Travels with my Donkey

Shinto from his Massey Ferguson and led him through the big doors and over the road to a tree conveniently circled by green straggle.
    Poor Shints didn't get much of a meal: with the 10 p.m. curfew looming, very much against the powerful will of his stomach, I had to haul him back inside before creeping upstairs past the shrine, through the snuffling tuts and into my room.
    I sat on the bed, initiating a complex and enduring chorus of haunted creaks, and wondered how I felt. My runaway-donkey rope burns were now crudely but effectively calloused, as it seemed were the little-toe blisters. No real surprise there: owing to an accident of birth I would previously have been reluctant to describe as a happy one, my feet are undersealed in a thick layer of friction-resistant tarpaulin. Oh, and I had scabies. Or at least such was the diagnosis until that raw and hairless ovoid on my right upper thigh was traced to the abrasive action of camera in trouser pocket, chafing away with every stride.
    But what of the spiritual healing, the personal growth, the evolution of my inner Tim? Whenever pilgrims huddled into reverential discussion of how the Way of St James was inveigling itself into their characters, their personalities, I'd felt left out, guilty almost. I was still just me, only with a donkey. 'You must allow a new person to emerge from within,' one of the Brazilians had announced to the bar at large. Because he then identified these as the words of his countryman Paulo Coelho, whose effortfully esoteric novel The Pilgrimage marks him out as a serious rival to Shirley MacLaine as the camino's guffmeister general, I'd dismissed this soulful homily forthwith. 'I had become a tree,' confesses Paulo, quite early on.) But now I reconsidered, and looking down I saw with something approaching horror that Paulo was right. A new person had indeed emerged from within. But I'd have to suck him back inside straight away, because he was wearing socks under his sandals.
     

Seven

     
     
    W alking up to 40 kilometres a day, the medieval pilgrims were logistically obliged to get on the road in darkness, but it would be some time before I was able to understand or forgive the pre-dawn stamps, hawks and — yes — whistles of their modern descendants. Those with recent camping experience will understand that even a closed door and earplugs are no match for the decibels generated whilst bullying a 900-tog sleeping bag into its tiny nylon carry-sock. It was like putting a condom on a donkey. I imagine.
    I should have predicted that Shinto might be a little fractious after his foodless night, but being blearily off guard I didn't, and as I let him out for a morning graze he bit me. Only a nip on the forearm, perhaps, but probably enough to warrant that reflex yelp of abuse, if not its volume. There were two small girls by the tree I'd tied Shinto to the night before, but instead of running off to look up 'vicious', 'little' or 'sod' in an English/Spanish dictionary, they gambolled over to pet him. Smiling indulgently, I contrasted their easy familiarity with the freak-show hysteria Shinto had roused in Pamplona — much as it pained me to realise, just a fifteen-minute drive away. He's back amongst his own, I thought as I went back up to stuff wet pants into wet bags. A city was no place for such a little donk, and I was glad that he wouldn't have to tackle another for 100 kilometres — 100 clicks in Evelyn's initially irksome but soon infectious shorthand. So much gentler to be here, where the grass was green, the camino quiet, and small girls were always on hand to... oh, to jump up on his back and ride him round and round a tree whilst thwacking his loins with big bits of plastic drainpipe. 'Oi!' I shouted out the window, but they didn't stop until a delegation of departing pilgrims chased them off. Later someone saw them throwing a tiny pregnant cat over a wall.
    Shinto didn't seem scarred by the experience, which a Brazilian witness controversially suggested he enjoyed, but something had exacted an underfoot toll and it was probably Windmill Hill. That ingrained, spongy silt on Shinto's back hoof was getting worse, or so I gathered from his diligent attempts to knee me in the bollocks as I tried to scrape the mud off it. Certainly he looked rather sorry, still slathered from the stifle down as if he'd just hauled a gun carriage across no man's land. In possible consequence, a line of sympathetic lady pilgrims formed as I saddled