Travels with my Donkey

another wide blue morning it was apparent that he'd spent the last fourteen hours up to his hocks in wild alfalfa, and for the first time I had to loosen the saddle straps under his gut by a couple of holes each. Guffing queasily he allowed himself to be led out of town, and even over a long wooden bridge, but came to a bilious halt halfway up the hill that followed — an eminence far more grandiose than that eponymously charged with mule murder. I got him to the top in the end, but as we stood there in the lee of a weathered pilgrim monument, Shinto gazing dolefully down at Castrojeriz and me across at the windfarm on a distantly opposite meseta, I knew it had taken a lot out of him.
    Evelyn and Petronella, the former at least unusually late on the road, caught me as we plodded funereally down the gentle descent. Company always shifted Shinto up a gear, but that day he seemed oddly withdrawn, settling immediately into a full run-through of his favourite stalling tactics: the frenzied nibbling of that suddenly unbearable gnat bite on his ankle, the elaborate olfactory encounters with even the most inconsequential dried turd, the abrupt, prick-eared halt which had us all scouring the landscape for a non-existent threat. After an hour I told them to go on ahead. I was beginning to accept this dreadful, torpid sloth, or at least to tolerate it with nothing more than the occasional resigned obscenity, but welcoming as companionship always was I couldn't expect any other normally fit human to put up with it for long.
    The path was undeviating and I watched Evelyn and Petronella pace steadily away for some time. They were halfway to the horizon when I was overtaken by a quietly polite Norwegian lady I'd lent — perhaps even given — some toothpaste to the night before. Then, as the comely silhouette of a compact 800-year-old refugio took shape, and beyond it the rising hump of a 1,000-year-old bridge, the two more distant figures were joined by a third: small, hunched, male.
    The three of them walked together awhile, then stopped and seemed to converge. I narrowed my eyes into the heat haze: the man, hatted and of advanced years, had an arm tight round either waist and was hungrily kissing each face in turn. For the first two minutes or so the women seemed to find it very funny, but when the comic appeal waned he was eased aside and walked off to the right with an unreturned wave. Poor Evelyn. It was only a couple of days since she'd shaken off the most unwholesome of her coterie, a Dutchman who, in her memorable description, 'just sat there rubbing his legs together like a cricket'.
    After a while the old feller turned about, and shuffled back to the camino. I had a feeling I knew what was going to happen next, and so did the Norwegian lady, because when he came up to her she said something loud and pushed an outfacing palm hard into his throat. When I passed him a few minutes later he was still standing there, stroking his tender gullet and looking sad and bewildered. I don't understand it, you could see him thinking. I've waited seventy years to be old and shrunken enough to get away with this.
    A sign on the other side of the bridge welcomed us to the Tierra de Campos, land of fields. 'This country abounds in fodder,' said the Liber Sancti Jacobi, 'and it has plenty of bread, meat, fish and honey.' I read it out to Shinto but it didn't seem to make him any happier. Big flatness he hated, and the gradient profiles of the days ahead were like brain-activity readings from an overweight narcoleptic listening to John Major count in binary.
    Somehow the horizon behaved itself, hiding behind a couple of false summits, throwing up a diversionary hillock on the right or a copse on the left. Lunch went fairly well, though after his alfalfa blow-out he didn't eat much, and at one point caused me a violent stab of panic by lying down in a patch of very tall grass when I wasn't looking.
    Soon after we'd hit the dusty camino once more it speared unwaveringly up an incline substantial enough to be named on the map. Near the top we passed a young girl sitting on her rucksack at the side of path, crying. 'OK?' I said, stooping down. She pressed the fat part of a hand against the moister eye and smeared it down her cheek. 'Please,' she beseeched, quiet and German, craving only solitude. I was to see her about half a dozen times, in the company of a portly youth I learnt was her new husband. Few ever heard him speak, and that tiny