The south reeds were still on Friday morning. They were still at first honk, and nothing across the rest of the watch gave reason to call them anything else. The water was unhurried. The reeds at the bend were drying. The light came a degree or two kinder than it had all week, though on the reading of light the older drakes hold a longer and better view than this paper can match, freely conceded.
The coot was at the bank by the second honk. His own bank, by general agreement, though no formal designation has been made. He stayed there through the watch. And he was, as regular readers of the recent bulletins will appreciate, in possession of his pebble. The pebble sat on the bank, on the coot’s left, in the place it was carefully moved to at the Sprint finish on Wednesday last. Since then the coot has, by every sign, declined to disturb it for long.
The gazette logged two movements of the pebble. The first came near the third honk. The coot raised it in his beak to about a wing-span, inspected it from below for what came to three breaths, and set it back exactly where it had been. A brief settling followed, a small beak-side adjustment to each, then a stillness in which the coot regarded the pebble from a short remove for some minutes before he resumed his own posture. The second movement came near the fourth honk. It matched the first in every particular but one. This time the inspection was, by every sign, conducted from above.
For any reader who lost track of the pebble’s particulars across its long custody in the Clerk’s office, here they are again. It is smooth. It is a colour the owner calls a sort of grey. Its dimensions go unstated today, the Subcommittee not yet having adopted a standard to state them by. The stone has passed through various keepings across the spring and early summer, the better part of three months, and sat in the Clerk’s office on no fewer than four occasions. It is now, for the first time since the morning of the twenty-first of May, in its owner’s keeping, on its owner’s bank, and so far as one could judge without approaching, to its owner’s settled satisfaction.
The gazette did not approach the coot. On the matter of this pebble the reporter’s instinct has long been to file at the first opportunity and ask the nearest party why. The matter of the pebble at rest asks for no such inquiry. The pebble is at rest. The coot is at rest. The bank is at rest, and a thing at rest is not improved by a reporter standing over it.
So the watch stood off, and let the bank keep its quiet morning, and the stone keep its place.