LITTLE WING.

On a bright, breezy Saturday not long ago, Sedona Murphy gave her homing pigeons away. Earlier that morning, the birds had flown around the neighborhood, looping over the shaggy old trees and the peaked rooftops of South Boston before returning to their gray shed in the Murphys' back yard. They then toddled obligingly into their wooden case. These were racing birds, accustomed to being crated and carried, so the close quarters were nothing new, and they had no way of knowing that this was the last time they would ever fly free.

The pigeons were being given away because the Murphys were moving, and the pigeons would not assent to the move. No matter how much nicer the yard would be at the Murphys' new house, in Southborough, a suburb west of Boston, the pigeons would always consider home to be the narrow wooden house on East Fifth Street that the Murphys were leaving behind. If the birds moved to Southborough and ever got out of their coop, they would race back to Fifth Street. Once in a while, pigeons that have to be moved--that is, pigeons whose owners are moving--can bond to a different coop. But, most of the time, birds raised by hand in a coop have no talent for living in the wild, so homing pigeons that have to be moved must be caged for the rest of their lives--they become what are called "prisoners." In the best of circumstances, prisoners are kept in a large aviary, so that they have room to fly even though they can't be let loose; in the worst, they never fly much again.

I got into the Murphys' car with Sedona and her twin brother, Patrick, and their mother, Maggie; the pigeons were in their wooden case in the back seat, muttering to themselves like old men in a bingo hall. The highway was uncrowded. We ticked past several exits, until we were minutes from the headquarters of the South Shore Pigeon Flyers, one of the two dozen or so clubs in Massachusetts for homingpigeon fanciers, where we would be leaving the birds.

Sedona was quiet. She is thirteen years old, a lean, leggy girl, with the luxuriant golden hair of a princess, but a grave, precise manner. Her posture is elegant. Her diction is occasionally exactly that of a person her age--earlier in the day she had announced, with amazement, that Grand Tetons means "big boobs"--but more often it is startlingly precise and sophisticated. Once when I was visiting her, she was showing one of the pigeons to a friend. The bird was squirming and pecking. Her friend squealed and said she thought the bird was icky. Sedona gave her a look, then turned the bird on its back and said firmly, "Hey! You're being a dominant, dominant bird!"

South Shore Pigeon Flyers is housed in an old brown barn behind the home of the club's president, Damian Le Vangie. When we pulled in, Le Vangie was standing on a small terrace off the second floor of the barn, his head tilted up. Maggie called out a greeting. "I can't come down," Le Vangie said. "I'm waiting for birds." At six that morning, thousands of pigeons from the Boston area had been released near the Berkshire Mountains for a two-hundred-mile race, and Le Vangie's flock was likely to be reaching home any minute; he would need to lure them across an electronic finish line so that their leg bands would trigger the timer used in official scoring.

"We have Sedona's birds," Maggie said.

"Just leave them," Le Vangie said. Spotting a flash of wing in the sky, he swivelled around and began shaking a can full of grain to attract the birds' attention, so they wouldn't dawdle in the air too long before landing. Maggie and Sedona waited for a bit, but Le Vangie wasn't budging. Finally, Sedona placed the case of pigeons near the barn, and then climbed into the car. By the time we got back to the Murphys' house, a friend of the family's, Jim Reynolds, was dismantling Sedona's pigeon coop, restoring it to its original incarnation as a garden shed. Sedona stood at a distance, observing. "It looks empty," she said. "Pigeonless." Maggie watched the demolition with her. Out came the perches, the bird bath, the fifty-pound sacks of pigeon feed; off came the Lucite door the birds hopped through after they'd been flying around and were ready to come home.