This reporter watched the west pier on Tuesday morning, first honk to third, clear water and good light, and has to report that the fish were gone. Those two, possibly three, fish whose four-morning run had been the basis of this paper’s quiet excitement were not in evidence at any point in the watch. The heron was not at its station either. The pattern has complicated.
This is the kind of development that does not lend itself to a ready reading. The previous four mornings ran clean: bird away, fish present, dabchicks issuing statements of a sort. This morning runs: bird away, fish away, dabchicks not commenting at all.
The eldest of the dabchicks was at the seaward end throughout the watch. She was not, at any point in it, minded to make a statement. This reporter approached on the second honk, and with forbearance, the eldest of the dabchicks having lately shown the discretion to signal at a distance whether a nearer approach is welcome. By means this reporter thinks it improper to set out further, she conveyed that no statement was being prepared, and that none should be expected before the family had reached one of its own accord. There was, in this, no contradiction of anything the family had said on the third or the sixth. There was only silence where, on the four preceding mornings, there had been a sentence or two. This reporter withdrew.
The fish, whose absence has every prior season correlated with the heron’s presence, were not there through the watch, nor in the further hour this reporter kept from the bank above the pier. The water was clear. The visibility was good. The fish were not there. They had left by some means and at some hour this reporter cannot specify. Three orderings are possible. The bird’s return came before their departure, in which case the usual correlation holds. Their departure came before the bird’s return, in which case it does not. Or the two ran independently, by mechanisms of their own. This paper does not intend to settle which, on the evidence it has.
The Subcommittee has not met since Saturday’s noises. The Wednesday session is expected tomorrow, where the heron question should appear among the standing items, alongside the noises and, by the Clerk’s latest count, which this reporter could not confirm, some seven or eight further matters on which a deferral can be safely predicted.
So: the fish are not at the pier. The heron is not at the pier. The dabchicks are at the pier and are not speaking. The pier is exactly where it has been throughout. Whether this morning is a development of the arrangement, a wholly new arrangement, or a brief interruption that resumes by Wednesday, is not to be said on the evidence to hand. Accounts vary, and the only honest entry is that the pond has stopped, for one morning, doing the thing it had taught the gazette to expect.