Earlier this week a friend told me that as he was walking into the café, a flock of pigeons came clapping over his head, followed, a breath later, by a hawk. Before it veered out of sight he saw, grasped in its talons, a pigeon.

I was walking home from the store just now with a mackerel and some small potatoes for dinner when I noticed another flock of pigeons looping around the Catholic church in the square. Their movement drew my attention to a large hawk poised, dead center, on the spine of the roof. The pigeons kept approaching, and some of them ventured to come to rest on the roof. Each time, the hawk would nonchalantly lift a wing or ruffle its feathers, scattering the settlers. But they kept coming in, flying right up to the hawk before swerving away.

I couldn’t tell if they were trying to gather on the roof or get the hawk to leave. In the end, they did neither. The flock wheeled and disappeared, and the hawk remained, like an icon, calm and still.