The west pier, on a Saturday morning ten days after the heron’s return to its old station, stood under watch for some two hours. The post was a spot on the southern approach that has, over the past several weeks, proved the station from which the pier is least likely to notice a correspondent. The light was excellent. The water was clear to a depth of perhaps two wing-spans. The fish, for all the clarity and all the patience, were not visible at any point.
The bird was at the western end of the pier, in the station it has held since its return on the twentieth. Its head was turned toward the lily pads of the southern waters. It did not, across the two hours of watching, shift its position by any measure the eye could take. It did, twice, once at the third honk and once at the fourth, give the slow blink the gazette has learned in earlier dispatches to record and not interpret. Its account of itself, as ever, came by no other means.
The family of dabchicks was arranged at the seaward end in what has, these several weeks, become their standard formation. They issued no statement. They have issued none, by a tally now ten days long, on any day since the bird’s return. The eldest, though, was at work. The settled word for it, after some reflection, is an inspection of the family’s customary positions. She moved, with deliberate care and no apparent urgency, from the outermost position to the second, and from the second to the third. At each she paused about four breaths and seemed to be weighing, or confirming, some feature of the position that was not, from this distance, a thing the eye could share. At the fourth she conferred briefly with the second of the dabchicks, too low to record. Then she returned to the outermost position and, for the rest of the morning, did not move.
This paper will not commit, on an inspection conducted in silence and at a distance that allowed no further inquiry, to a reading of its purpose. It will record only that the eldest has not, in any prior dispatch on file, been seen to circuit the family’s stations as she did on Saturday. The inspection, whatever it was for, was carried out with a particular seriousness. It is the seriousness a family that has found no occasion to speak since the bird’s return might, by the natural drift of such things, come in time to ask of itself.
The long-resident frog was not at the western reach during the period. The Deputy of the Warden of the Sluice came by once, around the fifth honk, passing along the sluice approach toward the southern shore at a pace best called considered. She paused at the pier’s approach, regarded the west pier about two breaths, and went on without further sign of intent. The Warden was not seen.
By the sixth honk the pier had settled back into the arrangement the morning began in: the bird at its western station, the dabchicks in formation, the fish gone, the water clear, the light excellent. This paper left at the second honk that carried over from the reeds and filed on the way. The bird kept its station. The pier kept its silence. Whatever the eldest was confirming, she confirmed it to herself, and let the morning close over it.