Travels with my Donkey

drag lay the refugio, a Romanian youth hostel of a construction, with concrete cancer and a forecourt waist-high
    in weeds where dozens of pilgrims were already hanging up their washed socks. Here I left a rather broiled Petronella, before leading Shinto off in search of a friendly field, a search that within minutes — all right, seventy-five minutes — had a man called Roberto shouting down at me from a second-floor balcony.
    Maybe it was all that stuff I'd just read about Zubiri's proud tradition of pilgrim-directed robbery with violence, but I didn't feel entirely happy as Roberto, a small man with the obligatory cig in his teeth, beckoned Shinto and me into a nettled enclosure round the back of a low-rise block. Roberto himself seemed a decent sort, at least until he offered to mind my bags for 10 euros, but what of his unseen neighbours? Or indeed of any itinerant Romany horse thieves of the type Hanno had warned me about? The refugio lay at least half a kilometre distant, as I came to appreciate whilst dragging and pushing and shouldering any conceivably thievable luggage (including the saddle, which some German pilgrim had told me was worth more than the donkey) back up the road under a sun that seemed to have forgotten it was gone seven.
    This was a two-stage process, though it wasn't until the end of the sweaty, stumbling second that I wondered why I hadn't thought to unload Shinto outside the refugio, or indeed to enquire whether he could have been accommodated in that weeded forecourt. But in a way it didn't matter, because — as I gathered from the apologetic faces of the pilgrims who looked up from their blisters as I passed them on the porch steps — there was no longer a bed for me. The scrawled note stuck through the rusted door bars had the same effect on me as a slatted bridge on Shinto. 'Completo' it read. Like him I tried to make it disappear by staring at it, and when this didn't work, like him I backed away in blank horror.
    Rather more interestingly than it may have seemed at the time, finding a single room for a man proved a greater challenge than finding a single field for a donkey. Walking with Shinto, and vocabbed up by my pocket dictionary, I merely had to approach someone and with an appropriately searching expression say, 'Campo!' (field). Somehow 'Cama!' (bed) lacked that unequivocal appeal — particularly, I have to say, amongst Zubiri's female population. By the time I found myself a room in a glorified motel, I didn't care that it cost 49 euros. But after I'd finished relocating my belongings, and returned to pick out Shinto's feet, I did care that it was right down the other end of town.
    I'd seen my first Spanish cloud just before sunset, and the dripping swish of passing vehicles that dawn brought indicated it now had company. I parted the net curtains with a face like Captain Scott peering at a blizzard-blurred Norwegian flag: the moss-clotted surface of the motel pool was alive with brutal rain. It was good that I'd been able to do my laundry in an ensuite bathroom, but it was bad that I'd draped it on my window sill to dry. I thought of my fellow pilgrims, so trim and neat when they'd set off the morning before. And then I thought of Shinto.
    He'd bleated wanly when I'd left him for the last time, and my sleep had once more been punctuated by associated anxiety dreams: donkeys bolting across a busy dual carriageway, or being taunted by youths on mopeds, or just running, running, running, with me in forlorn pursuit. Most memorable — so much so that I had it again the night after — was the one where a dicky-bowed waiter staggered into the dining room of some crusty old hotel and dropped untidily to his knees at the table I was sharing with Hanno, Marie-Christine and — yes — Anjelica Huston. 'You!' he rasped, pointing shakily at me with one hand and with the other tearing open his starched shirt to reveal a torso angrily imprinted with hoof-shaped lesions.
    The bar where I'd ingested a rewardingly calorific dinner was now exclusively populated by soldiers; indeed, as I noted carrying my croissant back to the table, the entire building was surrounded by them. There were two right outside the window, sheltered by the canopy, toting enormous automatic weapons with an air of hair-trigger intent. 'Gotta watch their backs,' muttered the stocky young chap as he laid down my coffee. He'd served me the previous night: his father was from the Bronx, and after spending the