Travels with my Donkey

did I'd enlist them to bundle this infuriating animal forcibly across, just as we'd done to get him into the horse trailer. But — and I still don't understand how this happened — they didn't come. Nobody came. At the back of my mind, behind the mighty massed ranks of fury and frustration, piped a tiny voice of forsaken timidity: I began to understand this dark valley's popularity with pilgrim-mugging brigands throughout the camino's medieval pomp.
    For nearly an hour I sat there, on a rock already warmed by foliage-filtered sun. Shinto raised his tail and extruded a large bunch of khaki briquettes; after twenty minutes they had hardened brown. Wondering if this was better than watching paint dry, I began to twitch and giggle like Inspector Clouseau's boss, then on some mystery impulse whipped out the Dictaphone, rewound it to the relevant section and held it up behind Shinto's ears. With the loudness turned up to max I hit 'play', and at surprising volume Hanno's 'Eeeeeuuuwwww' rang out. Shinto's ears sprang back and his front legs tonked loudly on to the first plank; if I'd expected this procedure to work, rather than merely unsettle him for purposes of vindictive entertainment, I might have been able to press home the advantage with a well-placed shoulder charge. But I didn't, and in half a second he'd not only whipped his hoofs off the bridge but retreated 20 yards back down the valley path. Even as I rewound for a repeat I knew I'd missed my chance. And then, looking back to the bridge, I noticed that not much further upstream lay another: if I did somehow get him over the first, we might easily end up marooned between the two. Stranded until a helicopter lowered a cargo net down through the tree-tops.
    I walked back towards the village, hissing abuse at Shinto and trying not to acknowledge the starkly awful implications of what had just happened. At least here I had the option of returning to the main road and following its bridgeless progress to Roncesvalles, but there would be times when there would be no such option, when the camino ploughed its lonely furrow up hill and down dale and over the bodies of water that generally divided the two. When I went past the old man with the big beret again, he returned my paper-thin smile with a look of lugubrious empathy. Donkeys — can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em. Except that I can, and in fact had for thirty-eight carefree years.
    Out of the trees and back on the road it was hot, and we weren't doing 4 kilometres per hour any more. Tim and Shinto's Excellent Adventure had just become their Bogus Journey. For solace I could only remind myself that 20 per cent of the pilgrims who set out from St Jean never make it to Santiago, and that it was better to fuck up in the first mile than the last. A peloton of local club cyclists swished past with a volley of spirited hee-haws. More pilgrim pedallers — Dutch, German, American: 'Wow, you going to Santiago with that?.' A French car passed and pulled over up the road; the elderly husband got out to pee into the pine trees and was still doing so as his wife questioned me through her open window. Where had I bought him, how much had he cost, what did he eat, who would take him off my hands at Santiago, why was I doing this? I answered the first three to the best of my abilities and shrugged over the remainder. 'Eh, mon brave,' said her husband, slapping Shinto's nearside haunch with an assured familiarity I could only dream of affecting. 'Voilà.' He leant in through the window and emerged with the knob end of a stout baguette. As Shinto snaffled it up from his open palm I wondered if I should have asked him to wash his hands.
    Yellow arrows leading off to the left indicated further opportunities to rejoin the camino proper, but the sound of rushing water below meant I was never tempted. Instead, as the road headed sinuously heavenward, I stayed on the hot tarmac, gradually slotting events into perspective. It was our first day: if I was nervous, so was he. Ten hours in a horse trailer was hardly ideal preparation. And in a way, it was quite sweet — we'd had our first argument. After all, I'm... oh Jesus oh no oh buttocking tit-ends I'm being pulled at immense speed into the middle of the road and onwards and upwards and now he's rearing up like a bronco and the rope is burning through my hands and there's luggage all over the asphalt and thank fuck nothing's coming or we'd both now be dead and I've got him