Travels with my Donkey

slipping about on the inclines and descents. But not for Shinto. A portmanteau word is one that blends the meaning of two words in one, such as brunch. I inadvertently coined one after twenty-five loud, wet minutes at the top of that staircase. This word was 'donkunt'.
    At least the slippery, stairless detour wasn't too far away, and as we gingerly descended I saw unfamiliar pilgrims loping past, heads down, in the rainy distance. These were the vanguard of those ghastly freaks who had left Roncesvalles before dawn: not yet lunch, and I'd been lapped already. I watched dumbfounded as one hopped past on crutches. An authentically pilgrimish sighting, but not one that made me feel any better.
    The farmhouses were few and far between, some unglazed and empty, some window boxed and immaculate. All, though, were splendidly regal structures, with great long balconies and coats of arms above the mighty arches of their oaken doors. It was from one of these that a young female farmer emerged, headscarfed against the elements, with a sack of nitrate under one arm and two loaves of old bread under the other. 'For burro,' she said, revealing a single huge tooth before thrusting these at Shinto's sorry, soggy maw. He grabbed one and worried it into bite-sized pieces on the muddy doorstep. I thanked her, then pointed at the weeping sky, and at my steam-faced watch, and shrugged in enquiry. 'Tres días,' came the reply, accompanied with a dourly girding hand on my ponchoed shoulder. I wished I hadn't asked, or understood.
    Despite the most obvious disincentive, there were far more locals around than the day before. I encountered a further two just up the lane, a couple of chaps in red overalls emptying wheelbarrows of concrete slurry into... oh. Into a huge, camino-spanning hole. The silt-brown brook frothing through either side of this hole suggested a new, solid, donk-friendly bridge in the making, which had I been here twenty-four hours later I'd certainly have been grateful for.
    I knew Shinto looked pathetic, his Neanderthal brow guttering the rain down that great, sad head, mud splashed up to his spindly knees. And I was fairly certain I did too, or if not pathetic then at least poignantly foolish, with those two flapping tarpaulins somehow channelling all the water that fell on my head straight into my boots. The men in red surveyed us through eyes slitted against the elements, and understood; the shorter one hopped up towards a gap in the tangled hedgerow and beckoned me to follow.
    I have to say that Shinto acquitted himself rather well in the moments that followed. Keeping up with our red friend meant charging blindly through a battery of thorned gorse-stuff, and across two big fields of chocolate Ready Brek, but we made it. We made it right up to where he'd stopped, his palm pointing down between two low bushes, a quietly satisfied my-work-here-is-done smile on his wet, brown face. Nodding happily at him I eased Shinto towards the bushes. A yank back on the rope suggested he saw it first: here was the same stream, unbridged, no wider than a fully laden donkey but excited by the downpour into an unstable pocket torrent. My hands tensed around the rope — show no fear, never hesitate. Embracing Hanno's mantra meant marching directly into the water; the first stride was just up to the ankle, but the second regrettably cleared the top of my left boot. By perhaps two feet.
    I felt the rope tense again — no, not here, you silly sod — and then there was a whoop and a shriek and my little man in red, my Super Mario, was charging towards Shinto's rear, wind-milling his arms in an erratic frenzy, like a once-a-season goal scorer.
    Well, it worked. Shinto splashed in, crashed through and dashed out, pulling the few remaining dry parts of my body through the brown rapids and out across the field below. I shouted a wayward 'gracias' over my shoulder and after a brief but messy chase sequence managed to get close enough to Shinto to barge him back through a hedgerow and on to what I hoped was the camino.
    'Ah,' said a low, wry voice, whose Teutonic inflection confirmed this hope. I looked around wildly, not that hard a task when you've just endured the mud, foliage variant of being tarred and feathered, and there's a rope in your cold hands with a steaming, slathered donkey at the end of it. Propped up against a sheltering tree was a tall, gaunt man in his late forties, with a greying skinhead which, teamed to a private