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Together, we made our way over to George, the llama’s big, black eyes still locked onto the baggie of granola.
“George! I’d like you to meet my new friend, Henry.” George said nothing, of course, his eyes on the food. “Henry, this is George. Why don’t you introduce yourself?”
“Hi!” Henry said. “Do you want some food?” He stuck out the bag, George doing a little excited hop in response. Henry laughed. “He does.”
“Pour some of it onto your hand, like this.” I took the bag from Henry and dumped a bit of granola onto my hand. That done, I lifted the food up to George. The animal wasted no time sticking his tongue out and cleaning off my palm with a single slurp.
Henry laughed again. “He’s really hungry.”
“He sure is. He likes to run off, but he always comes back when he remembers that I’m the one who gives him his food. Now, you try. Put a little on your hand and stick it out to him.”
Henry, a huge, excited grin on his face, did just that. George lowered his head and stuck out his tongue, wrapping it around Henry’s hand and licking off all the granola.
That got a huge laugh out of Henry. “It tickles!”
“I know, right?”
Henry turned to me. “Can we give him more?”
“Yep, but let’s save a little for the trip back. George can get a little distracted, so we should save some food to make sure he doesn’t wander off again. OK?”
“OK!” Henry looked up at me. “Can I ride him? I ride our ponies.”
“You can’t really ride llamas. If you try to jump on his back he’ll buck you right off. But if we get going, I bet he’ll let you pet him a little.”
“OK!” That seemed to go over just as well with the little man.
I grabbed George’s collar, leading him and Henry through the woods and back onto the trail. The snow was picking up more and more, but all I could feel was relief. Not only was Henry safe, but George was, too.
“There’s my place,” I said, pointing off toward the farm in the distance once we reached the hill I’d been looking out from before. “Nice, huh?”
“Yeah.” He sounded a tad underwhelmed. “Our house is bigger.”
I couldn’t do anything but laugh at the example of kid honesty.
“Well, it’s cute and cozy and it works for me.” Just as I opened my mouth to say more, something clicked in my head.
Henry said he lived in a big house. He had to have wandered off from somewhere nearby. There was a large house in the area, a huge mansion about a half mile west. The place was ginormous— seated on about a thousand acres of primo land. I didn’t know a darn thing about the house or who lived there, it was so far off that I’d never needed to. However, it made perfect sense to where Henry must have come from.
“Hey, Henry, do you live in that huge house over that way?” I pointed in the general direction of the place.
His eyes lit up. “Yeah! With my uncles and my sister.”
More relief took hold. “Well, that’s perfect.” I dropped into a squat and put my hands on my knees. “How about this—I’ll take you over to my place, get you cleaned up, then I’ll drive you home. Sound good?”
“Yeah!”
The situation was becoming more and more manageable by the second. George’s collar still in hand, I led us down the trail and back onto the main grounds of the property. The house was about twenty minutes off, and once we got going, little Henry proved himself to be quite the chatterbox. He told me about his uncles, how they worked on the ranch with all the animals, how they took care of him and his sister, Hattie.
About halfway into the walk, a gruff voice stopped me dead in my tracks.
“Hey, there. Going someplace with our boy?”
My heart skipped a beat. The voice was low and deep and impossibly masculine, with just a bit of gravel to it.
I turned slowly, confronted with the sight of two men, both tall, both insanely handsome. They were dressed in the same style as Henry, wearing rugged jeans, brown leather work boots, and flannel shirts under half zipped parkas. They both wore rancher-style hats like mine, snow collecting in the brim.
One look at them was enough to see that they were related not just to each other, but to Henry. They were both tall—one of them appeared to be just a little under six and a half feet with dark hair and hazel brown eyes, his angular face brooding and his facial hair cleanly groomed into a neat stubble. It was a bit hard to tell, but I guessed he was somewhere in his mid-forties.
