The southern waters at first honk on Sunday were, by any measure, plainly empty. The long-resident frog, whose post below the second willow has become a fixture readers may take for granted as readily as the desk does, was not in attendance. The leaf that had drifted there on Saturday evening, recorded then with the appropriate care, was no longer present. It had submerged, or departed, or been quietly moved by some interest there is no liberty to name.
Your correspondent kept a respectful remove and noted, in the order they came into view, the morning’s arrangements. The three provisional candidate pads, named by the Cultural Subcommittee on the third of last month, and held by the Reed-Bed Subcommittee at the same session to carry no further weight, sit where they sat that day. One of them, the easternmost, now shows a small tilt of no apparent significance. The central position, vacant since the seventeenth of April, presents the gap it presents every morning. A slight unevenness in the surface. A circle of pondweed at a respectful remove. The kind of stillness the older drakes, were they passing, would call “as it was.”
From the direction of the Old Willow, around the third honk, a rehearsal carried. One voice this time, not two. The higher voice. Hettie, working alone, on what may be Item 3 or may be something else, the running order’s particulars not yet held beyond the duet in third position. This paper has heard a number of her practices now and is prepared to commit to the identification. The phrase ran about ten breaths, paused, ran again for about fourteen, and then declined to repeat. There was no approach made.
The frog’s absence is, without alarm, neither new nor unwelcome. Across his long run in these pages he has set the precedent that his presence at a station is not contractual. He has gone missing for whole days together, and once, around the storm of the twenty-fourth of April, for the best part of a week. That morning an attempt to put the storm to him was politely declined. Where he goes when he is not where one expected is a thing he has shown no wish to explain.
In the meantime the southern waters went on without him. A small dragonfly worked the easternmost pad. Two minnows, of a kind not worth specifying, made one circuit of the central position and withdrew. The pondweed shifted, briefly, in a current the season does not readily account for. The rehearsal, resuming for a third pass, took the shape of the first and stopped, this time, after eight breaths.
This paper waited for the frog well into the fourth honk, then, satisfied he was not minded to appear, took its leave. The southern waters at this hour, in this season, with the central position open and their resident in absentia, keep the dignity proper to a place that has been the place at which one knew where one was. The light was kind. The water was still.