Travels with my Donkey

logistics and probabilities in a breathtaking flurry, then announced its assessment. Bollocks to all that, it said. Jump up on that donkey's back, boy, jump up there and ride him!
    I inaugurated plan D, of course, by ripping my shirt off. Twirling it wildly overhead and with a throatful of noise I hammered over the bridge; Shinto naturally turned smartly about, but already seeing myself up on that panniered saddle, clattering to an exultant halt in Santiago's Plaza del Obradoiro, I launched into my vault regardless.
    It was an unhappy spectacle, this star-crossed marriage of lunatic resolve and malcoordination. A take-off boot missed its appointment with the ground; suddenly I seemed to have far too many limbs, and none where they should have been. An arm threshed through a thistle, an ankle buckled, and somehow there was my head, or at least its left side, making jarringly stout contact with Shinto's robust hindquarters. Then I was down, a knot of twined and twitching appendages, a dying spider on the path.
    I could hear Shinto's hoofs drumming off through the neighbouring field; I got up because I had to. My ankle yodelled with shrill pain, and a lens had been punched out of my sunglasses. No time to find it, or whatever was left of the shirt — he was bolting swiftly away through the corn like a wild palomino, the long rope scuttering behind him.
    If he'd kept going that would have been the end of the story, but righteous outrage was mercifully overridden by the panic alarm that always went off when Shinto's radius from nearby humanity topped 100 yards. Shirtless and one-eyed I staggered through the crops, grabbed the rope, and breathing hard began to haul myself along it towards him. Just in time I saw those ears flatten back in a reprise of yesterday's Evil Mr Ed; my sidestep was quickly followed by a double-footed buckaroo back-kick, aimed right where I'd been standing. And so, I'm afraid, we had a fight.
    He turned about, bared his teeth and snorted, and I filled my lungs with hot, wheaten air and bellowed back the worst things you could call a donkey, or at least the worst things that came to mind, an anthology inauspiciously launched with 'big-eared crap-sniffer'. When I could shout no more his ears went back and his eyes narrowed. We faced each other across the still green corn: only one of us would get out of this field alive. Stay out of it, Frank Assisi — this was between me and him. I was ready to kick some ass.
    Shinto charged and I swayed and feinted like a matador,-then I chased him,- then he chased me. Mad donks and Englishmen. Round that field we went, thrashing through the thigh-high wheat until we'd flattened out a drunken crop circle. I paused again to turn the air blue, then Shinto swivelled his rear round to face me and turned it horribly brown.
    Hands on knees, torso tarred and feathered with sweat and dusted vegetation, I watched those off-kilter panniers rise and fall with each of his huge breaths. Slowly he turned back, looked at me, at the trampled earth, at the now distant line of trees bordering the river, then raised his head and brayed into a flawless sky. Seven low, steady blasts, like no noise he'd made before: the all-clear klaxon, an end to hostilities. Then stillness and silence. That was it. We were both done in. Neither of us was really sure what we were doing here, but whatever it was we were in it together. I needed him,- he needed me. And good God we both needed a drink.
    Heart booming in my neck and head I blundered up to the field's highest point. There was a spire, and dragging myself cross-country between cereal crops but mainly through them I went straight at it. After two fields I was a humid, saline fly magnet, but after two more I didn't care. As the town beneath the spire took shape the buzzing faded, and I became dimly aware that my eyes had stopped stinging. The soggy cornflakes and pretzel sticks pasted to my arms and chest were drying up and falling off.
    I had stopped perspiring. Every body fluid that could have been reprocessed into sweat had been: every joint seemed rustily ungreased, and my tongue was that crisped-up old sponge down the back of the bathroom radiator. Kidneys brutally wrung out by a fat-armed washerwoman, then fed through her sandpapered mangle. Only my socked and booted feet had escaped the desiccation, and somewhere down there they stumbled off the crumbled clods and on to tarmac. Creaking my unshaded eye shut I squinted at the sign: