I saw a donkey in Kelowna

I don't think he used his legs much anymore.  Didn't need to.  His authority came from the bulk of his neck, the heft of his hee-haw, the thick-jawed resonance of his glance.  He ruled the paddock from his lean-to in the south-east corner below which a dozen sheep roamed, creating paths in the snow and not straying from those paths (thus acting like sheep, I'm tempted to say, except that their owner--the human owner, not the donkey--said every year their paths are in exactly the same place, meaning, he claimed, that the sheep selected the most logical path given the topography of the paddock, not just because one sheep walked dumbly along and the rest followed).

At feeding time I wondered, was the donkey oatey?  No, more like cornstalks was what they all ate, even the sheep (following the donkey).

I spoke to that donkey in Kelowna.  If it was after dark when I drove by, returning from kicking some brother-in-law butt on the shuffleboard table up at McCullough Station, the donkey would let me have it--a variety of rusty hollers for which the word "hee haw" doesn't come close.  ("He's an excellent watchdonkey," his owner had told me.)  By day the donkey couldn't have cared less if I spoke to him or not.  Get outta my face, he seemed to say.