This weighed on Stevenson's mind during his walk, and as I'm setting off I hear a 'pack of 50 wolves' have been bothering sheep to the north. In the 1760s, the so-called 'Napoleon of Wolves' ate a handful of children here until some farmer shot him. I begin, after a celebratory night at a rescued farmhouse B&B with 241 goats near Florac, by taking a taxi to my setting off point: a gray recycling bin outside the closed Restaurant-Bar Sandwichs, across the Allier River from the Gévaudan, which is sort of Languedoc's Transylvania. I walk five hours a day, and stay at gîtes (guesthouses), where you can get a private room and big dinner for 40 or so euros. Never much of a hiker or trekker, I've planned a five-day 'walk' that overlapped with the heart of Stevenson's story. In the Footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson That we were both agonizing over careers and dealing with broken hearts, a less happy one.

That we both were drawn to travel, and occasionally to pirates, was a happy coincidence. We both have Scottish surnames and gradual Presbyterian departures. In a second grade T-ball game, I struck out playing for his namesake school in Tulsa. The resulting Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes is a travel classic, less for its insights of 19th-century French rural life than its passages on 'why' and 'how' we travel - things that strike me as modern 135 years later. A gutted Stevenson headed for the hills with a donkey he named Modestine. A year-long affair with an American woman 10 years his senior had just ended when she returned to California (and her husband). Stevenson was 27 and unsure of a lot of things: his writing, his health, his religion, and most of all his love life. It was certainly off the tourist radar in the fall of 1878, when the future author of Treasure Island made a 12-day journey here. It's lovely, this pocket of France between Provence and Barcelona that somehow still feels a secret. The 156-mile walk from Le Puy to St Jean du Gard in Languedoc-Roussillon passes through forests of pine and birch, medieval villages and ancient ruins, and a rugged mountain pass or two. This is what I get, I guess, for deviating from my intended path of the GR70, or Robert Louis Stevenson Trail, which turned 20 this year. But when a rugby squad's worth are running your way, you run. I know cows aren't dangerous even French ones won't ram into human hips by instinct. I snuck out here, just as dusk began to purple the sky, to see 3000-year-old menhirs, scattered rugged granite slabs that poke from wheat-colored grass. Seven cows are flanking me in a sudden hot chase across a limestone plateau. But on my last day, I'm running in mud-caked boots with unexpected company. On and off the Robert Louis Stevenson Trail in rural France.

Robert louis stevenson donkey walk