Chetwyn Farms is home to a herd of alpacas in Prince Edward County, Ontario. This is the first in a series of stories about the animals who have shaped this place — and us.

I cannot remember ever consciously believing that our first five alpacas would live forever, although it appears that some part of me must have done exactly that. We had brought them home from the farm of the people who would become our mentors in almost everything we did not yet know, and there was so much of that in the beginning that death seemed not merely distant but somehow absent from consideration altogether. I understood perfectly well that animals died, just as I understood that people did, but neither fact seemed particularly relevant to these five animals who had just arrived and were now standing in our fields, looking back at us with the faint suspicion that perhaps we were the ones who had been purchased.

Pippa was among them, although it did not take long before she distinguished herself from the others.

She was snow white and unusually friendly, possessed of the rather inconvenient conviction that she belonged wherever we happened to be. If there was a gate between us, she would wait at it. If we were working in the field, she would follow. Had we opened the farmhouse door and invited her inside, I have little doubt she would have accepted the arrangement without considering it remotely unusual.

The other alpacas seemed to understand that they were alpacas. Pippa appeared less certain.

When a photographer from the local newspaper came to the farm to take pictures for a story, she became fascinated with the strap of his camera bag, eventually taking possession of it and parading around the pasture with the photographer following behind, delighted rather than alarmed. It was impossible not to be amused by her. She was not simply friendly in the manner of a well-socialized animal; she was interested in us, and in whatever we happened to be doing, with a curiosity that made her seem somehow more present than the others.

Years later, with many more alpacas having passed through our lives, I can still say there has never been another quite like her.

Perhaps that is why, when she began to slow down one summer, I noticed.

Not enough, as it turned out.

She continued to eat and move with the herd, although without her usual enthusiasm, and for several days we watched her with that uncertain vigilance familiar to anyone responsible for animals: the endless negotiation between not wanting to overreact and the fear that one has already waited too long. Eventually we called the veterinarian, who examined her and told us she had pneumonia.

Alpacas are stoic animals, he said. By the time they allow you to see that something is wrong, it is often already too late.

There was nothing dramatic in the way he said it. He had presumably said it before.

It was a warm summer afternoon, and when the rest of the herd went out, Pippa remained behind in the barn. I stayed with her, watching as the strength seemed gradually to leave her legs, her body beginning to sway almost imperceptibly before the movement became more pronounced. I remember standing close enough to catch her, although I cannot now say whether I knew that was what I was doing until she began to fall.

She came down slowly.

For a moment I held her weight against me before lowering her onto the concrete floor, cool beneath us despite the heat of the day, and there I watched the strange physical business of life leaving a body I knew. I have since seen other alpacas die and recognize now the awkward extension of the neck that comes near the end, an unnatural gesture that seems almost impossible to reconcile with the stillness that follows it.

And then Pippa was gone.

Outside, the summer afternoon continued.

The sun was beginning its descent, the other alpacas were returning from the fields, and somewhere across the yard Shauna was in the house preparing dinner for friends who were staying with us. I sat for a while on the steps leading to the hayloft, trying rather unsuccessfully to contain the tears that had begun gathering, looking at Pippa lying on the barn floor and attempting to understand how something that had been so completely itself only a short time before could suddenly no longer be there.

I went to the house and quietly told Shauna what had happened. There were guests with us and dinner underway, and neither of us felt any need to draw them into what had happened in the barn. Two versions of the same summer evening simply continued alongside one another: in the house, preparations for dinner; in the barn, the first death among the animals we had brought here and somehow imagined would accompany us indefinitely.

Then the practicalities asserted themselves, as they invariably do on a farm.

Pippa could not remain in the barn overnight, and so before darkness came I took the tractor two fields back and dug a grave. Alpacas occupy an awkward middle ground in almost everything, including death—not so small that moving one is easy, not so large that burial on the farm was impossible—and I did what needed to be done, carrying out the strange final responsibility that comes with having invited an animal into your care.

That field is still part of my working life. I cross it for haying and walk its edges when fences need attention, and over the years Pippa has been joined there by others: animals we could not save, a cria born without life, another whose life was over almost before it had properly begun. There are no stones or markers, nothing to tell anyone passing through that beneath the grass lies a small history of the farm. The alpacas themselves appear to have little interest in death once it has occurred; the living continue with the considerable business of being alive.

I have learned something from that too.

But Pippa was the first, and perhaps because she was the first, or perhaps simply because she was Pippa, something about that afternoon remained with me in ways I could not then have understood.

We had always believed that the animals who came to live with us deserved our protection and the best life we could reasonably give them. That had been part of the bargain from the beginning. Shauna had suggested alpacas precisely because we wanted animals around us but knew we could never raise livestock whose eventual destination we understood would be slaughter. It was a distinction that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time.

Over the years, it became less so.

I cannot say that I left the barn that afternoon having reached some great moral conclusion. I buried Pippa, returned to the house, and life went on, as it always does. But once you have known an animal as an individual—once you have understood its habits and preferences, laughed at its peculiarities, worried when it was unwell and held its weight against you as it died—it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the comfortable fiction that individuality belongs only to the animals whose names you happen to know.

Somewhere along the way, the distance between Pippa and the anonymous animal beneath the plastic wrap in a supermarket began to trouble me.

It took time. Most real changes do.

Years later I would live differently because of what I had gradually come to understand about animals, although I would never claim that Pippa alone was responsible. She was simply there near the beginning of that understanding, snow white and curious, following us around the farm as though she had every intention of staying forever.

Perhaps that was why I had assumed she would.

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If you'd like to meet the herd, you can book an alpaca encounter at Chetwyn Farms, or explore our alpaca yarn and home goods — each one made from the fibre of animals like Pippa.