Alpacas are habit-prone animals. Humming and chewing were the two habits most common to their kind. Birthright traits entwined with the deep identity of all camelids. Alfonzo had written two chapters—both now caught in the limbo between processor and printer—on the practical and psychic significance of humming and chewing. In a way, humming was straightforward, a dialect, a mode of communication that turned in toward the organs and out toward the Other. It was a way to work through stresses and questions. It was also the way camelids communicated among themselves when they wanted to be private. Humming was untranslatable. In the community, it served as quotidian telepathy. Other animals couldn’t understand, just as camelids couldn’t understand the chatter of other species. Dogs had dog tongue—or conversation with scent and saliva—just as birds had bird speak, and rabbits had whatever anxious chatter they had. It was impolite to probe into the private communication systems of others.

Chewing, in contrast, was complicated and more brutish. To chew was to be judged. Yet camelids weren’t the only chewers, or even spitters for that matter. And chewing was, like humming, both soothing and nourishing; it likewise filled odd moments and provided something to do during nervous ones. Chewing cut across alpaca/llama society and connected with larger political, emotional, and social issues. Chewing was a hallmark of the entire ruminant community, and the ruminant matrix was complex.

The most famous and influential ruminants were, of course, cows, but the wider classification included many. Alpacas, llamas, vicuñas, sheep, goats, and moose were all united by their multiple stomachs and love of vegetarian restaurants.

Ruminants were frequently mocked by the socially dominant single-stomached. Cats, dogs, horses, pigs, and raccoons were all too comfortable making cracks about grass-bag bellies, about burps and endless chawing. A whole hygiene and supplement industry had arisen to “solve” what was deemed a shameful digestive problem.

Ruminant intellectuals had developed whole philosophies based around the digestion question. Alimentary deconstructionists envisioned stomach as mind and food as information. They held that beauty and complexity arose from slow digestion. Charlene Mooken had devoted her career to the subject. She wrote that gut and mind were inseparable, that the pockets and folds of the brain were mirrored in the digestive tract. Ruminants, she argued, had been instrumental in the development of animal society because of—not despite—their slowness to digest.

Once, Alfonzo had made the error of explaining epistemological folds to his father. He’d regretted it. After that instance of intellectual sharing, his dad had brought up a twisted-up version of Alfonzo’s summary to bolster his own problematic species-ist arguments.

“You can’t generalize, Dad! Not all those with one stomach are idiots.”

“Well, your French cow girlfriend thinks they are.”

“She’s a dead philosopher, not my girlfriend.”

“Potato tomato,” his father had huffed.

Each replay of this argument reminded Alfonzo of the perils of getting into alpine philosophy with family.