Travels with my Donkey

that.'
    'My donkays are all, ah, cut, but they still enjoy to cover the ladies. Eh! Here is your one.'
    And so I first beheld my ass. Blinking into Hanno's torch beam he shuffled up through the trees, then idled circumspectly in the background as his fieldmates jostled and stamped and nuzzled steam at my throat. As they were dark so he was mousy,- as they were loudly tousled so he was neat and petite. Tiny and tawny. Low-key, reticent: My Little Donkey amongst the rodeo rowdies, Charlie Watts at the back of a stage full of posturing Jaggers.
    'Eh, Shinto!'
    I'd been thinking about a name for two weeks,- on the plane the choices had been distilled to a toss-up between Doug and Judas. But now it was Shinto, and as he perked up his browny-grey ears at its bellowed enunciation, I knew that however inappropriate it seemed to travel a hallowed Catholic trail with a beast named after a polytheistic Oriental religion, I couldn't change it.
    Shinto looked me in the eyes, blinked once more, then sauntered off into the night. 'He is the most intelligent of all my donkays, and the least nervous.' An appealing claim, whose relative nature did not at this stage occur to me.
    The caravan was pertinently monastic — clean but spartan. Before he left Hanno shone his beam at its plumbed facilities, a few yards downhill in a log cabin of his own design and construction, solar-heated shower and all. (Though as I'd later discover to my nocturnal disadvantage, he'd cut a few corners on the toilet: a plastic dustbin and an adjacent bag of sawdust, a bran tub I'd be stocking with mystery prizes for two days.) The donkeys parted for him, and now I was alone. Alone in a caravan cornered by donkey shit and high voltage, yet if the accounts I'd read of the pilgrim refugios were to be believed, this was as good as it would get for the next 774 kilometres.
     
    I listened to the tape I'd made at dinner as mountain rain shot-blasted the thin roof. Even amidst the racket I could detect in Hanno's tone a slight incredulity — he evidently hadn't believed I was quite as useless as I'd insisted I was. 'You don't know the different type of straw, not at all?' 'The chair or bowline knot you can do, of course. No? Really, no?'
    The tape clicked off, and as I yanked the paisley curtains together a herd of rustling shadows swished into the trees. Now was not the moment to recall Hanno's tale of the time he'd borrowed a lady donk, a jenny, for breeding purposes: his boys had all had her up against the caravan, and in the process knocked it over. As I pondered this, a mighty, awful bray banged off down the valleys — no more apocalyptic by day than the hearty priming of an ancient hand pump, that night, alone in the caravan, it was the rusted gates of hell being effortfully forced ajar.
    Throughout the long hours of darkness I was unsettled visibly — and on one unhappy occasion audibly — by extraneous asinine activity. As dawn fingered in round the curtains I felt like rushing down to the house and shaking Hanno by his huge shoulders: It's all right for you, mate, you build solar showers and train your own donkeys and... and... and I just can't do this. Because I didn't even have to. You didn't need a donkey to take a Southwest Airlines baggage allowance across Spain. Nineteen kilos on the nose — dump a couple of books, and whatever I'd said before, I could shoulder that. Or I could... get on the next plane back to London.
    At breakfast the phone ruptured a sombre silence. Marie-Christine handed me the receiver: it was Birna, reporting in fretful distress that the children's scalps were alive with lice, and that the plumber had just found a rat behind the boiler. Someone didn't want me to give up and go home. Our Mister was already working in mysterious ways.
    I followed Hanno out into the paddock, and looking around began to feel better. The rain had gone and under a big blue sky I saw what the Pyrenees had that Belgium didn't. Densely medieval forests pitched and rolled, surrendering at distant length to fearsome snow-veined peaks: here were the Himalayan foothills transplanted to Somerset on a perfect morning in the butterfly season. Walking from Italy or central France, a medieval pilgrim would typically bank on getting to Santiago and back in four months; those setting out from Britain or the more distant central European lands might allow a year, overwintering in Spain before heading home. Either way, spring was the time to set out if you