Travels with my Donkey

a solitary jackass browsed Mañuel's yard. 'We've got to make him an offer on that one pronto,' I told John.
    'Absolutely right.'
    Twelve hours later John phoned me back. 'He's just sold it to a shepherd.'
    A day of silence was followed by an email of blurted selfcastigation, in which Mañuel confessed that his rental business was no longer an active one; that indeed it was now — put the chisel down, Mr Moore — two years since last a bray had been heard in his grounds. 'People who rented his donkeys couldn't cope,' elaborated John that evening as I held the receiver to my limp and sallow features, 'especially when it rained a lot. They just abandoned them by the road.'
    I can't say this was a happy time. Mañuel's customers had been Spanish, and so by definition more culturally at ease with donkeys: so at ease that when they weren't weaving toy examples together out of raffia to flog to unsophisticated foreigners, they were lugging real ones up the church tower and heaving them off as a fiesta ice-breaker.
    As we rumbled and roared through damp villages, I waited for Hanno to explain in his proficient English why I had nothing to fear. Instead I learnt that people would think I was a gitano, or gypsy, and would consequently drive the donkey off their land, to be met by real gitanos, or gypsies, who would steal it. I learnt how I'd need to treat the animal for ticks every three weeks, and then in dramatic terms how to effect this by jabbing a stout hypodermic through its breast — an enactment that required him to remove both hands from the steering-wheel whilst overtaking a tractor.
    'You are strong?'
    Hanno glanced at my T-shirt and what it contained, saving us both the discomfort of a verbal reply. 'But you will be. You must be. In the first days the donkay must understand that you are the boss. You will be... physical to him.'
    Walking a donkey on asphalt, as following the camino would regularly require me to, dangerously eroded its hoofs; better to take a compass and just head off cross-country, snipping barbed fences with wire-cutters. I should also be wary of crypto-fascists, two-faced priests and snakes. 'Be very careful, huh?' he warned at the end of almost every sentence, rather superfluously for what had now been upgraded from a culturo-spiritual voyage of discovery to a fatally ill-equipped commando raid by the Sergeant Bilko's cavalry.
    Tarmac turned to mud and we bumped up, across and then down a mist-wreathed hillside. The sudden violence of our progress seemed to dislodge a rogue nugget of inner defiance: what did he know, anyway? Panoramane, Hanno's one-man ass-for-hire operation, rented donkeys for cosy three- and four-day hikes around the foothills of the French Pyrenees. Longdistance travel was not his business, and nor was anything Spanish. By his own admission he'd never even sold a donkey before.
    Despite this stage of the journey causing his considerable head to impact repeatedly against the cab roof, the proximity of home seemed to mellow Hanno. 'But what you are doing, it's a... a very strong experience.' He kissed the bunched fingertips of his right hand. 'You will find again the, ah, ancient rhythms of life, a nomade with another nomade at your side.' We rumbled down a muddy hairpin and up to a wooden house in the latter stages of construction; he killed the engine. 'Possessions will have no meaning,' continued Hanno, his glassy gaze on the bedrizzled valley below, perhaps willing me to imagine no religion.
    'Voilà.' An asinine honk blared out, and there, trotting down through the tussocked greenery, were a dozen damp donks. Big donks: wildly shaggy, almost bison-like in their brunette sturdiness. Feeling like a motorist whose car has broken down in a safari park, I managed a mechanical wave.
    'Which one is mine?' I asked, unable to keep a quaver out of my voice.
    Hanno scanned the long, dark faces. 'He's not here at this moment. Sometimes you find him, ah...' Bleeding? Foaming? Sinking? Hanging? '... Hiding.'
    'So, um, how do you know?' I enquired as Hanno climbed into the back to pass me the bags out under the gormless scrutiny of his herd, mercifully coralled behind an electric fence.
    'Hmm?'
    'About, you know, the experience. And its strength.'
    Boldly oblivious to the constraints of his surroundings, Hanno depicted incredulity with the very Frenchest of all body gestures. 'But I have done it!'
    All we'd established in the first of our two brief calls was that he had a spare