A Pitying of Doves (33 page)

J
ejeune
sat on a dune near the entrance between the pines at Holkham, staring out at the expanse of pale water before him. Rafts of birds floated far out on the horizon, gulls and ducks, but the numbers of shorebirds were fewer now, and the movements less. The vast transit of migrating flocks was slowing down, and most of the birds that had arrived here lately would be staying on, spending their summer along the north Norfolk coast, seeking shelter among its bays, foraging along its wide, fertile mudflats, retiring to its wetlands and salt marshes to breed and raise their young. It was the end of a season; the birds settling to a new equilibrium after the upheavals of the previous weeks. Not calmness, not comfort; life for the birds on this coast was never that. There would still be the daily struggles, battles to be waged against the elements, against competitors for food, for territory, for mates. But it was a sedentary life for a few months, at least, without the perils of long-distance travel, with all its uncertainties, its threats seen and unseen, its dangers man-made and natural.

Jejeune watched as a flock of Black-tailed Godwits flew in from the west to settle on the shore. New arrivals from West Africa. Even these robust shorebirds seemed so fragile to have made such a long journey. And yet, here they were, nestled between a soft pastel sea that stretched out behind them and the endless infinity of a blue Norfolk sky. As they would be next year, and the year after that, and every year for as long as humans preserved their summer homes and their wintering grounds, and the important resting places in between. But who would do that? Who would work to guarantee that these birds, and others like them, would always have these places? Would the Turtledoves, who must follow the same route as these godwits, find refuges and safe havens at the end of their epic migration route? Jejeune had not seen a Turtledove in the wild this year, but he knew he would, at some point. Out here in north Norfolk there would be Turtledoves to be found, if one looked long enough and hard enough. But would future generations of birders be able to find them? Or would they be left to see them only in captivity, in aviaries, in breeding programs destined to produce only more generations of captive Turtledoves? Once it had been Phoebe Hunter's role to provide answers to these questions. Once he had thought it might become his. But he knew now that it would not.

An unfamiliar chirrup came from his pocket and Jejeune belatedly remembered that Lindy had handed him her phone on his way out, since he couldn't locate his own. He read the text:

Found your phone — obviously, since I'm texting
you from it. Dinner at 7. Hope the birding is good. X
.

As he went to turn off the phone, he noticed the draft folder. He opened it and saw the message he had composed on the plane. Fifteen words, that was all they were now, stripped of the emotion, the panic, the despair in which he had written them. Fifteen words that had been stilled, rendered irrelevant by Salter meeting them at the airport gate and their frantic, breathless rush to the consulate, where the words had no place anymore, no meaning. And never would again.

Jejeune looked at the message again:

Effective immediately. Withdraw all protection on Hidalgo. Advise him no further monitoring of his activities.

Tell him to save the doves, he was saying. The message would have defined his stand between his two worlds forever, spelled it out for all to see. Domenic Jejeune was willing to allow Hidalgo to provide the necessities of life to a pair of rare and precious doves and still preserve his diplomatic immunity, still avoid confessing to a murder Jejeune knew he had committed.

It was a price Jejeune had been willing to pay. If he had sent the message. But would he have sent it, finally? Or would he have looked down at those words one final time before pressing the button? Heard in them Danny Maik's disapproval, Shepherd's outrage, Lindy's disappointment? Would they have caused him to rethink, to hesitate, to re-evaluate the lives of two birds against the larger justice owed to Jordan Waters, to Phoebe Hunter, to Ramon Santos? Jejeune didn't know. He suspected he never would now.

He pressed the button.

Permanently delete this message?

How easy it was to make words disappear, to erase them so that the only place they existed, would ever exist, was in some shadowy recess of the writer's heart.

He pressed the button again.

Folder empty
.

Domenic Jejeune shut off Lindy's phone and headed home.

I
t is estimated that European Turtledove (
Streptopelia turtur
) population in the United Kingdom has declined by more than seventy-five percent in the past forty years. Today, fewer than 45,000 pairs return to breed each year in the U.K. The problems are manyfold, but include inadequate protection of the African wintering grounds and intensive arable farming practices in the U.K. Such practices remove the weed seeds that constitute a major portion of the European Turtledove's diet. Another major factor is hunting, both legal and illegal, of the species during their migration. As many as four million birds are shot or trapped as they pass through Europe and North Africa.

A number of groups, including The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), are now lobbying for better enforcement of the EU Birds Directive, which limits the hunting season, and seeking additional legal protection for this declining species. To learn more about the efforts to protect European Turtledoves, please visit www.rspb.org.uk or www.bto.org.uk.

O
nce a species has disappeared from the wild, only a large-scale, multi-faceted effort can restore it. In 2013, more than four decades after the last member of the species was seen in the wild, six captive-bred Socorro Doves (
Zenaida graysoni
) were transferred to breeding facilities in Mexico. These birds are part of a project designed to support the eventual reintroduction of the species to Socorro Island. The project involves thirty-three organizations in twelve countries, including the National Autonomous University of Mexico Institute of Biology, the Island Endemics Foundation, and Mexico's Instituto de Ecologia. To learn more about the work of the Socorro Dove Reintroduction Project, please visit www.zeroextinction.org.

Copyright © Steve Burrows, 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Editor: Allison Hirst

Design: Courtney Horner

Cover Design: Sarah Beaudin

Epub Design: Carmen Giraudy

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Burrows, Steve, author

A pitying of doves / Steve Burrows.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-4597-3106-6

I. Title.

PS8603.U74745P58 2015 C813'.6 C2014-908129-4

C2014-908130-8

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