Travels with my Donkey

had left, and those that hadn't were about to, cramming belongings into backpacks. This was no furtive, apologetic rustling; on the sack-stuffing scale of reckless intensity here were elves up against the clock on Christmas Eve. I held my watch up to my face, and as its digits loomed into focus understood that I would be spending the weeks ahead in the company of a great many truly appalling bastards. It was ten to six.
    I glowered out into the after-dawn, dragging half-packed panniers behind me, and tramped round to the field, still very sorry to be awake and with my big toes belatedly registering blisters. Shinto saw me before I saw him, and issued the first proper noise I'd heard him make: a stunted, preliminary little honk, more bleat than bray. He did it again as I walked up to him, and this close I was able to rule out the emotion behind the noise as one of welcome or friendship. This was the sound of neat despair. He turned those coin-slot pupils towards me and for once his expression spoke. Cockholes, it said. Not you again.
    Still, my knot had held fast overnight, the sky was blue and today I'd have back-up. Petronella had been one of the last to wake, and seeing fresh tears well up in her eyes as she contemplated her rucksack I proposed a bargain of mutual benefit: Shinto lugs your stuff, and you help load him up and chase him down and... just kind of make me less scared of this colossal being.
    Her weeping habit made this a gamble, I accept, but it paid off immediately. With me leading Shinto from the front and Petronella at his rear, progress was arrestingly rapid. She had a pair of metal-tipped walking poles, and every time they tapped or scraped the path Shinto's ears would flick back and off he'd go in a slightly unsettled jog that ate up those first kilometres. Everyone else had long gone by the time we turned away from monastery and mountains and entered a long grove carpeted by the ronces — brambles — that I've just realised gave the monastery its name, but soon we were reeling the blister-hobbled stragglers in.
    We never caught them, though, because at Burguete, the first village, the camino turned between two houses, rounded a barn and headed merrily across a lazily broad river by means of the Golden Gate of all slatted bridges. Ernest Hemingway had often fished in this river, and if he'd been here, and Petronella had been a man, and so had I, we might have bullied Shinto across. As it was, after a brief but intense pull-me-pull-you session I cut our losses and with surprising equanimity — was the pilgrimage lengthening my fuse already? — led him back to the road. And in fact St Jim was riding shotgun with us, pulling the N135 taut into a corner-cutting short cut, then propelling Shinto up it with a blast of Navarrese wind that flipped that washing-up bowl over his saddle and consequently sparked off another blind panic. I was rather pleased at how I managed to marshal this into a semi-controlled gallop, but when after a breathless half-kilometre I looked behind, there was Petronella trotting laboriously along with her cheeks moistened once more by tears, this time of unbridled merriment.
    The pilgrims thus overhauled started catching us up after the camino crossed back over our road at the next town. In common with many settlements along the route, Aurizberri had been founded purely to cater for pilgrims, or in fact in this particular case to offer them refuge from muggers who plagued the Pyrenean foothills. Nearly 800 years on, it was still defined by the camino: iron scallop shells set into railings, terracotta ones on pots, stained-glass ones in the church window.
    In the white heat of a brazen sun we set off across the alpine pastures: despite that descent to Roncesvalles it was still over 2,500 feet. A herd of shaggy-footed horses clumped down a hill to challenge Shinto to an over-the-fence stare-out, and won. My nascent blister began to throb. The pilgrims we'd outflanked were now streaming past in twos and threes: lipsticked Frenchwomen mincing along in suede trainers, a trio of hearty German lasses, a tiny bald Englishman dwarfed by his backpack and his wife. All greeted us with an already familiar roster of donkey questions — what does he eat? Where does he sleep? What are you going to do with him in Santiago? — before passing on up the sun-dried ruts with a wave and a 'buen camino'.
    'What are you going to do with him in Santiago?' Petronella asked, and I reprised an