21 12 07

The day before winter solstice & all the ice & frosts have melted. Down at the edge of the bay two donkeys softly graze at the regreened but salty grass. The sunlight is radiant & the unclouded sky a zinging blue. The donkeys are dark against all this. They’re minded by a woman & a child. One is led from a grass cropping to the next; the other is free to roam, but stays close to his companion & the girl. Donkeys here in Ardnamurchan are a rarity these days, what ever might have been in the past. These are retired, though from what work I don’t know.

It’s more than thirty years since I backed a donkey into a donkey car to tackle him to bring in hay. While donkeys can be biddable, they always have minds of their own. Ours, a rig, had a habit of submitting to the collar, and backing up far enough to be tackled, then moving forward sharply so that the shafts dropped. The old TVO tractor that replaced him was not a lot better. It was commonplace at that time in Kerry for donkeys to take the milk from maybe a half dozen cows each day from the holdings to the collection point for the creamery lorry. Even then, they were being replaced by bulk tanks, coolers & tractors with cabs.

The donkeys here in Gobsheallach may never work & even on occasion bite, just to let you know their ancestry, but in the solstice sun here, now, there’s plenty of grazing for them. In Palestine, since the checkpoints were rigorously (re)enforced there’s not a lot of diesel or petrol getting into the West Bank or Gaza & donkeys are the general transport, serving as taxi & ambulance & draught animal. Beasts of burden. Grazing is scarce in a land one-fifth the size of Scotland but with more than two and a half million people. Many farms, frequently olive & citrus groves, have been annexed for a wall between Palestine & Israel; the trees are bulldozed & the land out of farming. On any other fertile ground, crops for people is the order of the day. Even with the price of a donkey twenty or thirty times what it was before the virtual sealing of the Palestinian lands, if grazing, or hay or concentrate can’t be had, there’s no future for donkeys in Ramallah or Hebron or Bethlehem.