Travels with my Donkey

mohican of a mane seemed almost lacquered in its upright brilliance. The baggage — red panniers, purple waterproof duffel bags, turquoise tent-bag — lent a vibrant contemporary edge to this warmly nostalgic scene.
    An Italian motor home passed with a cheery if alarming toot; Shinto held his ground benignly. And I saw my first pilgrims: three male cyclists, all in late middle years, each sporting a pannier-mounted scallop shell so large and prominent that it might have been crowbarred off the sign outside a red-and-yellow petrol station. The first two waved as they overtook, and the third pedalled by with a gutturally North European cry of 'buen camino'. We are family, I thought, then sang. I got all my pilgrims with me.
    My guidebooks had told me the camino branched off the road after 4 kilometres, and I reached the junction in just under an hour: a speed in generous excess of all professional predictions. How was this happening? If I walked through the nights I could be at Santiago in a week. Perhaps with Hanno out of the picture Shinto was a different beast: less jumpy, more consistent. Perhaps the spiritual adrenalin exuded by pilgrims past was seeping up through his hoofs. Perhaps — a theory that gained weight and credence the more I contemplated it — I was just generally very good.
    The path was more authentic than the road. It followed a chuckling brook and meandered through an ancient village, where I tilted my triumphant countenance in greeting at a gold-toothed old man wearing a beret the size of a bin lid. At this settlement's conclusion stood a barn with a yellow arrow daubed on its side, pointing right. I wheeled Shinto as directed, and heading into the densely wooded valley felt myself being forged as the newest link in that 1,000-year pilgrim chain.
    If I haven't mentioned Shinto's slight hesitation at a drain cover just outside that village, it's because it didn't seem important at the time. In fact I only appreciated its significance, through a brain clotted with ugly, red ganglions of pure rage, when I passed back over it. Three hours later.
    There was a bridge, see. Was it a large bridge? Well, no, it wasn't. This was a little wee feller, six foot of slats spanning that same humble brook. When Shinto stopped with his front feet two inches from the first slat, I imagined he wanted to crap or pee or eat or something. Nothing about this bridge warranted distress, and nothing about his manner expressed it; that long face and those unblinking eyes with their coinslot pupils remained purged of detectable emotion. For perhaps five minutes I waited for him to fulfil any of the aforementioned physical needs, and for five minutes he stood in mute, empty-headed inactivity.
    Things happened rather quickly after that, but there were a lot of these things, and once they all added up I'd been there for almost an hour and a half. I got hold of the rope, advanced to the middle of the bridge and clucked and beckoned. I laid a trail of succulent grasses across the bridge. Hypothesising — correctly but belatedly — that its slatted surface, distantly evocative of a cattle grid, might be to blame, I laid my beach mat and anorak over it. I walked Shinto round in a figure of eight and returned. I gave him a tentative little shove in the back, then a matching tug from the front. To demonstrate its stout resilience I danced upon the bridge, with grace, with purpose, and finally with visceral, plank-stamping abandon, accompanying myself with throat-shredding hoedown shrieks that filled the gorge and bounced away off its wet slate battlements. Moulding that sound into a football-terrace remix of Hanno's galvanising croon I barged repeatedly at Shinto's rear, then staggered to the front and heaved and hauled on the rope until my palms screamed and I was almost horizontal.
    My legs gave out before my lungs, and for some time I slumped against the bridge's wooden rail rasping terribleness at the tree-shaded heavens, compound epithets that last made sense in a West London playground during the mid-1970s. It would have helped, somehow, if Shitto here — don't say you didn't see that coming — had in any way or at any point resembled a beast confronting his most elemental terror, rather than, say, being shown a photograph of a bus shelter. The animal before me was not an obvious object for sympathy.
    Finally, slick of face and dry of mouth, I sat down on the bridge to wait. Pilgrims would come, I decided, and when they