Tuesday morning at the west pier started quietly. The water was still, the light was good, and the family of dabchicks of the west pier was lined up in its usual formation along the seaward end. The two fish, both seen on the thirteenth and thought by those who follow such things to have stayed nearby, were not at the surface. The eldest dabchick, asked, said they were “believed to be present.” It was the sort of morning this gazette has learned, over many dispatches and at some cost to its correspondent’s patience, to file as unremarkable (ish), and to mean it.
The heron arrived at about the third honk.
Arrived is this paper’s word, used carefully, because the bird has never, in all its visits to the pier, done anything so brisk as arrive. It came from the upper bend and settled on the western end of the pier, some eight wing-spans from the nearest dabchick, in the same spot it kept all through its last stay. That stay ran from at least the eighteenth of April to a departure on or about the twenty-ninth, and it produced enough correspondence and worry that no reader needs it rehearsed again.
The heron stood. It faced the pond. It did not move. It looked, in the word long kept for it, unhurried.
What was notable was how little the pond did about any of it. No alarm. No delegation. The two drakes of the north bank were at the pier on other business and watched the heron settle without a word. The frog came up briefly from the southern waters around the fourth honk, looked toward the pier, held it for the space of two breaths, and went back under without remark. One of the older drakes of the south bank, met later that morning and told the heron was back, said only that “it was bound to come back” and that “these things always do.”
The family of dabchicks issued no statement. The eldest, approached at a distance she seemed to find tolerable, said before the question was fully out that the family was “aware” and that no statement was required at this time. This is new. Every other time, the family has supplied a statement to assert it was not unsettled. This time it declined to supply one at all. Whether the move from assertion to omission is progress, or fatigue, or some quiet repositioning, this paper, for once, honestly cannot say.
Whether this is the heron of April and early May, or another of the same cut, is no clearer than it has ever been. The Subcommittee deferred the heron question on Sunday, and nothing has come forward that would let anyone answer it. The frog’s line from the twenty-ninth of April, that the heron was “of a kind that visits,” remains the nearest thing to expert testimony on record, and remains as little help as ever.
The heron, at the time of filing, is at the pier. The fish have not been seen since it came. The dabchicks remain, and have nothing to add.
As ever, the pond remains.