Travels with my Donkey

of a human. Two evenings before Evelyn had recited the dedication to her family, inscribed on page one of her pilgrim journal, and I'd joined my table mates weeping freely into their flans.
    Time would be the judge of any lasting legacy, whether I'd be one of those who came home inspired to teach Galician, or play the bagpipes, or who embarked upon any of the slightly off-kilter life redefinitions I'd read about in that Californian anthropologist's book. 'In Santiago I said goodbye to engineering,' I remembered a German telling her. 'In the meantime I volunteer at a windmill.' Perhaps it was because of this sort of business that I'd never been able to take a full and active role in the many earnest group prognostications along these lines. I was just happy, more accurately dumbfounded, to have made it here. 'Santiago is just the beginning of the pilgrimage,' I had been severally informed, and I'd nod importantly, thinking, The fuck it is.
    'Eh, Shinto!'
    Those exclamation-mark ears sprang to attention above the tall grass, and I half-stifled a dry gulp. Over the last seven weeks the pair of us had evolved into a single, man-donk entity; I had set off, we had arrived. With those ears at my shoulder we had spread a little happiness along the streets of five cities, and, more thinly, across the epic plains and peaks that separated them. If I had a euro for every photograph, and even just a Santiago-backed cent for every smile elicited from brown-eyed, gap-toothed bairn to red-eyed, gold-toothed barfly, the 800 euros I'd paid Hanno would have been recouped long ago. Give me another couple of months with Shinto and I might even have clawed back the additional 1,000 I'd just handed over. They say you can't put a price on happiness, but perhaps I now had.
    If I had started off on my pilgrimage sharing many of Shinto's more negative traits, most notably stubbornness and sloth, then now, at its end, I had discovered and become imbued with his redeeming qualities: sociability, hardiness, and a schlong down to my knees. Defying his breed's definitive quality, Shinto had learnt something too: he'd lost that fear of water, or at least puddles, and expanded his epicurean horizons to include clover, plantain and certain varieties of giant dandelion. The animal I had once dismissed as a sub-standard jackass, a donkey reject, now stood proudly atop the burrocracy, the paragon of his breed. Hearing of his achievements, Shinto's fellow jacks would shake their long heads in mute awe; the most radiant jennies of his age would be biting their saggy lips bloody at mere mention of his name. And if to love a donkey was a crime, then yes — I too was guilty. It is? Well, maybe in some countries.
    He could see us now, and as we approached the circumference of his night rope Shinto gambolled eagerly forth through the flattened grass. Then, angling his head curiously at a distantly familiar face, then at mine, then back again, he stopped. He made a little dart towards Hanno, checked his stride, then trotted purposefully up to meet me. A journey of perhaps 3 yards, yet I was emotionally unravelled before its end.
    I led Shinto back up the hill, Hanno nodding silently at my side, then together, with something approaching grace, we eased him into that old horse trailer. 'There you go, Shints,' I said, or rather tried to. A final farewell, a slammed door, the roar of an ancient engine. My shaggy-donk story had reached its punchline.
    I watched the trailer bounce softly away down the hill, those ears swivelling about above its side walls. The brake lights distantly winked, a right-hand indicator flashed; after all those westward weeks, it was back to the east. Then I put one foot in front of the other, and again, and again, still with my hands behind my back, still with my body slightly bent forward, urging on 200 kilos of warm reluctance that was no longer there.