Tales of the Peculiar by Ransom Riggs

Author:Ransom Riggs
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2016-08-16T16:02:07+00:00

The Pigeons of Saint Paul’s

Editor’s note:

The story of the pigeons and their cathedral is one of the oldest in peculiar folklore, and it has taken drastically different forms over the centuries. While the most common versions cast the pigeons as builders, I find their role as destroyers in this iteration much more interesting.

—MN

Once upon a peculiar time, long before there were towers or steeples or tall buildings of any sort in the city of London, all the pigeons lived high up in the trees where they could keep away from the bustle and fracas of human society. They didn’t care for the way humans smelled or the strange noises they made with their mouths or the mess they made of things generally, but they did appreciate the perfectly edible things they dropped on the street and threw into garbage heaps. Thus, the pigeons liked to stay near humans, but not too near. Twenty to forty feet above their heads was just about perfect.

But then London started to grow—not just outward, but upward—and the humans began building lookout towers and churches with steeples and other things that intruded upon what the pigeons considered their private domain. So the pigeons called a meeting, and several thousand of them gathered on an empty island in the middle of the river Thames15 to decide what to do about the humans and their increasingly tall buildings. Pigeons being democratic, speeches were made and the question was put to a vote. A small contingent voted to put up with the humans and share the air. A smaller faction advocated leaving London altogether and finding somewhere less crowded to live. But the vast majority voted to declare war.

Of course, the pigeons knew they couldn’t win a war against humans—nor did they want to. (Who would drop scraps for them to eat if the humans were dead?) But pigeons are experts in the art of sabotage, and with a clever combination of disruption and vandalism, they began a centuries-long fight to keep the humans at ground level, where they belonged. In the beginning it was easy because the humans built everything from wood and straw. Just a few burning embers deposited in a thatch roof could reduce an annoyingly tall building to ashes. But the humans kept rebuilding—they were bafflingly un-discourageable—and the pigeons continued to torch any structure taller than two stories just as fast as the humans could erect them.

Eventually the humans grew wiser and began building their towers and steeples from stone, which made them much harder to burn down—so the pigeons tried to disrupt their construction instead. They pecked at workers’ heads, knocked down scaffolding, and pooped on architectural plans. This slowed the humans’ progress a bit, but didn’t stop it, and after some years a great stone cathedral rose higher than any of the trees in London. The pigeons considered it an eyesore and an affront to their dominance of the sky. It made them terribly grumpy.

Happily, Vikings soon raided the city and tore it down—along with most of London.

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