He first appeared in the village in May last year, walking unsteadily down the country lanes head hung low, lifeless and dispirited. His once shiny brown hair was coated in thick dust, large hazel eyes lacklustre, reflecting the sorrows of his miserable condition. One of life’s losers, reduced to scrounging food and water, no friends, all alone and hopeless. Had he been human he might have been chased off but being a wild donkey no one knew quite what to do.

Ellis was one of the first to help him. She found him standing next to her jeep outside the gate that lead to her farmstead. With his rear leg held clear of the ground each time she went in and out he hopped pathetically after her, stretching his tired neck over the gate desperate for sanctuary. Like any sensible Turkish villager at first she ignored his unspoken pleas.

Wild donkeys live in herds of twenty or so in the mountains and forest above Çandır and fend very well for themselves. The descendants of domestic beasts turned loose with the advent of tractors and motorbikes they live free, roaming where they will and avoiding direct human contact. The closest İ had been to one of these equines previously had been at night when unwittingly İ walked too close too a herd night grazing. The swift harrumph of the herd leader, a massive expulsion of nasal air, sounded like an irritated dragon’s snort of warning. When you can’t see what’s making the sound it’s loud and sharp enough to make you veer off your unwisely chosen path. Otherwise they were largely seen at a distance, grazing amongst the ruins at Caunos, trotting in tight formation through the village at night inciting the local dogs into frenzies or heard as a cacophony of braying from the hills behind our house.

This young jack had been injured and not knowing which way to turn had drifted down into the village where the smoothish roads meant he was able to limp more easily and perhaps to find shelter and food. Ellis’s Turkish villager stance lasted only a few days and then she took him into her home. He gladly followed her through the gate and into the olive grove and there he stayed for the next week. Slowly he became more surefooted on his three limbs and rested in peace with no dogs to harass him but at no point did he lower the injured back leg. İt became obvious that the injury was permanent and that he would never recover enough to go back into the wild and rejoin his herd.

We wondered how he had been hurt and speculated that he had tripped, been trapped or perhaps shot but Kadir told us he was most likely to have been injured in a fight for a jenny. He explained that when donkey stallions compete for a mate the fights are vicious and in addition to biting each other’s neck and shoulders, they also snap at each other’s legs. Jack had been hamstrung by a stronger and more brutal donkey opponent. We marvelled at Kadir’s knowledge and then marvelled again at his tact and imagination when two days later he asked Ellis to remove the donkey from the olive grove as he was ‘biting the sheep’ that also grazed there. Hardly in a condition to chase down and nip the woolly sprinters Ellis realised Kadir was politely saying that wild donkeys don’t get domestic privileges. With a heavy heart she turned him out.

His decline and eventual death from starvation seemed inevitable. İn fact we thought that someone would shoot him if he just hung round the village foraging where he could. The village dogs harassed him on a regular basis and Jack was a pathetic sight as he tried to escape them fourth leg swinging hopelessly behind him. Ellis even asked me to ask around the village if someone could shoot him and put him out of his misery but no one was willing. Each man İ approached had the same attitude, God gave him life and God will take it away.

Well the God of Donkeys apparently doesn’t think that Jack’s day is done yet because he’s still there. He has adopted the yard of the disused school as his home and thus has come to reside right in the very heart of the village. The dogs don’t bother him anymore and he walks slowly where ever his fancy takes him. He is quite unassuming and humble in his behaviour and has run (or hopped) no midnight raids into gardens, stolen no fodder from sheep or cows and generally behaved with the utmost decorum. Things did look a bit dicey by high summer when foliage is thinnest on the ground and water scarce but he made it through that as well.

In fact it has transpired that people have been feeding him, not much but each house has thrown a handful of oats or straw his way and a few chickens have had to work that little bit harder as the cucumber skins previously designated as theirs have made their way into the schoolyard. Also at least five households that we know of leave water out for Jack at night – even old witch Raz whose house he lives right opposite (and who is infamous for torturing tortoises who dare to wander into her garden) leaves him food.

Furthermore he’s not alone, periodically a young jenny, perhaps the one he lost the fight over, comes down out of the forest and stays with him for a few days at a time. He may have lost the battle but obviously not the lady’s heart. Last week he actually had ‘company’ and five donkeys and a horse came and hung out with him. Jack the re-domesticated donkey is, if not thriving, no longer the dispirited mangy beast he was when he arrived and while it would be wishful thinking to claim he’s the village mascot, he’s not far off it.