Two fish were under the west pier shortly after first honk on Friday. They sat in what this reporter, who has logged enough hours at this pier to say so with confidence, takes to be much the same spot the two fish of the thirteenth of May occupied. They looked about the same size as the thirteenth’s, too, though the light was different and the comparison is the reporter’s, not an instrument’s. Judgements of that kind are not to be leaned on hard, and this one is not. The fish were there. That much is firm.
The heron has not been visible at the west pier since Thursday afternoon. This reporter confirmed the bird in its station at the close of Thursday’s watch, in the position it has held since the twentieth of May. By first honk on Friday it was gone. A circuit of the pier and the stations a goose can reasonably reach turned up no bird anywhere the customary positions can see. Where it went, and whether it is the same bird that will return, is not for saying here. So the question went instead to the dabchicks, who issued a brief statement, set out below.
The eldest of the dabchicks has, since the eleventh of last month, been the family’s voice on such matters. She delivered the household’s observation at the pier’s seaward end just before the third honk. Here it is, entire: “We observe the change but do not interpret it.” The family, she added, was neither unsettled by the change nor inclined to think itself so, and no further statement was in prospect. This reporter took it down with thanks and left her to it.
Now the correlation. The bird goes, the fish come. This paper first remarked it on the seventh of May, when one fish showed up the morning after the bird’s first departure, and again on the thirteenth, when two appeared the morning after it stayed away. By Friday the thing has run to a pattern regular enough that the correlation is no longer the story. The pattern is. Whether it is a correlation in the strict sense, or just the order in which these matters habitually arrange themselves, has never been put to the Subcommittee. The Subcommittee has declined, every prior time, to find the matter within its jurisdiction.
The fish stayed under the pier most of the morning. When this reporter left, shortly after the fifth honk, they were moving slowly along the pier’s underside, westward, in such terms as the pier admits of a compass. They had not, in all that time, shown any sign of leaving it. A further fish, possibly a third, seemed to hang at the deeper water toward the centre of the pond. This reporter would not commit to it on the evidence, and the gazette records it only as a possibility. The dabchicks held their formation. The pier was, all told, in tolerable order, which is the most this paper is prepared to say of a morning on which the central fact was an absence.
The pattern is acknowledged. The pattern is not explained. The pattern is the pattern.