Travels with my Donkey

the plump and temperate hills of Bierzo, were just right. Arm in arm with my pilgrim wife, our flaxen-haired youngest riding high and happy at our side, a keenly prick-eared donkey under her rump and somewhere back down the dusty path a couple of somebody else's kids trying to trip each other up: this was as good as it got, and it was ending just as they'd all grown accustomed to fatigue, chorizo and the stop-and-drop approach to public urination.
     
    Cacabelos was another are-we-nearly-there-yet extruded strip town, with the pertinent buildings right out the far end. The hotel Birna had found was a new one, run by a family who'd clearly been anticipating Shinto's arrival all day: the eldest daughter spoke French and as Shints and I accompanied her through the streets she explained that her father kept three horses in a farm just outside town. We arrived at a house with a large and messy front yard, and a shrunken figure she identified as her grandmother tottered eagerly out to meet us, gumming her false teeth into place. Everyone smiled and nodded a lot; I did so with such consuming enthusiasm that Shinto was rather negligently attached to a large and oily piece of mechanical jetsam, which left his snout blackened for days afterwards.
    Perhaps because my most fearsome donkey-maintenance concern related to the intimate application of unguents, I had successfully forgotten that Shinto's anti-tick treatment had long since passed its expiry date. This took my neglect to a whole new level: the danger wasn't any uncomfortable irritation caused by the ticks themselves, but a reliably fatal blood disease they carried. I remembered as I was getting into bed, and before getting out again I had naturally pre-dreamt the entire procedure. For once fantasy was kinder: instead of having a spike plunged through his ribcage as Hanno had warned me he'd have to, the Shinto of my nocturnal reverie was a huge, prone stallion who obediently rolled over as I anointed each vast, glistening flank in turn with a sort of insecticidal lacquer.
    I had Kristjan ball-pen a reminder on my hand — a many-legged blob-monster that was less a tick than one of the Pacman baddies — during our final breakfast together. Looking from face to road-tanned face and suppressing a desire to clasp each to a chest moist with tears of pride and sorrow, I catalogued my children's achievements. Lilja, never previously associated with any act of stamina not involving tiny plastic beads, had defied the critics with an 80-kilometre on-foot total that left her just 20 clicks short of the papal qualification for a certificated pilgrimage. In the pantheon of crowd-pleasing equine/girl combos, Valdis had earned a place on the podium alongside Lady Godiva and the Banbury Cross bint. Cursed with a Y chromosome and bereft of a solar-powered Game Boy Kristjan had found himself frankly bored for long periods, but had tackled this wholly rational condition with doughty endurance. And considered as a three-headed entity, their traditional holiday litany of demands for complicated treats and favours had been eerily muted — evidently some asceticism had rubbed off. They hadn't even been more than briefly insufferable after we'd explained that those people had bought us supper because they liked them. Never walk with children and animals, the maxim nearly went, and I had proven whoever nearly coined it wrong.
    Birna bequeathed me a mobile phone and a new shirt as we transferred luggage from foot wells back to saddle. Despite the looming attractions of a daily routine shorn of lomo, dung and melted tarmac she was sad to leave: the camino's epic history and all-pervading human warmth had affected her with something approaching profundity. And for my part, a meandering personal pilgrimage had been set back on the straight and narrow: bullfighting, witnessed by the distraught children in a bar a few days back, was to be instinctively reviled rather than studied with growing interest as a fascinating cultural anachronism. By the same token, the girls' instinctive affection for Shinto and its girding influence on him had obliged me to appreciate the value of sweet-natured good humour and encouragement, and indeed its productive efficacy, with donkey as in life. It was the power of love, and my daughters had helped me find the switch. Let's just hope they hadn't taken the batteries with them.
    With a child at his side or on his back, Shinto's eager ears had stood like furry