The other day I left the house and was surprised at the unseasonable coolness, the brisk and chilly wind. My first thought was to fret over my lack of an anorak, despite the fact that I'm not exactly sure what an anorak is. I immediately associated that kind of weather with an anorak even though I couldn't quite picture an anorak. I think it's some kind of jacket, but it might be a species of sturdy mountain goat. It sounds Inuit, by way of L.L. Bean. When we reached the plateau we saw a herd of anorak, and they all turned their heads to look at us. It's also true that I might very well own an anorak, if an anorak is what I think it probably is, something less than a parka but more than a windbreaker, probably with a hood, a zip front maybe but probably a pullover style, perhaps constructed of space age polymers, rain-deflecting yet breathable. I can't imagine Nanook of the North wearing such a garment but maybe he wore an earlier low tech version, although to be honest it's hard to picture Nanook in anything but a parka with a fur-lined hood, I really can't see him in a lighter jacket. A llama is a very strange-looking animal. Some animals never quite lose their strangeness no matter how many times you see pictures of them. I've never been to Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas, but I'd like to go someday. I don't enjoy traveling but that is a place I'd like to see for some reason, although the prospect of encountering llamas isn't one of them. I'm not afraid of llamas, I'm indifferent to llamas. The llama is probably related to the camel, but how exactly did that happen? Did ancient human migrations involve riding camels across the Bering land bridge? A preposterous image. Lorenzo Lamas was on Renegade. Maybe it went the other way, early camel-like animals making their way to the Middle East from the western hemisphere somehow, losing their wool coats and acquiring one or two humps and taking up spitting. Camels are ungulates, everyone knows that. But what's an ungulate. I assume the alpaca is related to the llama, and that the anorak is related to neither since it's most likely a kind of outerwear and not a wool-producing ruminant, an object not an animal, not something you feed but something you hang in the closet, although wool taken from an alpaca or llama could be used to make a garment that serves roughly the same purpose as an anorak, more or less, assuming an anorak is what I think it is. I could look all this up in a flash. A beautiful vicuna coat. Wait, did Jay Gatsby have a vicuna coat? No. There must be llamas in Borges somewhere, mustn't there? Why must there? What's the famous picture, from the sixties, some pinup's face framed by a fur-lined hood? Was that Jean Seberg? No.