Environment : Bouncing Back : The vicuna makes an impressive comeback in Peru while its cousin the llama gains popularity in the United States.

“Look, vicunas.”

The arid Andean plateau, 13,000 feet above sea level, stretched into distant hills where dust devils swirled over long gray slopes. It seemed too barren, too desolate a place for such beautiful creatures to live.

But six vicunas skittered away from the dirt road as the van pulled up.

“It’s a family group,” said Mauricio de Romana, a Peruvian conservationist, as he watched from inside the vehicle. “It’s a male and five females.”

The females loitered nervously 40 yards from the road as the male stationed itself on a low mound, sending shrill warning sounds toward the idling van. They were the size of small deer, with long, graceful necks and small, alert heads. Their fawn-colored coats were thick but not shaggy, and extra fluffy muffs of white fur puffed out at their chests.

“It used to be extremely difficult to see vicunas,” said De Romana. “In this area, there were hardly any vicunas left.”

Now they are abundant. Several groups of the delicate, light-footed animals popped into sight like ghostly apparitions in this high country east of Arequipa.

Vicunas, llamas, alpacas and guanacos--all cousins of the camel, differing in size and in the uses humans have found for them--once were revered and protected by the Inca as man’s kindred beings. But when the Spanish conquered the Incan Empire in the 16th Century, a harsher era began for the camelids of South America.

Great herds of domesticated llamas and alpacas were depleted and relegated to inhospitable back lands, along with guanacos and vicunas, the wild camelids. Over the centuries, vicunas dwindled to a tiny fraction of their former numbers and finally were declared an endangered species.

Lately, however, a new and more promising era seems to be starting. Vicunas have made an impressive comeback in the highlands of Peru and neighboring Chile, where protective reserves were established, multiplying their numbers from about 10,000 in the 1960s to an estimated 130,000 today. About 100,000 of them are in Peru.

The comeback has been so successful that Peruvian conservationists and government officials now want to permit limited marketing of vicuna fiber shorn from live animals under strict controls. Plans are being made to legalize the sale of their fiber after a 20-year international ban by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Cloth made from the animals’ fine, tan fleece has sold on the black market for thousands of dollars a yard in recent decades.

The closest thing to vicuna in a legal fiber is alpaca, according to Peruvian breeders and textile makers, who are hoping for a surge in the depressed world market for alpaca cloth. It is lighter, softer and warmer than sheep’s wool, they boast, so demand for it is bound to boom someday.

Some Peruvians hope that international interest in alpaca cloth will be stimulated by the increasing popularity of llamas and alpacas in the United States, where the beasts are bred as pets and pack-animals for trekking.

Many of the animals have been imported from Bolivia and Chile, and now for the first time, Peru is about to export them. An initial group of 450 animals is being prepared at Arequipa for shipping to the United States as breeding stock. Top llama sires have sold in the United States for up to $190,000.

James Vickers, a veterinarian in Charlevoix, Mich., who specializes in camelids, said there are about 50,000 llamas and 5,000 alpacas in the United States. Vickers said that one of the earliest importations of the animals to the United States was made by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst in the 1930s.

But the American llama boom has come in the past decade, mostly among people who live on farms and what Vickers calls “ranchettes” in Western states, including California. “It’s growing and growing,” he said by telephone from Michigan.

For most American owners, the llama is a pet that is clean, easy to keep and train, intelligent and friendly. “There’s no biting, no kicking,” said Vickers. “They’re extremely gentle animals.”

Llamas are being used increasingly to carry equipment and provisions on recreational wilderness treks; U.S. forest rangers have begun using them as pack animals in the Colorado high country. Some owners use llama hair for knitting, even though the fiber is coarser than that of the alpaca.

Alpacas, smaller than llamas and not as useful for packing, are also growing in popularity in the United States. Their fine fleece is used for hobby knitting; a commercial market for the U.S.-produced fiber is beginning to develop.

The American fascination with llamas is geographically fitting. According to paleontologists, animals related to the camel descend from North American camelids that migrated to Asia and South America ages ago. In South America, llamas and alpacas were domesticated as early as 5000 BC, some archeologists estimate.

Some theorize that the llama’s usefulness as a beast of burden and food source was indispensable in the rapid expansion of the great Inca Empire along the central Andes in the 15th Century.

Canadian scholar Daphne Kelgard, who wrote her 1991 doctoral dissertation on the history of Andean camelids, said that for the Incas, the camelids were “special beings. . . . And still today the herders say, ‘These are our children.’ ”

Vicunas and guanacos were believed to exist as a sacred trust to be administered by the Inca rulers, Kelgard said by telephone from Vancouver, Canada. Wardens watched over the animals, and hunting without a license was punishable by death.

Kelgard estimates that there may have been 6 million vicunas and guanacos and many more llamas and alpacas in Inca times. Some experts estimate that llamas alone numbered more than 20 million during the Inca Empire.

The Spanish brought in sheep, goats, cows and horses, which quickly began replacing camelids in the best pastures of the Andean region. The Spaniards confiscated whole herds of llamas and alpacas for meat, disregarding a traditional ban on killing fertile females. Indian-owned herds of llamas and alpacas were driven high into the Andes, where fodder was poor and conditions were hard. Much of the ancient breeding technology was lost; of a handful of breeds of llama believed to have existed in Inca times, only two survive.

Today, there are about 1 million llamas and 3 million alpacas in Peru--more than 80% of the world’s population of the two species. Although the alpaca hair is sought after for woven and knitted goods, the best fiber by far is the vicuna’s. That has always gotten the vicuna in trouble. Untold thousands have been shot for their fiber.

“Since it isn’t easy to capture them, the cheapest and most efficient thing is to put a bullet in them,” said Mauricio de Romana, president of an Arequipa-based conservation group called Pro Defense of Nature.

He said a private Japanese foundation has agreed to finance development of a method that would use helicopters or light planes to herd alpacas into giant net “funnels,” where they could be caught, sheared and released.

The fiber of the guanaco, the larger wild cousin of the vicunas, is not especially valuable, but the animal has long been killed for meat and for sport. Today, there are about 300,000 guanacos in the Andes of southern Argentina and Chile, but only about 10,000 in Peru, said De Romana. “In Peru, there should be much more concern than there is,” he said.

Llama and alpaca herds have diminished in recent years. Peasant herders have had to sell or eat animals to survive a severe Peruvian recession and the depression in alpaca fiber prices. A drought during the past two years has also taken a heavy toll, drying up pastures and streams.

Last year, a Peruvian government decree opened the door for llama and alpaca exports. Romana and his alpaca association would like to make contacts for direct exports from Peruvian sellers to American buyers, avoiding the costs of middlemen. But the first exportation has been arranged by middleman Tom Hunt, a Michigan-based animal dealer who specializes in unusual foreign species.

Hunt has a U.S. government permit to take 450 animals into the United States. He said 150 will be llamas and the rest alpacas.

Some Peruvians fear that as alpaca herds grow in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and other countries, an oversupply of the animal’s fiber will develop and keep prices down. But others predict that, once industrialized countries begin producing alpaca fiber, more widespread promotion of its superior qualities will make it an increasingly popular product, thus boosting business for Peru.