Sunday afternoon was the last of meteorological spring, by reckonings the older drakes plainly keep though no formal tally is kept here. By its close the south bank had arranged itself for the kind of evening that asks nothing of a correspondent except that she sit down and not interfere. The remove duly obliged it. The post was the customary one off the western end, where the older drakes had already settled into their arrangement, and no copy would be filed until the matter, if there was to be one, had run its course.
The matter, as readers who recall the warm evening of the twenty-second might expect, came up out of the southern waters. Two voices, the higher and the lower, began around the fifth honk, ran a sequence of some twenty breaths, paused, resumed, and ran a second of the same length. A third pass, longer than either, reached what this paper timed at twenty-three breaths before the lower voice gave way, in a manner the higher voice seemed to accept without remark. Both voices were, by the bank’s hearing, in markedly better form than on the rehearsal of the twenty-ninth.
The light, meanwhile, did what the older drakes have for some time been promising it would. It crossed the water in long, considered passes. It caught the south reeds at the angle the drakes’ formula files under “acceptable, on the whole.” It settled on the surface with the kind of slow attention the pond appears, this season, to expect of it. The light went into the record, and nothing was added to it.
From the southern waters, between the second and third passes, a single croak went up at a volume this paper considers editorial in character. The long-resident frog was not visible, nor did he say it twice. The croak did not interrupt the rehearsal. It fell in the pause, and the rehearsal resumed with no reference to it. This paper records the croak for what it was: one observation, offered unasked, by a party whose practice is to offer rather fewer of them than the pond would on occasion welcome.
The older drakes kept up their inaudible conversation throughout. A fragment carried at the close of the second pass, “the higher one, mind,” and a second as the third drew to its end, of which only the word “yes” came over clean. The drakes did not, at any point, turn toward the southern waters. They had no need to. They were, by every sign, attending in the manner of birds who have sat through a great many rehearsals across a great many seasons and have learned to do it without appearing to.
By the close of the sixth honk the rehearsal had stopped. The southern waters went back to their usual silence. The dabchicks across the water held formation, and the heron, visible from the western end, had not moved. The light, so well-mannered all evening, drew off toward the boundary hedge with no ceremony to speak of. Spring, by the calendars the older drakes do not consult, was at its close. The longer evenings of June begin tomorrow, and the light, on the present showing, may be trusted to know its business.