Thursday at the west pier brought the biggest advance in the heron arc since the bird came back to the pier on the twentieth of May. The family of dabchicks issued a statement. This is the family whose chief practice all season has been to assure the record they are not unsettled, and whose silence since the fifteenth of last month this paper has tried to describe without overstating. The statement came in person, from the eldest of the family, who has not addressed these pages in her own right before. She is, it bears noting, a different bird from the eldest of the goslings, with whom she has at least once in these pages been mixed up.
The eldest of the dabchicks came up shortly after the second honk, at the same measured distance her family keeps for these things. She gave it, in a voice the correspondent calls small but precise, without preamble. Here it is in full:
We have, on consideration, decided to refrain from issuing a statement at this time.
Our correspondent waited. Nothing more came. The eldest inclined her head, made what looked like a small, deliberate adjustment of her posture, and went back to her place at the seaward end of the pier. The rest of the family stood at their varying intervals, still, and gave no visible sign for the statement or against it.
It is, all the same, a structural advance the heron arc has not managed before. The family’s silence ran some twenty-seven days, by the gazette’s count, and took in the day the bird returned. It broke a pattern they had held unbroken since the eighteenth of April. So Thursday is not a return to the old habit but a step past it. The family has turned its refusal to be unsettled into a refusal to be drawn.
The heron stood at the pier throughout, in its usual spot three wing-lengths from the water. It did not move during the approach, the delivery, or the withdrawal. Whether it was attending to any of this, or merely there for it, is a question this paper leaves, as it leaves most heron questions, alone.
The eldest of the dabchicks, the correspondent’s later inquiries establish, is the senior of the family’s junior members. She has been seen before at what was once called, in these pages, an inspection of the family’s customary positions. As of Thursday she has, in fact, become the family’s spokeswoman to the press. Asked whether any notice of the appointment had been filed, the Clerk said the family had not, to his knowledge, been required to file in a matter of its own internal arrangement. Our correspondent took the answer.
The fish are still not visible. The heron is still there. And the matter, by the family’s own act, is now a matter on which a statement is declined.