Travels with my Donkey

calm.
    With tree-filtered sun speckled across the path and bejewelling the gentle water that traversed it this was a capital spot; I went over to extract a carton of rosé acquired during that ill-fated dash round the Spar in Triacastela. Settling myself down on a smooth rock I tore the carton open and offered it to Letje, who with brittle thanks declined. After an extended, throat-bobbing swig I wiped my mouth and announced I didn't really care what happened, that I'd camp here if it came to that. 'Sitting on the Dock of the Bay' came to my lips and stayed there in a nonchalant and, in hindsight, infuriating hum, and presently Letje blurted a curt farewell and marched off up the stream's impressively severe valley with Sativa in noisy tow.
    For a peaceful hour we rested, the two of us flat-lining either side of the bridge. At 6.00 the mosquitoes started to bite, and feeling that perhaps I ought to do something I sluiced the remaining wine into the stream, ambled over the bridge and led Shinto back up across the train tracks. There was an alternative path of sorts, running parallel to the railway's lofty embankment in vaguely the right direction, but it proved no beaten track. Within 50 yards the undergrowth was overgrowth: I looked behind and only Shinto's ears were visible. Wrestling through the shrubs and saplings we presently arrived at the same stream, here swollen to twice its previous girth. It was a merrily hopeless scenario.
    'OK, Shints, we're just going to walk across this now,' I announced, in a voice stoutly purged of defeat or desperation. As the water topped my right boot, some gifted clairvoyant behind the controls of a distant locomotive applied his shrillest klaxon, and a busy moment later I was on the other side, drenched and laughing and leading a newly alert Shinto towards an arch cut through the embankment.
    I met Donald a click and a bit up the road: roused by Letje's desperate prognosis he'd been dispatched from the refugio on a salvage mission. He placed a beer in my hand and a hand on my shoulder — tea and sympathy à la Scotsman. 'Post-traumatic distress counselling,' he smiled, and though by standards of certain early evenings I in fact felt jauntily chipper, this was another humbling moment. Twice in two days the milkman of human kindness had left me an extra pint.
    Donald led us up to Barbadelo, a trim but ancient hilltop hamlet now dominated by one of those nineties refugios, its whitewashed concrete already mossed by the Galician elements to a simulacrum of some wartime military installation. Both floors were loudly replete with the energetic young Spaniards whose presence would from hereon be a bracing ubiquity, but somehow Petronella had fended them off to save me a bunk by the window. I went to hug her and... there they went, a tear down each crimson cheek.
    Letje was laying her stuff out under a lean-to by the municipal football pitch that fronted the refugio : as so often, Sativa's presence excluded her from an indoor berth. We exchanged conciliatory smiles as I led Shinto to the distant tangle of wild peas and clover that would be his campsite, but this was to be our final encounter.
    Sucking up peasant broth with Donald and Petronella at the village's solitary commercial establishment I began to curse myself for the gratuitous folly that had effectively spurned the first and only offer to address the post-Santiagan Shinto situation. Why had I done this? In terms of that awful dog Shinto could have looked after himself: one well-timed kick and she'd be canine history. Perhaps, after all, it was envy — if Letje had welcomed the camino into her soul, then I remained a spiritual pygmy, scrabbling foolishly through the transcendental low-ground as all the Big Answers passed overhead.
    We were halfway through our digestifs, this time, at Donald's insistence, a fearsome local distillation known as aruxo, when Ramon strode sternly in. I gulped reflexively, never a good idea with a throatful of over-proof lava, and expectorating alcohol into my cupped hands wondered if this would end in awkwardness, humiliation or both and a good shoeing. Ramon stopped at the head of our table and closed his eyes. 'De beauty is seemple of trust and pain,' he intoned, palms held up as if weighing each word individually. And when he opened his eyes again with a smile of apologetic glee, I wasn't the only one choking.
     

Fourteen

     
    I t had been a moist night, and as I re-pegged my still-damp