Monday at the southern waters came in the way one learns to expect of mornings that follow occasions. At the first honk the scene around the long-resident frog’s customary station was arranged in a manner that struck this correspondent, even from the distance at which she made her approach, as not quite the customary one. The light held, and the water carried the warmth that water keeps on the morning after the longest evening. None of that was the thing that stopped her. The thing that stopped her was the presence, at the station beneath the second willow, of two frogs where there is customarily one.
This correspondent took up a respectful remove and did not approach. The long-resident frog was at his usual position on the small flat stone that has served, for as long as these pages have reported on the southern waters, as his appointed perch. He was upright, alert, and engaged in what looked, from where she stood, to be speech. The second frog was smaller, a shade paler, of no particular acquaintance, and not, by any earlier record, seen at the station before. He sat half a wing-length to the long-resident frog’s right, on a leaf, in an attitude this correspondent, mindful of the standing policy on inner states, will describe only as one of attention.
What passed between them will not here be called a conversation in the ordinary sense. The long-resident frog spoke. The second frog, in the period of observation, returned no audible reply. The long-resident frog’s manner was the one this correspondent has learned to know over the present season: deliberate, measured, with the small pauses by which he lets his words settle on the surface of the water before he adds to them. The second frog received it in the same attitude throughout. At one point the long-resident frog inclined his head briefly toward the southern edge of the cluster of pads, and the second frog’s gaze followed. The gazette notes the movement without reading it. At another, the long-resident frog produced a single short croak, which the second frog did not return.
This paper will not, on present evidence, call what it watched instruction. It will record only that the attitudes of the two were not inconsistent with such a reading, and that a reading is not a fact. The long-resident frog has not, as this dispatch is filed, confirmed any account of the relationship, nor has he been sought for one in the customary way. His preference on the morning after engagements like Sunday’s has been settled over several seasons, and that preference is respected. The second frog has not been approached, and has approached no one.
After some minutes, which this correspondent estimates at fifteen, though the morning had a stillness that makes such estimates a matter for the record under caveats, the long-resident frog resumed his customary submergence and went down to the deeper water beneath the station. The second frog stayed on the leaf. He did not, in the further period of observation, move, beyond a single adjustment of his position by no more than the width of a webbed foot. He was, when this correspondent took her leave, in the posture in which he had first been seen.
Whether the second frog has come for a day, a week, or longer is not a matter for speculation now. The southern waters were, taken in the round, as they have been all season, arranged about a central absence that Sunday evening did not, in any formal sense, address. The one material change this paper can put on the record is plainly stated. Where for many mornings there had been one frog at the customary station, there were, this morning, two.