Travels with my Donkey

by means of a slatted bridge. I suppose the hour-long detour was the least I deserved.
    The approach to sizeable Spanish towns, I was learning, tended to incorporate a muddy yomp across some half-finished commuter suburb of ambitious proportion, and Estella proved no exception. Villatuerta, 4 clicks to the west, seemed largely composed of a houseless grid of roads neatly decorated with give-way lines and zebra crossings, like one of those children's playmats. My 2003 Confraternity guide had been covetously admired for its updated reliability, but even it had nothing to say about the albergue I came across while perusing a rare street of completed buildings. A portly señora was reading at a desk inside: she looked both surprised and delighted at my appearance before her, even when it was swiftly and dramatically trumped by that of Shinto. He always followed me indoors at the end of the day, or tried to, and in suitable circumstances this habit could be endearing. It shouldn't have been here, in a reception area that appeared to have been decorated and furnished in the previous two hours, but somehow it was.
    'Eh, burro!' she cried, rising to her feet with a clap of hands and encouraging Shinto through another door, into a dark and unfinished utility room and thence via the sliding French windows into a yard. In being both tiny and grassless this seemed unlikely to impress Shinto, so it was a surprise to see him half-stifle a whinny of joy and roll delightedly in the clay, particularly as I had yet to remove his luggage.
    The dormitory was a small upstairs room crammed with unoccupied pine bunks; the bathroom next door had a marble floor. I deposited my misshapen, clay-clotted bags and set off to find a supermercado : with nothing for Shinto to graze on, it would have to be muesli.
    In fact it wouldn't, because when at length I found the supermercado it was closed. The people of Villatuerta, all three of them, tried their best to suggest alternatives: the lady in the chemist's memorably insisted that the answer was a hefty barrel of baby-milk powder. I laughed, but I'd have taken it had she been a little more flexible on price. Fifteen quid for a donk's dinner? Hee-haw.
    There was nothing to do but walk on into Estella, an 8-kilometre round trip. It was 5ish. I should have minded this more, but Shinto had done well that day and for once I was determined to see him right. A dramatic darkening of the sky diluted this determination rather, and I can't pretend I wasn't glad to find myself before an industrially proportioned bakery less than a click up the road. Wheat, rye, barley: it would be a multi-grain banquet for Shints tonight.
    Drivers and foremen were in the yard doing what you do at a bakery — milling about. I went up to the one with the least stubble, but opening my mouth I realised I had no idea what to ask for, and that I'd left the pocket dictionary back at the albergue. Instead, after a 'por favor' and a girding cough, I mimed. With upstretched hands sprouting from the top of my head, and a two-tone bray from the back of my throat, I was the unsated ass; when this elicited a small nod of wary comprehension I launched into the life cycle of his comestible quarry, as a barley seedling gleefully piercing the bakery-yard tarmac. The performance had already attracted a semicircle of boiler-suited colleagues, and during my free-spirited interpretation of the threshing process some took a half-step forward in concern; others a full step back in alarm. Breathlessly I scooped together an imaginary mound of grain, before reprising my donkey cameo to effect its histrionic consumption.
    Hands on hips and blowing hard, I looked in happy expectation from face to frozen face. 'Come on, boys,' I said. 'Corn me up.' A car sped past with a toot; without turning towards it two or three bakers held up a hand in wordless reciprocation. Then one of them broke rank and placed a gentle hand on my back. 'Peregrino?' he enquired, softly. 'Si,' I replied, making a mental note to inaugurate all future discourse with this vital door-opener. 'Peregrino con burro.'
    Slowly he led me towards one of the vans parked in a rank behind us. I watched him crank its back doors ajar and vault in, then rustle out a brown paper bag the size of a mail sack which he motioned me to hold open. I did so and he crouched off to the van's dim depths, emerging with half a dozen stale baguettes. These he dumped in the bag, returning with another load, and