Travels with my Donkey

remember if it was Tosantos or Villambistia. The path curved down to a little patch of unkempt green in the heart of the village, and on it were a set of swings, a rusty slide and a very large, very dark donkey.
    The donks at the Centro Hípico had been behind bars, but here was one Shinto could rub noses with. I thought of those twelve absent friends in their Pyrenean paddock, and beckoning his new acquaintance with little clicks of the tongue led Shinto to the edge of the grass.
    What happened next cleaved Shinto's pilgrimage in two, before and after. The division was as dramatic as it was sudden, like two paintings crudely spliced together in the middle. One second we were ambling across a Constable. The next it was Guernica .
    Their snouts were about 4 feet apart when it happened. Shinto stiffened, and stared, and the stare bounced back, and in the blink of a large brown eye the hierarchy was established to his disadvantage. The rope rasped through my flesh and he was off, round the swings, under the slide, then straight up the hedgerowed lane with that satanic beast in audibly close pursuit. It was the title sequence to When Donks Go Bad.
    Shinto hammered round the corner and I hammered behind him, at a speed I hadn't thought him capable of and one I'd certainly never have managed two weeks previously. Bags were bucking wildly about on his back, smacking me in the head and chest as I fought to keep the end of the rope in both hands. Up a short straight, round another uphill left-hander — and still that bastard came, his heavy hoofs drumming ever closer. If I'd thought he just wanted to defend his turf, I was wrong. He didn't want to scare us. He wanted to kick us, and keep kicking until our protests faded to a phlegmy, defenceless gurgle. Then he wanted to eat us.
    The snorting huffs were at my elbow — I could hear them and so could Shinto. From somewhere he found more speed, shifting up into a full gallop, 200 kilos of raw panic on the hoof. The rope was tightening; Shinto was getting away from me. My brain began spooling out ever more desperate contingency plans: try-line escape dive through the brambles, fist-in-the-stifle counter-attack, prayer. And then, with fearful finality, Shinto ran out of gas. He hit the wall, and pulled up in abrupt accordance, steaming head lowered in submission, surrendering himself to a one-sided assault.
    'NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOO!'
    I didn't know what I was going to do until I did it, but there I was, baying at the ragged edge of human capacity with my arms and legs outstretched, like a skydiver after a fruitless yank on the reserve cord. I held this pose and spun round to face the donk of death, finding that huge black head just a foot from mine. He'd stopped, but he didn't take even a tiny step backwards until I flapped my arms and somehow screamed louder, a valley-shattering explosion of spittled, bestial decibels. There was soon nothing left in the throat locker, and still he filled the path behind, two yards back, side-on and staring with intent. The stone I picked up was rather larger than I'd have preferred but I'm afraid I threw it anyway. With a taut thump it bounced off the meat of his shaggy thigh. He didn't flinch, and for a moment I wondered where all this would end. Then, with studied and impudent sloth, he turned his head away and plodded slowly back to hell.
    Barbed vegetation had ripped into both legs and an arm and torn half the collar off my shirt, and though I didn't know it yet my Dictaphone had spoken its last 'Eeeeeuuuwwww'. But Shinto was a broken donk. I looked at his craven, lowered gaze, at the sweat seeping through the saddle blanket. He'd trotted into that playground with the eager innocence of a lonely child finding a playmate, and the playmate had tried to kill him. That quivering anus swelled and unpuckered and what was left of his morale spattered horribly on to the Way of St James.
    At that moment I wouldn't have cared if Villafranca had been a forsaken pocket of hell relentlessly bisected by roaring 32-tonners, but by the time we got there, and found it was, I did. 'Not staying here, Shints,' I said as we ate our respective lunches outside a cemetery on a hill overlooking the town. Suits me, his look said: procuring brief respite from the flies now clustering his loins meant kicking himself in whatever was left of his bollocks. The upper reaches of Villafranca's domed church tower were engagingly festooned with really quite large bushes, but