Another woodpecker has met its demise at the paws of one of the cats. I'm not sure which cat, though. Dozing on the couch as the pines trees speared the sun, I heard a ruckus of birds outside the window. It ended and I thought no more of it, but an hour later I went into the garage, and there saw Portia staring into the dark space behind a large board that leans against the wall. Suddenly a scrabbling noise came from the darkness, and I thought for a moment that it might be a rat, but as I stepped back, a young woodpecker came out, more hopping than flying over Portia's head and leaping into a narrow space beside the washing machine. Neither I nor the cat could reach the bird, but I wanted to give it a chance to escape so I took Portia indoors. Another hour passed, and I checked the garage to see if the bird was still hiding there. I couldn't find it, so I let Portia back out. Another hour passed, and I heard the low yowls that usually mark the early stage of a cat fight. It was full night by now. I went out and saw Portia at the end of the driveway, facing away from me. Approaching slowly with my flashlight, I finally saw a glint of eye beyond her, and saw the other cat, crouched near the body of the dead woodpecker. It was Farah, and she was the one making the threatening noise. It wasn't too difficult to snatch Portia and carry her indoors. Later, I went back out and both Farah and the bird corpse were gone. So I don't know if Portia found and killed the injured woodpecker after it had escaped the garage, or if Farah found it and finished it off. All I know is that it almost ended in a fight between them, and the bird is dead. Farah will undoubtedly offer the prize to her kittens, who will refuse to eat it, and the cadaver will slowly molder somewhere in the back yard. A depressing end to an otherwise quiet Sunday. Sunday Verse The Deer B.H. Fairchild Amid the note cards and long, yellow legal pads, the late nineteenth-century journals containing poems by Swinburne or Rossetti or Lionel Johnson, the Yeats edition of Blake with its faded green cover and beveled edges, I and the other readers in the British Library began to feel an odd presence. We lifted our eyes in unison to observe the two small deer that had entered the room so quietly, so very discreetly, the music of their entering suspended above us, inaudible, but there, truly, as the deer were there. They paused, we could hear their breathing, or so it seemed, and no one moved. What could we do, there were deer in the room, and now hundreds of deer reflected in our eyes. The silence was unbearable at first, and the librarian in the linen blouse, her long fingers trembling, began to weep. The deer sensed this and, without seeming to move at all, came closer, licking her elbows, sniffing the soapy fragrance in the well of her neck, staring into her watery eyes. At some point beyond memory we could no longer distinguish her from the deer, it was all stillness anyway, everywhere the silence covered us like a silken net, and the books began to darken and crumble with age. We had all found our place, our eyes were full of deer, and our sadness was without cease.