Travels with my Donkey

perhaps twenty minutes, he just watched me. I watched him back for as long as I could bear, then feeling sympathy and restraint evaporate in my bubbling brain I robotically reloaded him. What the Teutonic sink-bollocks was he playing at? Maybe the donks at the Centro Hípico had been getting at him, filling that empty head with filthy asinine propaganda.
    'Every day?' came the shrill bray through the fence. 'He makes you walk every day ? That is precisely the sort of odious fascist exploitation my grandfather went through under Franco.'
    'You're being sacrificed, brother,' whinnied his colleague. 'Sacrificed on the altar of human sloth.'
    And Shinto would blink his big lashes, then turn to the third, sauntering languidly up to the chain link. 'Hey, Frenchie,' he'd begin, in a deep and sugared neigh. 'You wanna stick around here. Man, you ain't lived till you done it with a horse.'
    'Come on.' The crack in my voice gave notice that Shinto was drinking at the last-chance trough. A fearful scenario was forming in my mind — what if he decided that was it, that he simply wouldn't take another step? We both knew there was nothing I could do if he did. He made the rules,- the law was indeed an ass.
    On cue he dug his hoofs in, and when I pulled harder strained his head back and bared those jaundiced tombstones: a hideous whites-of-the-eyes display that I would later dub his El Loco look. In that one moment I understood, in stark and vivid detail, why donkeys have acquired their unfortunate reputation, an impenetrable, illogical inertia that for 2,000 years and more has been propelling decent men to the edge of reason, and then off it.
    'EEEEUUUWWWW!' In one quick but ragged movement I stooped to claw a hand through the path-side scrub: it emerged with a foot-long frond of yellow-budded oilseed rape. My jaw tightened along with my grasp round its stem. I threw down the rope and stamped to Shinto's rear, my boiled red head filled with badness, a terrible determination to do things to a donkey that even Basil Fawlty wouldn't have dared do to an Austin 1300. If he didn't work, there was no point having him. With a small noise that was more fear than protest, Petronella scuttled round to the front and picked up the rope.
    I'm not ashamed to say I brought that bouquet down upon him. What am I saying? I'm horribly, cravenly ashamed. Out there under an angry sun, punishing the doe-eyed pride of many an infant bestiary in a rush of ugly, primal exhilaration: it wasn't really a postcard moment. Up front Petronella went very quiet, head down at the hot earth. All it needs for evil to triumph, she was no doubt reminding herself, is for good people to do nothing.
    And it didn't even work. The frail buds and tendrils thwicked against Shinto and sent the relevant haunch into a reflex flinch; the first time this was followed by half a dozen trots, but the second time it wasn't. Hanno's three-day authority deadline had long since expired: I'd spared the rod and spoilt the donk, unlocked the stable door too late and found the would-be bolter asleep. For a mad minute the black heart of a pitiless Dark Age drover thumped within me. My hot tongue darted across blistered lips — what I'd give for a goad. A stick with a nail, blood on that dumb brown rump.
    I was pondering an upgrade to a juniper switch when a noise like a peacock being castrated screeched out and there was Petronella, waving her sticks above her head, wheeling round to Shinto's rear with a fearful ululation tearing from her throat. Those long ears flipped back and he ran. That now bent and flaccid stem dropped from my whip hand and I just stood and watched him go, already haunted by the awful probability that my miserable, beastly conduct might be the closest I'd come to recapturing the zeal of the wayfaring medieval fanatics. After 100 yards he shifted down to a brisk walk, and when his pace lowered to a saunter that grating shriek and those wind-milled poles instantly fleetened his feet afresh.
    It took me twenty minutes to catch them up. 'You must remember that we expect to go faster, because we are now getting fitter.' Petronella's voice was abnormally muted. I had been bad, and now she was going to go all rational and Dutch on me.
    'Why isn't he getting fitter?'
    'Maybe he is. But this is not usual for him.'
    'Yes, it is! He spends all summer going off on... on...' On three-day hikes. I thought back, and contemplated an important and shaming truth: Shinto's average speed