Travels with my Donkey

that dog's dinner, but there was nothing in the small print that said he had to do it with a smile or turn up for unpaid overtime.
    I looked again at Sativa, scampering but ultimately subservient, and realised how much happier I felt with Shinto's free-spirited work-to-rule. His only duty was to himself, to do just enough to stop me throwing good barley after bad and abandoning him by the road. My gnawing fears that one day he would simply refuse to walk were misplaced: he knew exactly where that line was, and had been walking along it now for — ooooh — 620 kilometres.
    On we went, out past the refugio, following a line of huge pylons up and over a forested escarpment. Everyone, it seemed, had encountered a camino Doppelgänger: only the day before Petronella and her dog-following compatriot had both unsettled locals with ashen double takes, and a week earlier Birna palely recounted exchanging mute waves with a good friend of ours as she drove past a bus; a phone call which can only have compromised this friendship confirmed that he had not left Ireland in months. It seemed appropriate that I had my close encounter with this phenomenon near O Cebreiro: topping a gentle false summit and glancing into a pine copse I found myself face to haunted face with the living image, the very spit of Kurt, who had died ten years before almost to the day, and was a cat.
    After all that two-dimensional trudge, there was now much too much landscape. Epic prospects opened up on all sides, undulating, rain-fed fertility receding into a distant distance. It was like Wales with lizards; How Green Was My Valley isn't a question, but if it had been, then the answer here was Really Very. A monumental contemporary bronze of Santiago stood guard over a swooping descent through pimpernels and hazelnut trees: a gleeful swish of metal and Lycra on the neighbouring tarmac reminded me that it was here my friend Nicky's cycling companion had vaulted the handlebars and wound up in a ward. And because this was A Significant Place, she'd blamed divine retribution for their skimping at a refugio honesty box.
    Gravity placed its firm hand on the Shinto arse, but though from hereon in the camino was helpfully marked with count-down-to-Santiago posts every half-click, he seemed to have an uncanny awareness of when I was trying for an official speed record. 'I don't know what to say, coach, it was all coming together, I felt good, I'm coming into the last 50 and then there's like this big load of dried cow shit at the side...' At the next village, another Hospital, the road bounced back upwards, and with unexpected violence: after 3 unholy kilometres we stood on frail and shaking legs at Alto de Poio, almost 100 metres above O Cebreiro.
    This wasn't a town so much as a couple of head-of-the-pass bars either side of another quiet strip of the N6, but one of them had rooms and Petronella was sitting outside it in a receding triangle of late-afternoon sun. 'Looking good, Shinto,' she said, rising to manipulate the more tactile parts of his face. 'That spray for the little bugs must have helped.'
    Cock, piss and tits. How had I forgotten? And so, watched by Petronella, another of her many middle-aged pilgrim compatriots and, less intently, a trio of professionally bored Frenchmen, I lashed the unburdened Shinto to an adjacent garage door and swaddled his eyes with the strip of tablecloth that chef had used on him at Ponferrada. It was sad before I'd even started: hearing me prime and agitate that big blue bottle of badness, he flinched and ducked like a hapless POW at a mock execution.
    Here was a scenario beyond any bestial rationalisation: Shinto might feasibly have been equipped to connect most of my previous maltreatments with his own cowardice or reluctance, but what had any donkey ever done to deserve this cold-hearted, systematic torture? I swallowed hard, shook again, and holding the trigger at arm's length let him have it square on the forelock. Shinto backed blindly away and flailed so violently that he head-butted the up-and-over garage door, a great basso profundo gonging that boomed out sickeningly and raised faces from many a beer at the windows of the bar opposite. All that to treat an area equivalent to half a cat's nose. By the time I'd finished, a huge toxic cloud hung over our corner of Galicia and Shinto, poor Shinto, was leaking mucus from all the many holes in his poison-plastered head.
    The great thing about animals, though, other