Travels with my Donkey

even up here the traffic was deafening, and the refugio's grimy windows had it all right in their face. My mind was made up, but if it hadn't been, a glance at the sky would have settled the decision. Bridging the blue expanse were wisps of clouds, warped by some extraordinary whim of nature into celestial chevrons, arrows pointing due west, up over the big hill behind us and on to Santiago.
     
    These days no one's going to get lost on the camino, not badly anyway, but there were times in the hours ahead when I wondered if I'd missed some vital yellow arrow and erred into the wolfish wilderness. The climb itself was hefty and meandering, but it was also movingly winsome, painterly foothills dense with ancient oak, their upper reaches dotted purple and yellow by broom and heather, and all of it smiled on by a billion-watt sun. Iguana-sized lizards green as tree frogs scuttered off the path and into the piny undergrowth as we approached the brow.
    Only there wasn't really a brow. The path peaked but didn't fall away, instead ploughing remorselessly across a yawning, heathery moor on holiday from Cumbria. Shinto had been withdrawn and lethargic since the pursuit, and I knew this vista would spark off what I was beginning to think of as his agoraphobia.
    I nursed him onwards, with conversation, and when that inevitably palled, in song. This was always a risk, as in addition to an abysmal taste in music he was implacably demanding. Like the back-seat howler demanding a nineteenth rewind to the start of 'On Top of Spaghetti', if he didn't hear what he wanted he wouldn't cooperate. And what he wanted to hear — I will never know what initially possessed me to mumble the intro — was 'We are the Champions'.
    "'And WE'LL keep on FIGHTING", till the... Look, Shints! We're going downhill!' And so we were, but before we could go uphill again there was something to cross, and it was made of planks. That was a blow, and though we soon found an acceptable concrete alternative just upstream this proved the straw that broke my poor donkey's back. Back up on the hot and shadeless plateau, in a landscape purged of man and his creations, Shinto gently lowered himself to his knees, then eased over on to his side like a cat being put to sleep. There was a noise that I'd later link to a buckling saucepan lid, and then another, a terminal wheezy groan.
    We were in a bad place, and Shinto seemed bound for a better one. For thirty minutes I thought he was about to die, and for at least five of those that he actually had. I pressed my water bottle to his flaccid lips, and gathered what grass I could in this... oh dear, in this bewolfed and gradually darkening nowhere. I heaved the barley bag out from under him and he accepted a little from the bowl. But only a little. And then, as I pictured myself scooping out a huge shallow grave with a bent saucepan lid, I did what I suddenly remembered seeing a Scottish shepherd once do to a similarly stricken sheep. I paced out a run-up, then charged at Shinto, rodeo yee-hahs rasping from a Queen-ravaged larynx.
    He leapt upright when I was almost upon him. And just over an hour later, with the mist already beginning to coil out of the dim and cooling fields, we were being cheered and applauded into the extraordinary, marooned monastery of San Juan de Ortega, site of 114 recorded miracles. Make that 115.
    Before they set off everyone has a mental image that they build their expectations around, an encapsulation of their pilgrimage, and mine was something like San Juan de Ortega. The situation was exceptional: a stolid, mighty Romanesque pilgrim-fortress bursting out of this remote and lumpy pasture-land, its neighbours a token handful of forsaken farm buildings. Largely unroofed and surrendering to nature, like Roncesvalles the monastery had been saved by the camino's renaissance in the eighties. The galvanised canopy keeping the rain out spoilt the profile somewhat, but what it encased was the most authentically medieval experience of my pilgrimage to date.
    The cheers, being many and youthful and Dutch, meant that I'd be sleeping on the refectory floor, though I was lucky even to bag that. Peering through from the hall I could see mattresses and rucksacks stacked all along the refectory's splendidly panelled walls. The hospitalera was a bustling crone who stuck her head out of an arch, saw me, saw Shinto, barked 'Camping!' and disappeared.
    That wasn't going to happen, so to give her the slip I tied