Travels with my Donkey

of a hill start effected in third gear. We toiled up through an empty village, and onwards to an open escarpment girdled majestically by muscular peaks. It was hot. Hanno threw his leather jacket over Shinto's saddle and sparked up a Marlboro. 'There is Spain, there,' he said, jabbing its lit end at the southern horizon. And then we headed back down.
    Shinto quickly took stock of this new approach to gradient, and used it to develop momentum. For perhaps five of my steps and ten of his we were in the zone, striding purposefully as one. Then the footpath steepened and in moments he was hurtling crazily down its sun-dappled hairpins; I grabbed the rope in both hands and was pulled helplessly along like a novice waterskier. Hanno's jacket flew from saddle to nettles, but before stopping to retrieve it he distantly crooned out a noise that sounded like his 'Eeeeeuuuwwww' played backwards. Shinto slammed on the anchors and I slid groin first into his rump.
    'When you go up,' panted Hanno as he rejoined us, 'you stand behind with your baton. But when you go down, you must be ahead, and hold the baton in front of his eyes. As a brake?' He snapped a leafy switch from an adjacent birch and handed it to me, not unfriendly but with determination. Nodding wordlessly, I wiped the back of a wrist against my humid brow. Getting Shinto to move had appeared to be the significant problem; now I understood the more fundamental disadvantages of not getting him to stop. If he decided to go, he was gone: unless I mastered that noise or got hold of a stun gun, there was nothing to be done. Shinto stood there, motionless and four-square, like an eighteenth-century livestock portrait. Shakily I raised the branch to his face. He gazed through its resident foliage for a moment, then with a sudden snatch of the jaw broke the stick off about three inches from my fingers and settled into its protracted consumption.
    'You have too much fatalisme ,' said Hanno as he led Shinto up the rutted drive to his German friend Mikkael's house. I said nothing. The almost constant reiteration of my ignorance and incompetence was coagulating doubt into a clot of raw fear, a mass that having filled my stomach was now pressing painfully into the diaphragm. I tried telling myself that this was precisely the sort of feeble unmanliness I'd come to confront, but then if Hanno's assessment of my character really was accurate — which of course it was — then why be a pilgrim? Just as fatalism dictates that nothing a man does can alter his destiny, so a pilgrimage was predicated on the precise opposite. The options for the weeks and months ahead were hardening: philosophical overhaul of the starkest profundity, or stupid, craven, self-fulfilling shambles.
    Mikkael was a retired professor with two donkeys and a cottage he rented out in the summer. During our brief stay Shinto damaged all three. As we ate salami and yoghurt on an overwhelmingly panoramic terrace, Shinto contrived a confrontation with his new equine associates that had them all flailing about in a limb-knotted cartoon brawl. Chastised, and with a red-crescent bite on his neck, he then trotted up to the immaculate gardens fronting Mikkael's cottage and lowered his big snout purposefully into a flower-bed.
    We could see his jaw working, and I was the nearest. 'Tim, maybe you, ah...' said Hanno. And so I, ah, did, quickly finding myself in a ridiculous Mexican stand-off, meeting a gaze that if not quite withering, was unsettlingly implacable. Eating flowers might be fun, but how much more fun to stare out this silly new man. I looked hard into those eyes, round and shiny as freshly shelled conkers, and beheld the very essence of dumb insolence. Then Hanno appeared at my shoulder and he trotted smartly to heel.
    Marie-Christine contemplated our belated return from their stilt-propped veranda. I saw her whilst urging a static Shinto towards his field with a nervously jabbed forefinger in the haunch, like an anxious toddler trying to rouse a foully hungover stepfather. So it was that she too came to see me for the feckless nance I so surely was.
    'But I'm too English to abuse an animal,' I said in a haughty whine as Marie-Christine poured me out some sort of infusion.
    'Maybe you think it is not love, but your relationship will be better if you are strong and take no bullshit,' she replied in mild exasperation. 'Just imagine how it is sometimes with dogs.'
    But I have never owned a dog. 'I could tell you how