A Pitying of Doves by Steve Burrows

Hunter’s research methodology was a long way from being over.
    â€œFancy a walk before dinner?”
    They often went for an early evening stroll along the bluffs near their cottage, but it was usually Domenic who proposed it, when he had finished work for the day. It might just have crossed the mind of a Domenic Jejeune less absorbed in Phoebe Hunter’s field notes, too, that there was a forced casualness to Lindy’s sudden suggestion.
    By the time he pushed his chair back from the computer and stood up, arching his back to relieve the stress, Lindy was already waiting at the door, wearing a light cardigan.
    They walked slowly along the path, side by side, shoulders occasionally touching like boats bobbing on gentle swells, both immersed in their own thoughts. Along the edges of the narrow clifftop path, smallknots of early spring flowers, common daisies and yellow hop trefoils, poked their heads tentatively between the pale tussocks of grass. It would be a while yet before Lindy’s favourites, the sea pinks — thrift as the locals called them — emerged. Out over the sea, the call of a Kittiwake pealed through the soft evening air.
    â€œYou never mentioned how the migration watch went the other day,” said Lindy. “I usually get chapter and verse but this time, not a dicky bird. Word , Dom,” she offered to Jejeune’s puzzled expression. “Rhyming slang. Remember, your crash course with Robin?”
    â€œAh.” Jejeune and Lindy had hosted a dinner recently for Robin and Melissa, friends of Lindy’s from college. Robin was an affable East Ender who had delighted in introducing Jejeune to the colourful world of cockney rhyming slang. But dicky bird , for word , hadn’t been among the lessons. Jejeune was pretty sure he would have remembered that one.
    â€œSo? How was it?”
    â€œWonderful,” said Jejeune simply.
    Lindy knew that Domenic chose his adjectives carefully, and he was using this one in the literal sense: full of wonder. Wonder at the swirling flocks of birds flying by, at the thought of the vast distances they had travelled — from Africa and beyond — and at the mechanisms of nature that set them on their way, and guided them, in ways that humans could, even now, only barely understand. How much more wonderful, then, might it be for someone with Domenic’s interest in birds to study them on a full-time basis? To continue the research that Phoebe Hunter had been working on when she died? Lindy knew Phoebe Hunter’s project represented everything Domenic would have wanted to do, in another life. She couldn’t imagine he was seriously considering pursuing it now, but when you were as unsettled in your career as Domenic Jejeune was, even dreams could be dangerous.
    â€œWhere did you go?” asked Lindy, more to drive away other, more troubling thoughts than because she had any real interest. “Did you take that same stretch of the coastal path you usually do?”
    Jejeune nodded “Burnham Overy to Brancaster Staithe, and then inland to the Downs.”
    Lindy shook her head. “Blimey, Robert Frost wouldn’t have made much of a birder, would he? No road less travelled with you lot. Why do birders always follow the same route when they go somewhere?”
    Jejeune hadn’t really thought about it, but as usual there was some truth to Lindy’s observation. He shrugged. “There’s always a temptation to try a new path when you go to a place you’ve been before, but there’s a pull, a tension that seems to drag you to the places you’ve already had success. Birders can remember the exact tree, the exact branch where they saw a good bird. If you saw it there once …”
    â€œYou see a bird on a twig and then five years later you expect the same bird to reappear in the same spot? You know you birders are all mad, right? The lot of you. Certifiable.”
    Jejeune smiled at