over 
the
4th of July holiday. I got
to walk behind a cart pulled by my Uncle Harpo. That was cool, but Uncle Harpo wasn’t doing so well in the
parade, even though he’s a veteran parade llama from last year. So Mike, while walking in the parade,
changed all our leads around so Harpo was attached to Zasu. Zasu, like Harpo, was a veteran parade llama,
and even the leader of our group until he started getting scared of all the
people. That’s him up front in the
picture. But, after all this
changing around, I, got to be with Mike, and we ran from
side to side visiting the crowd! Mike
was, like, always going up to young
human children and asking them, “Have you ever kissed a Llama?! Or, “Has your momma ever kissed a
llama?” Don’t get me wrong, like, I
like to be kissed by boy llamas, but humans yyyyyukkkkkk! I just didn’t have the heart to tell him,
so I just put up with it.
Hey!! Remember those horses I told you about last
year? They’re not as BIG
and Tough as I thought they were. “Thunder” and “Lightening”, BJ and Mike call them, kind-a stick
by themselves. They are the biggest
things on the ranch; even bigger than Gerty and Heath. Thunder, the male horse, is OK. He even comes up to me more than Lightning,
the female horse. My uncles are all
intimidated by those two. I guess they
get their way when they are in the same pasture with my uncles. The only llamas that stands up to them is
me and Zasu, my mom’s 
soul
mate. I’ve seen Thunder with a face
full of green spit many-a-time after being around Zasu.
Yah gotta
come and see another new addition to the ranch menagerie. This time BJ decided 
that
she wanted to be able to ride instead of walking all the time. So she had a chance to purchase a small
filly colt. BJ named her “Cheyanne”. I think BJ has the wrong concept that if
you get one of us at a young age you can train us not to have too much
attitude. Don’t tell her, but we’ve
got it, like, all figured out and put on a good show. When Cheyanne arrived in August she was, like, kind of scrawny
and small; even smaller than me. Now,
here it is, December, and she’s, like, a tad taller than I am now and matchen’
BJ. I think she’s BJ’s special
one. And, HEY! that’s supposed to be
my designated ranking on the ranch.
Yah know, it seems that whenever we have a new born on the ranch they
seem to eeek out that title.
Speaking of
which, the other big thing on the ranch is a bunch of new cria llamas. My aunts Jenny and Katarina each had baby
boys that look almost identical to my Uncle Bridger. If you’ve ever visited our website at http://www.tctwest.net/~wtr/page3.html
you’d see Bridger on the llama page.
They call Jenny’s cria, “Tenacious”, and Katarina’s cria, “Turret”. And I can’t forget about Bridger’s mom,
Dark Rain. She had a cria girl that
looks like her, all black, and they call her “Seneca”. Somehow I got to be the one that looks after
them when their moms aren’t around.
That’s no fair! Tymico, who was
born 3 weeks after me, doesn’t help out at all!! She just flirts with all the cute boy llamas and steals them
away from me. I keep complaining to
Mike and BJ, but they say that I’m a special llama and the best
of all the llamas on the ranch. Now
that’s radical!! But somehow, I 
think,
they say that just to appease 
me.
Hey!! I’m now a BIG SISTER!! My mom, Lilly, gave birth to a cria girl. I’ve asked Mike and BJ if I can name it? What do you all think of “Sensay-Su”? Since the guys started with “T” the girls should all start with “S’s”. I kind-a like my aunts’ names Titapa and Nichaja. They’re Thai in origin and I thought it would be fitting to have an Oriental twist. Also, my mom, Lilly, likes having me around to cria sit, so yah think maybe I can get out of watching the other three, and hand that responsibility over to Tymico.
We’ve had a lot of young human people stopping by the ranch last May. There have been three groups of them. Mike halters a few of us girls and a few of my uncles and ties us to the corral rails. He has these young humans Mike calls “kids” come into the corral and pet us. But, since I’m the special llama I get to walk around free. That’s to my advantage, because Mike brings out the feed bucket and has the kids dip their hands into the feed. They love to have us eat it out of their hands. And, if you haven’t guessed it, I’m free, the others aren’t, it’s like I get fed the most. Smooth thinking, Right?! Mike doesn’t call me his special llama for nothin’.
Yah gotta come and see our cool barn
Mike put up! It’s long and wide and
has an overhang. Mike says it’s a
30’x60’ pole barn with a 12’ lean-to the full 60’. The barn is neat because it has two big sliding 
doors
on either end and on the west side, under the lean-to, there are these neat
double doors, six (6) of them. They
are called Dutch-Doors. Mike and BJ
bought a bunch of these metal corral panels to section off six (6) runs, one
from each door. That makes runs for us
of 10’x 48’ long stretching into the small corral, and we get a 10’x10’
enclosure in the barn. This was a good
place to be one day last spring when this guy called a Vet came to the
ranch. That particular day it
rained. It rained so much I thought my
ears would ache from it hitting the metal roof of the barn. That was the day I met the Vet Doctor, and
these things they call needles. That
was a lot of fun—NOT!!! With the rain hurtin’ my ears and this guy stickin’ stuff in my
muscles I was feeling OUCH!! The good
thing about this was we all were able to stay inside the barn instead of
outside getting drenched.
That
was back in May sometime. It hasn’t
rained here much since then. We have a
pond that I like to go in once and a while.
Mike says we don’t have enough water rights to keep it filled all the
time. With all the 
hot
weather he seems to water the lawn and garden a lot, and the pond is always
low. It was really hot for a week
here in August. There is a thermometer
on the door of the shed, and since I learned my numbers good, I read 110. I asked BJ what that meant and she just
said that when it gets over 100 that it means it’s HOT!! I can
believe that because I laid in the shade all those days.
Now that it’s December, that pond has ice on it. It ain’t very thick though. So Mike did something kind-a weird. He put some posts in the ground a few feet away from the edge. Then he strung this small thin wire between the posts. I thought, HEY, how’s this puny stuff gon-na stop me from getting on the ice. Wellllllll, let me tell you that when I went up to it and try to smell it did I, WHOA!!! Man! It felt like a mess of those hornet bees were stinging me in the nose and it went all throughout my body. Mike was standin’ off on the hillside, just a laughin’. He said to me, a bit later, that I must have jumped 3- 4 feet in the air and took off runnin’ to the pasture gyrating my body as I ran. HEY MAN!! That was NOT a very cool thing. Turns out that Mike said that this is somethin’ called an electric fence. Well, let me tell you, don’t EVER, touch something like this. If you do, you’re gonna feel all kinds of weird and you’ll never forget it. I aint ever go-in close to that puny wire again. Hey! Maybe I can get Tymico to touch it. Then, maybe, I can get back at her for taking all the boys.
Yah know, I
wonder sometimes if my ears are attached?
I told you about our website above, but I forgot to tell you how it
happened. Last January, Mike finally
decided to get a new computer. What a
dufuss! I don’t know why he waited so long
to buy it. But he finally has it. He went about designing our web page with
help from me. I’m the ideas llama. It took about two weeks to construct it and
we change/add to it every once and awhile.
I don’t know why he put in that section about flying? Maybe he thinks he’ll get me inside the
plane he owns—NOT!!!
I think I may have over stretched my bounds a bit in that last part, and better sign off on this letter. I only hope Mike doesn’t proofread this.
Cowabunga Dudes, I’m done!!!! You-all have a good year, and, like, take care!
From the menagerie at the Wayfaring Traveler Ranch!
From the Llamas:
(Me) Maggie Lilly Mandarin Chocolate Tymico Jenny Tenacious
Dark Rain Seneca Katarina Spit Turret Nichaja Titapa
Zasu Bridger Mt. Osborn Radar George Esparado
Ethan Bola White Knight Coco Man Sinara Chico
Harpo Groucho Black Knight Spunky Magnus Howard K
And my new cria sister Sensay-Su She is a cutie.
From the BIG Birds: Gertrude and Heathcliff
From the barking Hippos: Meiko and Koncho
From the mouse catchers that lay around all day: Kalico, Misha, and Searcher
From the hippapodian duo: Thunder and Lightening. And, the speedster: Cheyanne
Ohhhhhh yyyyyah, can’t forget those two human beings that keep us in llama feed: Mike and BJ
P.S. Maggie!!!
Yes I do proof read. I should
never have taught you how to type!
Llama kids! Yah can’t keep em’ off the computer! That special llama category may be in
jeopardy.
From BJ and I, the Llama Wrangler, may you all have
a happy and joyous New Year. And, if
you ever decide to get a llama, watch out for those sassy ones. Visit our website www.tctwest.net/~wtr and you can get all
the info to get back to us, e-mail or snail mail. Bye!
BJ & Mike Carlson
Wayfaring Traveler Ranch
PO Box 98, 1100 Lane 38
Burlington WY 82411-0098
307-762-3536
wtr@tctwest.net
http://www.tctwest.net/~wtr