Heavy weather is due to reach the pond by late Friday afternoon. The Warden of the Sluice issued an advisory at first light. No one recalls the Warden doing such a thing before, not this season at least, and the issuing of it has been read, around the bank, as news in its own right. The advisory itself was short. It asked all waterfowl to secure their effects and to keep out of the open shallows. It asked them, further, to stay within “a reasonable distance of the bank one is most prepared to be on, should events prove of consequence.” That phrasing is the Warden’s. That was the whole of it. The Warden does not pad.
The barometer, by such reading as the Warden would share, has been falling since the small hours. The east wind is expected to stiffen by mid-afternoon. Hail toward evening is, in the Warden’s measured phrase, “not to be taken lightly, on the present indications.” The older drakes who remember the storm of three winters past have been holding low conversations with the young all morning. The Subcommittee has issued no public bulletin yet. The Clerk, however, has been seen making notes, which the bank reads as a bulletin of a quieter kind.
Bread at the East Bank feeding point has been moved, by common agreement, to the higher ground above the bank. The pebble, which readers will recall from three sessions of the Subcommittee on two separate grievances, has been moved higher still, on the Clerk’s instruction, the Clerk declining to be the party blamed if it is lost a second time. The Cultural Subcommittee has postponed all rehearsal for the midsummer programme indefinitely. Hettie’s mother is said to be relieved.
The reed beds are, as ever in such weather, the chief worry. A general lashing-down ran through the afternoon. The resident drakes worked at it together to a degree not seen on this bank before, which is the sort of co-operation that arrives, on the pond, only when the alternative is worse. The dabchicks at the west pier were asked whether they would move inland for the duration. They replied with the emphasis that has, by now, become a habit with them. They had no intention of moving anywhere. Further questions on the point would be treated as impertinent. The fish, by every account, remain absent.
The older drakes have invoked the storm of three winters past at every chance all day, and they overdraw it. That storm threw winds put, at the time, at upwards of fourteen drakes, a unit now kept mostly as a curiosity, and it shifted a stretch of the east channel to a position rather further east than before. The coming weather is serious. It is not expected to reach those numbers. The deputy unaccounted for three winters ago is also the deputy unaccounted for now, which is set down beside the rest and left where it lies.
The heron’s whereabouts, in this weather, cannot be established. Whatever the heron meant by its stand at the west pier, the heron is not at the pier, by any account gathered so far. Several quarters offered theories, unprompted, and they are set down here for the public benefit, with no view rendered on their merit. Some say the heron picked this storm to leave in. Others say the heron picked this storm to arrive somewhere else in. The two are not, on close inspection, as different as their holders believe. Which it is, the pond cannot say, and will not be able to until the weather has had its turn and gone.