Neighbor helps keep hope alive

By David Horst  sandhill7@gmail.com

Hope came rolling up our driveway in the form of a really big pickup truck on Monday.

Consty

Our hay guy, neighbor Randy who cuts and bales our hay with his brothers in exchange for half the take, came to help us get Constellation to his feet after about 72 hours of the llama being down. We're not close friends. Really, our only relationship is the business connection of haymaking. But when we asked, he came.

"That's what neighbors do," Randy said. It's the code of the country.


With a help of a man a generation younger and arms capable of throwing a hay bale one-handed up onto a stack four courses tall, we got Consty to his feet. There was no imagining that he was going to stand on his own, but at least he got his legs working and the blood flowing again.

We had some mechanical help. The double-pulley arrangement of a block and tackle hooked to the joist overhead reduced the strain of lifting, but it still presented a major challenge, with 250 pounds of llama at the other end of the rope.

I had two attempted designs for a sling ready to use -- a 6x8 tarp screwed to two 2x4s to keep it from bunching up and a hammock. Neither was ideal. Luckily, Randy had brought along a canvas sling made for lifting cows. It's a hair oversized, but beat out anything else we had by a long measure.

Here's what you need to lift a llama.

Even the best neighbors can't be expected to come to your house twice a day for what could be a couple of weeks to help you lift a llama. We needed a more independent solution. I decided to let fossil fuel take the burden.

An electric winch is the ticket, I thought to myself. Scanning the Internet, I found $100 would get you one capable of lifting twice Consty's weight. Off I went to the tool store with MasterCard in hand and walked away with a box heavy enough that you almost need a winch to lift it.

I got home with it in what I thought was plenty of time to unbox and install the winch before my wife arrived. That's when I got to the part in the directions that said to attach the winch to a steel pipe or a beam strong enough to handle the force of lifting, but small enough to fit within the provided brackets.

I'm here to tell you there is no exotic wood in the deepest forests of Brazil strong enough to take the force of the lift when cut thin enough to fit within the little provided brackets. That left pipe, and the closest thing to pipe in our barn is plastic electrical conduit.

I searched the basement, the garage and the barn for any length of bracket-diameter pipe. What I came up with in the end was our trusty tamping rod. It's a rusted old 4-foot length of 1¼-inch steel pipe that we have used through the years to compact the soil around fence posts and beat rocks into submission. Now it would be our winch-holding pipe, after a trip to the hardware store to provide my own brackets to screw the pipe down to the barn beams.

It's like a children's song. "With the cable that's on the winch, that's on the pipe, that's on the barn beam, Old McDonald lifted a llama, eey-eye-eey-eye-ohhh."

To make a short story of a long installation, the brackets held the pipe and the winch securely enough to lift the llama with the sling Randy had provided.

A couple of times, Consty actually helped with his back legs. That fed hope.

Getting his legs out from under him revealed his front-right leg is injured, the knee noticeably swollen. Add that to his systemwide infection and you have a challenge to standing up that could take some time to overcome.

The plan is to lift him two or three times a day in hopes that his legs will strengthen and he will be able to stand, and then get up, on his own.

When that happens, hope will be here to stay.