Travels with my Donkey

sticking out of their jaws. For the first time I thought: I'll thrash him. I'll snap a branch off that dead olive tree and give the stubborn sod a bloody good hiding.
    Within an hour I was dragging Shinto along with the rope in both hands and over my shoulder, leaning forward, my face a mask of fatigued fury, soured wine-sweat bursting out everywhere. A low hill took gradual shape before me, and if Los Arcos wasn't behind it I feared I might not be responsible for my actions.
    It wasn't. Instead, trailing a plume of dust as it motored unsteadily towards me over the ruts and crevasses, was what gradually assumed the shape of a camper van. 'I think that's a Bedford,' I rasped to myself, to that pilgrim's bootprint, to that thunderstruck tree stump, to anything but that bastard donkey.
    A Bedford it was, an old one, and it pulled up before me with a dusted creak. The door opened; a nut-brown fellow in a yachting cap bounded out. 'I've been looking for you,' he said, and not in a way that implied an afternoon spent grim faced before the monitors at PETA satellite-surveillance headquarters. 'I'm John. Would he like a carrot?'
    It was beyond odd. This wasn't a road; it was two hours since I'd seen even a tractor. 'How...' I began, but John waved his big brown hands about to shut me up. 'I just drive up and down the camino, looking for people in trouble, helping them.' He opened up the side door of his Bedford and emerged a second later with a bottle of cold water. 'Here you go. I was up the top of the Alto del Perdón waiting for you a few days back.'
    'Uh... ?'
    'That wind farm just past Pamplona.'
    I nodded vacantly. 'Yeah... but who...'
    'Waited until four. I heard you went over a little later. Biscuit?'
    Water bottle pressed to my lips I slowly shook my head, but Shinto had crunched down his carrot and had it instead.
    'Now. You're heading for Los Arcos, right?' I cautiously inclined my head. 'OK. It's over the next hill.'
    'How far?' I asked, thinly, handing back the empty bottle with a small belch.
    He ran his tongue along the underside of a grey moustache. 'About 4 kilometres?'
    I'd thought it couldn't be possibly more than 2, and so I'm afraid I said, 'Nunflaps.'
    John didn't care. As a possibly non-existent angelic entity he must surely have heard it all before. 'Right, there's nowhere to graze your donkey in Los Arcos, so you'll need some grain. Does he like barley?'
    'Does a bear shit on the Pope?'
    From a side hatch in his van's red-dusted exterior John procured a large empty fertiliser sack. 'Take this. OK, when you get into Los Arcos there are three large granaries, and if you turn left behind the second... '
    This was already beyond my current powers of recall, but he went on anyway for perhaps another seven minutes. When he'd finished he patted Shinto's cheek, then took one of my hands in both of his. 'It's gone six. You'd better get going.' And he got back in, fired up the reluctant Bedford and with a wheezy toot bucked noisily away towards the unpeopled horizon.
    Nearly two hours later, the pair of us were shambling waywardly down the crippled main drag of Los Arcos, an endless, lopsided parade of grubby whitewash and cracked plaster, big slabs of old wood wedged up against every front door to keep something unwelcome out: dust, mud, rats. It was like the approach to some outsized, downbeat Central American pueblo, which in the circumstances seemed distantly appropriate. I had been across the desert on a horse with no name, or anyway no polite name.
    The albergue was barely identified, just a dark door next to a bakery, and I'm still not quite sure how I found it. The door opened and I stood there swaying in a coma of fatigue, trying to get a blurred face into focus. The face turned to Shinto and fuzzed out a nod. Soon afterwards he was being tied up to an old bread oven in a shed floored with diesel mud. There was a tiny glassless window high up on one side; a dog shoved his snout through it and barked, and barked, and barked. I could still hear him at it as I blankly retraced my steps towards the granaries.
    Improbable as the albergue' s discovery had been, it was naught beside the random and empty-headed meanderings that somehow led me to a concrete hangar fadingly emblazoned with agro-commercialisms. No less startling, at 8 p.m. its big sliding door was still open. I went in; it was dim and cool and huge, and smelt like the underneath of a lawnmower. A young woman with dyed maroon hair approached, her