Travels with my Donkey

swivelled about in concern. 'They just did this really sweet thing with their... their legs.'
    In a very real way, it had brought my donkey and me closer: we had this thing together, that we both despised that dog. The two of us had been bound by a common love for my family, but the emotional adhesive here was somehow stronger. I'm sorry, modern Christianity, but nothing unites like a hatred shared.
    'You have some water for me,' ordered Letje when we shuffled into Sarria, up a pavement laid from the dismantled ruins of its castle. It was perhaps the fifteenth time I'd thus supplied her that day, and the lunch she'd eaten had also come straight from the canteen on Shinto's back. Exploiting his capacity to provide for others always gave me a small thrill of logistical fulfilment, the same thrill that I feel when the rear-facing seats in my Volvo estate are pressed into service, but after the next cadged swig I felt obliged to enquire as to the contents of her own modest pack. 'Just some clothes and toothbrush,' she said, unhappy to find herself in a conversation debased by such trivial drudgeries. 'Ramon had many bottles. I don't find it important to carry food and water.'
    'No, you don't,' I said with perfect neutrality.
    Were Shinto and I merely the latest stooges to accept gullibly a baton most recently dropped by Ramon? Or — dread alternative — one he believed I had snatched from his angry Latin hands? Either way I was eyeing Letje rather more carefully. And for her part, she had grown palpably disillusioned with my cosmic inadequacy: in essence, I was just far too silly an arse.
    Digital photography has much to commend it, but in puerile hands that profligate immediacy can become a curse. Panic fluttered my innards as I returned from a behind-bush comfort stop to see Letje idly beeping through the day's images.
    'What is this?'
    I looked over her shoulder: it was a snap I'd taken in the bar where we'd had our morning coffee. 'Um... well, that's a bottle of gin, I believe.'
    'Yes — this we have at home. Fockink Dry Gin.'
    I didn't quite know what to do with my face, though when she repeated the phrase with quizzical deliberation it began to crease and pucker compromisingly. 'Ah, yes,' she said, nodding scientifically. 'You laugh because the sound is a little like another word.' I shrugged feebly. 'The word of fucking.'
    That night I checked through the shots she'd have scrolled through to reach that one. There were three, and two depicted Shinto's anus at full and monstrous dilation during an epic act of voidance. The third was of a poster advertising some forthcoming night of modest parochial revelry, or at least a close-up of the incorporated legend 'Océano e Cunters'.
     
    Sarria was built up a hill, and with the shadows at their shortest Shinto downshifted in treacled reluctance. We lurched unsteadily up the precipitous main street, beneath pilgrim washing lines strung from the refugio 's upper windows, and though her rhapsodic camino persona proscribed displays of frustration, I could see a little enthusiasm trickle from Letje's open features. This trickle became an unstaunchable flood when, having very nearly failed to cross a railway line half an hour outside town, Shinto eased to a halt, with an air of up-to-the-buffers finality, before a broad and lazy stream traversed by a rude wooden bridge.
    'He will not cross this?' she asked, frankly incredulous, as I paid out the long rope and walked across to the opposite bank. There was a sudden aquatic commotion, and we looked back to see Sativa hanging by her jaws from the rope, hind legs thrashing the water in search of purchase. Shinto surveyed the scene with an air of disappointment, flinching in distaste more than fear as the dog relinquished its quarry and churned hysterically across to us. 'Certainly not now,' I said.
    To her credit Letje refused to accept this verdict. Determined not to give up that Timotei dream without a fight she beckoned Shinto with encouraging clucks, then tugged tentatively on the rope, and finally let the mask slip with a red-faced, double-fisted yank that left her panting, furious and prostrate. 'Your animal has a personality defect,' she rasped, spanking dust off her canvas pedal pushers and glowering over at Shinto, his eyes half-closed like a contented cat by the fire. 'He is... autistic!' I knew exactly what Letje was going through, but having gone through it so many times now found myself infused with an almost saintly