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panic with the window, I looked out and saw a dart-shaped brown bird rush and wrestle something on to the stones of the path. I ran out immediately to engage in brave combat with whatever it might be, armed only with a remnant from a long-ago Hallowe’en, a red-plastic trident with a wobbly pole. Devil-like, I stormed down the path brandishing the weapon towards the crouching bird who, by spreading his beautiful wings of grey-blue and soft brown, was attempting to conceal the bright white of his victim’s feathers, as if by so doing, I might not notice. The dove, I could see, was alive and appeared undamaged. I jabbed the trident towards the sparrow-hawk, who turned to stare at me with a look of great, entirely deserved hatred before he rose slowly from his lost dinner and equally slowly flew away. In flight, he was exquisite. He was too, very frightening. Were I a bird, I would share their terror at the quick silhouette passing overhead like a faraway cloud. The rescued dove, unharmed, flew instantly back to its house where it sat with its friends and family, complaining for the rest of the day in a loud and outraged voice, no doubt about the need for raptor control or the unfortunate tendency of life to be unpredictable.
    Always, after a dove has flown against the window in mortal fear, there remains a pattern on the glass, a faint and powdered image, aghost imprint of outstretched wings, a small body, two smudged arcs of feathers.
    I was even more anxious after that, watching for the sparrow-hawk’s inevitable return. It was the final, emphatic affirmation that dove-keeping wasn’t likely to make me more serene or bestow upon me a previously undiscovered ability to regard the world with equanimity. It was, I know now, the level of self-delusion that leads people to buy houses in countries they have seen only in summer, or to move from city to country believing that the essentials of life will be different there. Any sense of calm derived from the presence of the doves was transient, a series of brief interludes interspersing days of fear and panic.
    The sparrow-hawk, either the one who had visited before or another, did visit again. I looked out of the window one morning. Snow in April? The flowerbed was hidden under a drift of white. In the middle, with an air of calm intent, was the hawk, plucking and tearing. The process was prolonged, the remains slight, only a pair of feet, a light scattering of feathers.

    When, after we’d been here for a few years, new neighbours moved into the house next door, the first alarming sign I noticed in their garden was a large, well-kept black and white cat. The second, shortly after, was finding a dove, dead, eviscerated in a mess of blood on the dove-house floor.
    The cat was well-fed, pampered and almost preternaturally feral in its instincts. For all the time it lived next door, the cat and I waged a one-sided war. All the advantages were on its side, for it was a cat, possessor of every useful, artful feline attribute, every precision implement in the armamentarium of silence and stealth. My weaponry was a water-pistol. The cat evaded and avoided every attempt at deterrence, every blast of water, my putting up elaborate barricades, installing a sonic anti-cat device, to protect my doves from harm. When I asked the neighbours if they could restrain its activities, they said in a mildly irritated way that it was only doing what cats do. For the maintenance of neighbourly harmony, I refrained from saying that I didn’t care what they do; I just didn’t want them doing it to my doves.
    That late summer after the first murder, the doves stayed outside for days, too scared to return to their house, perching on nearby rooftops, their voices loud in warning, descending every now and again, cautiously, to feed. The weather was warm and I was happy enough to allow them to stay outside. Only when the nearby roofs began to display the consequences of their occupancy did I begin to worry