The object on the north shore, deposited there in the small hours of Saturday and talked about ever since, was pondside business in full on Monday. An inspection convened shortly after first light, by general acclamation rather than any formal motion. Over the morning it drew a number of waterfowl the Clerk has since put, with a confidence the figure does not entirely earn, at “between thirty and possibly more.”
The Warden of the Sluice had been first to the object. That was on Saturday, and the Warden made the initial assessment then. The Warden returned now for a second look, with the deputy. The deputy is newly back at her post, and arrived carrying a freshly burnished sense of professional purpose. She undertook a series of measurements with the principal humidity gauge, on the grounds that the local humidity around the object might prove material to its identification. The Warden permitted this without comment. No conclusions were drawn from the readings. The readings were entered into the record regardless.
The Clerk of the Reed-Bed Subcommittee took up a position to the rear and made notes throughout. At midday the Clerk was asked whether the Subcommittee meant to issue a formal communiqué. The Clerk replied that the Subcommittee could issue no communication that did not first depend on a determination of what the object actually was. This paper was invited to understand that no communiqué was, accordingly, in prospect. This paper understood.
Speculation, by the close of the morning, had divided three ways. A faction around Drake Halford of the east shore held that the object was a piece of a boat, possibly the gunwale of a small dinghy, possibly belonging to one of the human visitors who moor at the upper bend. A second faction, of less coherent membership but greater volume, held that the object was not a piece of a boat but a piece of something else, the precise nature of which was for the experts. A third party, consisting in its entirety of the long-resident frog, declined to offer a view. He observed only that he had still not, in his time at the pond, seen the like before, and that he wished his earlier remark on the subject read in that light.
Several explanations were considered and rejected over the morning. That it was driftwood: rejected by the Warden, on the texture. That it was an unfamiliar plant: rejected by an elderly drake, who had never known a plant of that shape. That it was a relic of some previous storm, now resurfaced: provisionally retained, on the sole ground that no other theory had stronger evidence behind it. A party of goslings, Hettie among them, was brought along to see the object. They were unimpressed.
One late-morning incident, recorded for completeness, briefly enlivened things. A junior member of the inspection, whose name escaped this correspondent in the moment, set out to approach the object directly and learn by close contact what it was. The Warden was seen to draw breath. The Clerk was seen to begin a sentence and not finish it. The junior member reached the object, considered it for a while at a range the Warden later called “closer than was strictly required for any forensic purpose,” and then retreated, apparently satisfied. Asked what the close approach had yielded, the junior member said the object was, on closer inspection, still the object. The remark was generally felt to have moved the matter no nearer a resolution.
The inspection was suspended for the afternoon at the Warden’s discretion, on account of a rising tide and the difficulty of examining at close quarters an object soon to be surrounded by water. Resumption is set for Tuesday. HONK, said the deputy, by way of professional summation, before retiring to file her measurements. Whether Tuesday brings an identification, or only another morning of the object being firmly itself, is a question this paper is not, tonight, able to answer.