Cleopatra

We bought Cleopatra to be company for Solomon. When we unloaded her, he ran.

She chased him.

Solomon came to NarroWay in April 2022 at two months old, and he had not been near another camel since. He has never wanted for company. He has a herd of donkeys, horses, sheep, and goats, and he is devoted to every one of them. Still, we knew he needed his own kind. Rebecca Martin had told Trent Reynolds, who bred Solomon at En Gedi Ridge Zoo in Bellefontaine, Ohio, that if he ever had a female, NarroWay would like the option to buy her. One was born on January 12, 2026, and he called.

She is white, and she is Solomon's half-sister. That settled it.

On June 8, 2026, Yvonne "Birdie" Clark, Rebecca Martin, and Lora McCoy drove to Ohio and brought her home at five months old in a small horse trailer.

Unlike her brother, Cleopatra spent the first months of her life around other camels and was never bottle fed. It did not help her with Solomon. He kept his distance for a while, and it was the donkeys who took her in first and let her become one of the herd.

She has been theirs ever since. She spends some time with Solomon, but she most often runs with the donkeys, and if we let them out of the stall before her, she cries until we let her out too. We bought a camel a companion, and she has decided she is a donkey.

Cleo, as some of us call her, loves people and will walk right up to you in the pasture, friendly and inquisitive and entirely innocent about all of it. She loves carrots and she loves scratches. She will also, if you try to put a halter on her, scream her head off as though you are killing her, with nothing hurting anywhere. Our animal handlers have been working with her to get her stage ready, particularly Emma Davis and Angelina Steele, along with Piper Anstey and Caitlin Brenner.

She made her first official appearance on stage at NarroWay's 30th birthday celebration on September 17, 2026.

She came to us as Hope, which is a pretty name. We had a bigger one picked out. Solomon was renamed for a king because we looked at his baby picture and saw what he would grow into, and Cleopatra has a queen's name with a good deal of growing left to do. We have a fairly clear idea of what she will be.