Travels with my Donkey

wanted to avoid that chilly short cut to paradise on some snowbound Pyrenean peak. Chaucer noted that no month aroused wanderlust more powerfully than April, and though he was talking about an English April, or rather Aprille, contemplating the panorama I saw what he meant.
    At least until that panorama had donkeys in it. Albeit largely in the background, for despite Hanno's beckoning clucks and whistles the bulk of his herd — though happily not Shinto — just gawped blankly at us from a great distance. Here was a man who bred and rented donkeys, who had walked halfway down Europe with donkeys, and still they sometimes ignored him, sometimes slipped his knots and got lost in the night, sometimes bit him. 'They bite? What do you do then?' We were outside the stable now, being jostled by over-familiar quadrupeds.
    'Oh, a bite is not so serious. But if he kick you — then you must attack with your hands.' He thrust out a taut fist; I began to explain that this wasn't quite the pilgrim ethos I'd had in mind. Was that really how Jesus prepared for his Palm Sunday ride into Jerusalem? 'Of course! You cannot train a donkay without pain! When he kick, you hit him with power in the stomach.' With disquieting relish he thus punished an imaginary animal. 'Bof! Always in the stomach. Their pain centre.'
    Shinto? Kung fu more like. I pictured a trio of stubbled apostles — perhaps St James himself among them — pinning down a disobedient jackass while their grim-faced messiah systematically worked him over. I remembered my grim encounter with a full edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's donkey journal: 'I must reach the lake before sundown, and to have even a hope of this must instantly maltreat this uncomplaining animal. The sound of my own blows sickened me.' And I found myself recalling how a friend's father had once had a fight — a proper fists-and-feet brawl — with a pony who'd thrown off one of his daughters. Did it really have to be this way?
    Shinto's associates wandered away and we were left with a rather circumspect grey animal. By the end of a long night I'd become rather good at blotting out the brooding enormity of what lay ahead, and watched in gone-past-caring nonchalance as Hanno lashed the toughened plastic packsaddle to Shinto's back by means of a fiendish cat's cradle of straps and buckles. 'Ah, this strap here to the behind, have it low so he don't caca on it.' He threw me the head collar and watched as I confidently attached it in a new way, a way that pinned Shinto's left ear to his neck. Wordlessly Hanno put this right, and we were off, taking my new donk for a test drove.
    My mentor took the reins, lightly holding the five-foot-long red-and-green leading rope in finger and thumb and positioning himself just behind Shinto. 'Eeeeeuuuwwww,' he groaned, like a one-man football crowd bemoaning a near miss. It wasn't a noise I'd anticipated, but before it was even halfway out of his throat Shinto broke into a brisk trot that had us jogging up the forest path behind him.
    Five minutes on Hanno handed me the rope, along with a pliable length of willow, and trying to gloss over the momentousness I took my place at Shinto's rear. 'Eeeeeuuuwwww,' I said, or tried to. It would be a lie to say Shinto didn't move, because one of his ears swivelled back. 'Eeeeeuuuwwww!' Nothing. Hanno stood in front, looking at me like a driving instructor watching a new student put the ignition key in his own ear and twist. He took a step back towards us, half a step really, and Shinto immediately jolted into motion.
    Hanno never had to say anything twice to Shinto, but with me even that was never enough. Repetition lent his more despairing exhortations the familiarity of a catchphrase. 'It is a problem of autorité,' was one. 'So once more — why a donkay?' was another. 'You are not so convincing' — his favourite — was typically accompanied with a palsied shake of the wrist that paralleled my attempts at physical chastisement to an incredibly old woman trying to coax ink from a reluctant Bic. 'Don't make my donkay too English,' said Hanno after one such episode. '"Oh, please, Mr Shinto,"' he went on, his voice ascending to a prissily camp facsimile of a flustered public schoolboy from the inter-war years, "'Would you care to advance a little faster?"'
    'He's not your donkey now,' I said, letting my willow fall to the soft earth.
     
    At my persistent and desperate behest Shinto eventually moved forward, with the eager brio