On Saturday morning the long-resident frog of the southern waters was at the willow’s edge, in a posture this paper has decided, on careful reflection, to call preparatory. The word is the correspondent’s. Asked, the frog declined to confirm it. We record the question, and the decline, and move on.
He had not taken up his customary spot below the second willow. He sat a short way east of it, where the willow’s lower fronds touch the water and make a small alcove the gazette has not had cause to describe before. By the hour of arrival, the second honk give or take, he was settled on a piece of bark that had plainly been placed there for the purpose. By whom is not a thing that can be said here. Himself, a passing party, the current, take your choice. The bark was steady. The frog was steady on it.
For as long as the correspondent watched, and the frog’s ease with the arrangement made it a good while, he was now and then vocal, in a way the paper feels bound to call not conversational. The sounds were short. They were spaced at intervals no one tried to time. They were not his ordinary croak, the conversational one, which has served on many past mornings as a statement, an acknowledgement, or a polite dismissal, depending. These were of another order. They had a measured quality, as though the maker were rehearsing not the delivery of a thing but its shape.
The pondweed by his position had been disturbed in a pattern the correspondent has chosen, and the choice is the correspondent’s and not the frog’s, to read as deliberate. There was a small clearing right in front of the bark. There was a longer trail running out toward the central position. There was a faint scatter at the edges, the leavings of the clearing’s making. Whether the frog arranged it to any working end, or merely shifted it settling in, is not a question a frog can be asked, and it was not asked.
Our correspondent did, at a respectful distance, try for a word on the preparations for his programme piece, the one announced on the twelfth. The frog met the question with a small turn of the head. He did not answer. After a pause of about six breaths, he produced one of the short measured sounds, and went back to the water. It was taken, on balance, for a decline, and left at that.
The morning was warm. The light came down on the southern waters at the angle the older drakes have, on other days, judged satisfactory. A single dragonfly worked the cleared patch of pondweed and was, this once, ignored. Item Four, as the formula has it, awaits its evening. The frog stayed on his bark. The bark held. The clearing, the trail, the faint scatter at the edges lay where the correspondent had found them, in no hurry to mean anything yet.