The Braying Adventure turns a small-town joke into an armed dispute, then tests whether reason can stop a conflict sustained by wounded pride. Its two movements—a traveler’s tale about the feud’s origins and Don Quixote and Sancho Panza’s encounter with the townspeople—show ridicule spreading beyond its original cause until even an effort at mediation becomes dangerous.

Origins of the Feud

At an inn, Don Quixote of La Mancha presses an armed traveler to explain the curious matter he had mentioned on the road. When the traveler says he must first finish tending his mule, Don Quixote helps sift barley and clean the manger. The traveler then tells his story before an audience that includes Sancho Panza, the cousin, the page, and the innkeeper. The account gives the dispute a distinctly undignified beginning: a town official had lost his ass, and, after about a fortnight, another official reported seeing the animal in a forest, thin and without its harness.

The two officials set out to find it. When the ass remains hidden, the one who had seen it proposes a method based on their own vocal skill: each will walk around a different side of the forest and bray, hoping the animal will answer. They bray at nearly the same time, mistake each other’s calls for the ass, and hurry together to investigate. Their mutual admiration becomes part of the comedy. Each praises the other’s bray as exceptionally natural and polished, and they eventually agree on two consecutive brays as a signal to distinguish one another from the missing animal.

The search produces no answer from the ass. The officials find it in the thick of the forest, where wolves have devoured it. Its owner says that a living ass would have brayed back, and declares the search worthwhile despite finding the animal dead because he has heard his companion’s performance. Their return, hoarse and disappointed, does not end the story. They tell their neighbors about the search and continue to praise each other’s braying; the account spreads through nearby villages, giving outsiders a ready-made way to mock their town.

From Mockery to Mobilization

The traveler describes the ridicule as contagious. People from other towns bray when they see someone from the original village, and children take up the taunt until it becomes a public badge attached to the people who are mocked. The response no longer depends on the original lost ass or even on the two officials’ comic search. The insult passes from one town to another, and the targets begin to come out armed in groups against those who jeer at them.

The traveler says that his town expects to march against a neighboring village two leagues away, one of its most persistent tormentors. The lances and halberds he carries are not equipment for the donkey search: he has bought them in preparation for the coming confrontation. His tale thus links a harmless-sounding imitation to a real prospect of violence, while leaving the promised battle pending.

The sequel arrives two days after Don Quixote leaves the inn. On the third day, as he and Sancho travel toward the Ebro, they hear drums, trumpets, and gunfire. Don Quixote first imagines that a regiment is passing and rides up a hill to see. Below, he finds a band of more than two hundred people carrying an assortment of weapons, including lances, crossbows, halberds, pikes, and muskets. Their white satin standard depicts an ass in the act of braying, with the verse, “They did not bray in vain, Our alcaldes twain.” Don Quixote recognizes the people as those from the braying town and explains the emblem to Sancho. The armed procession makes plain how far the taunt has travelled: the original bray is now a civic insignia carried into a potential fight.

Don Quixote’s Case Against Revenge

Don Quixote asks the assembled people to hear him and grounds his appeal in his stated calling as a knight-errant: to protect those in need and help those who require it. He argues that they are mistaken to regard themselves as insulted as a whole community. In his account, a private person cannot insult an entire town merely by jeering at it; he contrasts that situation with a collective challenge, citing Don Diego Ordonez de Lara’s challenge to the town of Zamora in response to a treason committed by one man. He also points out that such challenges can exceed their proper limits, even extending to the dead, rivers, fish, and unborn generations.

The distinction matters to Don Quixote because a town’s anger cannot make every individual in another community responsible for a taunt. He warns against treating common nicknames and children’s mockery as grounds for perpetual armed quarrels. Then he sets out the causes for which sensible people and well-ordered states may take up arms: defense of the Catholic faith, preservation of life, protection of honor, family, and property, and service to the king in a just war; he adds defense of one’s country as a further cause. A fight over a bray, he argues, does not belong among them.

His appeal also invokes Christian teaching. Since the proposed vengeance cannot be just, he says, it conflicts with the command to do good to enemies and love those who hate. His conclusion is that the townspeople are bound by human and divine law to remain quiet. Sancho privately marvels at his master’s learning, then publicly endorses his judgment, describing Don Quixote as knowledgeable in combat’s laws and urging the people to follow his advice.

Sancho’s Braying and the Broken Peace

Sancho undercuts his own plea by volunteering proof of his ability to bray. He remembers doing so as a boy, when, according to his account, the other asses in the town would join in, and he insists that the skill does not reflect badly on his family. To demonstrate, he pinches his nose and brays loudly enough for the surrounding valleys to echo. In a gathering already organized around the meaning of a bray, his performance is taken not as a friendly illustration but as mockery.

A man nearby strikes Sancho with a long staff and knocks him helpless to the ground. Don Quixote charges the attacker with his lance, but others get between them. Stones rain down, and the armed crowd levels crossbows and muskets at him. He turns Rocinante and gallops away, fearing that a shot will strike him, while the townspeople settle for seeing him flee and do not fire. The party does not fight its rival village: it holds its ground until night, then returns home exultant because no enemy came out to meet it.

Sancho, scarcely recovered, is put on Dapple, who follows Rocinante because he cannot bear to be separated from him. Once they are some distance from the armed band, Don Quixote waits for Sancho and examines him, finding no wound. He nevertheless rebukes him for braying in a place where braying could invite a cudgel. Sancho answers that his back is too sore for a proper reply and complains that knight-errants flee while their squires are left to be beaten.

Aftermath and Significance

Don Quixote rejects Sancho’s description of his retreat as flight. He distinguishes rashness from courage, arguing that courage without prudence is merely recklessness and that a fighter may reserve himself for a better occasion. He admits that he withdrew but insists that doing so followed the example of valiant men who chose not to risk themselves at the wrong moment. His conduct thus partly echoes the prudence he urged on the townspeople, even as the abrupt retreat leaves Sancho to suffer the immediate consequences.

Don Quixote helps Sancho back onto his ass, and they take shelter in a nearby grove at a leisurely pace. Sancho repeatedly sighs and groans; he says the pain runs from the end of his backbone to the nape of his neck. Don Quixote attributes it to the length of the staff that caught him down the back. The episode ends not with a settlement between the rival towns but with a sore squire and a retreating pair. Its comic chain of cause and effect is also its judgment: a dead ass gives rise to a story, the story becomes a communal insult, and Sancho’s attempt to display the very skill at the center of the dispute helps turn a reasoned appeal against violence into violence of its own.