Travels with my Donkey

laundry to Shinto's saddle an ancient rustic ambled by with a scythe over his shoulder; another in a wide-brimmed felt hat sat against the base of a garlanded stone crucifix up the road. The yellow arrows around here were occasionally supplanted by a red cross of Santiago, but daubed on boarded-up hovels these succeeded only in casting a bring-out-your-dead contagion on the more conspicuously abandoned hamlets.
    This was perhaps the most impoverished area we'd yet traversed, and it was ever thus. The ground floors of most of the older farmhouses were illuminated feebly by slitted openings in the stonework — not, as I'd first thought, for shooting arrows through but keeping burglars out. Even the little corn cribs outside every farm, so like oriental shrines with their stilts and narrow pitched roofs, were treble padlocked.
    Yet this was already becoming one of my favourite days. I'd long since given up trying to walk behind Shinto, like a true drover, and so was astounded when I went back to retrieve a wet sock that had snagged in a pathside vegetative tangle and saw that for once he hadn't stopped to wait. I retrieved the rope and held my station at his rump; he ambled forth. After more than a month of palm-flaying yanks and hauls, this was very heaven, this donk-cam view of bucolic vitality, the Thomas Hardy meadows bordered with dry-stone walls and foxgloves, the sturdy trees bursting into the flawless sky like mushroom clouds. The fat of the land had never been more chubbily larded.
    Another smart local entrepreneur had opened up a little bar just past the 100-kilometres-to-go post — its digits almost illegible beneath marker-penned autographs — and there were two separate parties in permanent, rolling progress. One for the arriviste young Spaniards, and the other for the weathered long-haulers, respectively commiserating over their huge outstanding task or toasting each other in mute, rapt disbelief that so little remained. A hundred clicks was the papally authenticated minimum tariff to procure a compostela; from hereon in the camino could seem a parade more than a pilgrimage, with a knock-on effect upon room-at-the-inn ratios.
    Counting down into double figures also had the effect of concentrating my attention on the pressing issue of Shinto's fate: I could be in Santiago in five days. Tragedy in the form of disease, theft or accident had for weeks seemed the likeliest settler of his destiny; in recent days, as our safe arrival became a realistic possibility, I'd been hitherto reluctant to tempt fate via any contemplations that would constitute taking it for granted. Only now that I'd palmed away a solution did I find myself considering the problem in sobering earnest. Throughout my rural peregrinations I had encountered fewer than half a dozen rival donks; the probability of finding Shinto a home in Santiago or indeed anywhere in Spain had never seemed more hopelessly remote.
    On I strode, back-seat droving up gentle hill and down modest dale, viewing a happy world past a chaos of straps and panniers and laundry, that half-baguette sticking out of a plastic bag and neatly bisecting the gap between Shinto's pricked ears. Life at the back end had its downside: now handed executive control for route planning, Shinto displayed an infallible sense for the absurdly wrong-headed. Follow that army of walkers up the straight, broad path ahead or veer purposefully into a foot-wide gap in the hedgerow? Left fork, or right fork, or — hang on — how about between those two tractors, round the corn crib and into that tiny dark barn? For Shinto there was only ever one option. Once he even tried to climb in through the open rear doors of a Transit van.
    If that was a blow to this bold new initiative, then the death knell was struck in a cloud of dust and hoofs as the path narrowed into an oak-shadowed corridor between pastures. A leathery cowman was ululating his herd from field to camino just ahead, and clapping Shinto into a burst of speed I just managed to get past the gate before the lead cow blocked our way. Or so I thought until we meandered round the next dappled bend, and there, spanning the camino broadside on and scrutinising us with clueless intensity, was the true front runner: a bull-horned, tan-hided colossus, half a ton of milk monster.
    Neck bells and the cowman's guttural encouragement were gaining from behind; stuck fast at a cock-eyed twenty to two, Shinto's ears elucidated his mounting concern. I