The noise he heard turned out to be a deer’s nose rubbing against a windowpane, reaching to get at the apples on the table inside.  Seven were stacked in a small bowl, one for each day.  He had absent-mindedly decided on the redder the riper, and so the reddest three were on top.  The deer licked at them on the pane.  Were he to move to open the window, it was sure to scurry off.  If he later left apples outside, the deer would want to make a habit of it.  So he watched instead the smudges of breath and saliva the deer kept slathering on the windowpane in what grew to seem a pattern, as though making smudges was what the deer was thinking itself to be doing all along.  He became convinced of it when the deer took off.  The smudges had been grouped into the rounded shape of an apple with its stem still on.  Had the apples been inspiration and not food?  He stepped out to look at the pane from the deer’s side, and never forgot that without a debate with himself he had then put all the apples out to pay the deer back.