Boris the dog encounters two groups of birds on the walks we take early weekend mornings. The first, seemingly displaced from their element, are the large seagulls that wheel over the vast inland sea of the Safeway parking lot. From light poles and electrical wires they call down to Boris. Do they expect him to hunt for them? They should properly be scavenging and likely are when they are not mocking my dog; why then did the scattered, decaying vegetables linger so long on the sidewalk alongside the Chevron at the corner of 82nd and Burnside?

Down Stark Street is the old commercial district of Montavilla. Dickson's Drugs is being cleared out in preparation for a new tenant after ninety years in place; the mosaic RX still shills for a different era. The shops are mostly filled; a new hairdresser and barber have opened next to each other. Other establishments range from the cavernous video store to the new age book/clothing store to several bars and restaurants to Kim's Billiards (can the players really be all teenage Vietnamese gangsters?) to Flying Pie Pizzeria, the only establishment Mrs. The Fyd and I frequent (though we have patronized the frame shop). It is here that the gang of big crows slouch their way from perch to perch up the street. Again Boris eyes them curiously, but there is no tension to spring at them in his body, unlike that which will coil inside him when we turn the corner and enter the residential streets, along which houses house cats and trees shelter squirrels, all rich targets for his acquisitive instinct.