Travels with my Donkey

charged us, pistoning those spindly legs to dramatic effect, wing stumps fluffily outstretched. Shinto had seen enough, and with the now enormous freak-beast ten yards from the fence he legged it. Happily in the right direction, but once we were over the next hilltop his head dropped and he slowed almost to idling speed. Beaten again, boy; beaten by a bird.
    That wasn't nearly as bad, however, as the truly awful stuff that happened an hour up the road, at the top of a hill with León happening right down there before my eyes. The yellow arrows had been letting me down all morning, ordering us right across a huge highway and then back across it 50 yards later, and I scrutinised with a degree of scepticism the one that pointed pilgrims straight over a four-laner. The brow of a hill and no green men or zebras: it was like a circle-all-the-dangers illustration in a road-safety leaflet, particularly as the furious traffic throughput provided the answer to where everybody in this part of Spain had got to. There was, however, a police car on the opposite hard shoulder, and seeing both front seats occupied I waved and yoo-hooed above the whooshing flow of fast metal.
    The window was lowered, exposing a pair of aviator shades and a big, lazy smile. A smile that didn't say, Stay there and remain calm, sir, while my colleague halts the traffic, so much as, Ready with the shovel and bin-liners, Luis — and if they make it over, the flans are on me. I waved again, motioning at the vehicular onslaught in helpless imploration. The smile became a laugh; the window smoothly closed. Proffering gestures that in Spain's less enlightened recent past would have had them truncheoning the soles of my feet for a week, I set off down the hard shoulder in search of an alternative crossing.
    The traffic intensified and our tarmac safety margin narrowed into a merging sliver of dirty chevrons, off-white streaked with the cataclysmic skid marks of someone's last moment on earth. There were hoots and snatches of bellowed Hispanic reproof; the four lanes became six and now there were slip roads and ramps and those big blue signs that say 'No pedestrians', 'No mopeds', 'No tractors', and 'Get that fucking donkey out of here NOW'. Yet Shinto always gave of his best in heavy traffic, cheerfully incapable of acknowledging a clear and present danger to his continued existence when, who knows, there might be a puddle or a flamingo or something round the corner.
    When after perhaps half an hour the hard shoulder finally disappeared we scrambled down an embankment, to be met by a series of crash-barrier hurdles and an underpass. Cars and huge trucks were now roaring past above and below: I could hardly hear myself swear. It was a bad place, a place where no man had stood in this highway's active lifetime, and here I was, standing in it with a donkey. We would have to go back.
    Six legs make a lot of footsteps to retrace, and I was almost in tears by the time we were looking at the empty space where those evil policemen had been parked. Shinto had blithely jaywalked all the way back up the motorway, and having utterly exhausted my nervous and physical resources in laborious restraint, I blindly shuffled alongside as he sauntered across those four lanes. In a cacophony of horns we made it. Quite why my donkey opted to cross the 100-foot wooden bridge we encountered almost immediately after I will never know, but if he hadn't it would have meant a hearse or a horse trailer. A truly Bunyan-esque ordeal was at an end.
    Shinto continued to excel himself as León gradually took shape around us. The schedule was all shot to hell, meaning his lunch was half a loaf and a packet of biscuits eaten from my hand in a car park, but snorting the crumbs off the long, rogue hairs on his old lady's chin he ploughed doughtily onwards. He paused by a gate and let the immaculately presented kindergarten inmates on the other side force their little hands through the bars to pet and tickle. He waited patiently at zebras between the executives and shoppers, kept his nerve as the arrows led us down sour-smelling alleys I could touch both sides of, and haughtily ignored the jeers of students vocalising what I now accepted as the last dregs of an age-worn cultural reflex to taunt any passing jackass. And when we found ourselves in the square before the great Gothic cliff of León cathedral, he allowed himself to be rather aggressively appropriated as a photographic prop by the many