The family of dabchicks of the west pier issued a statement on the heron at about the third honk on Saturday morning, delivered as ever through the eldest of the dabchicks. Your correspondent had waited at the seaward end on the cautious hunch that one was coming, after two days of the family’s close silence. The statement is reproduced below exactly as delivered:
“We remain not unsettled by the heron’s presence, and we wish it noted that we have, in the season, considered the matter not at all.”
The eldest of the dabchicks added that the family had nothing to add. The statement, she conveyed, exhausted their present view. Any further inquiry could keep until the family was minded to come back to the question. That, by the slight tilt of the head that has come to read as her full stop, was not anticipated soon. The reporter thanked her, took the statement down word for word, and went.
The family’s habit of issuing brief, near-identical statements on the heron was the gazette’s earliest and most reliable read on the west pier’s mood. The statements always ran to one effect: the household is not unsettled, has not been unsettled, and is not, on the present arrangement, becoming so. That habit broke on the twentieth of May, when for the first time in the season the family declined to say anything at all. It broke again across May and June, through a run of variant statements, the sharpest of them the household’s brief but consequential declaration of the eleventh of June that they had, on consideration, decided to refrain from issuing a statement at this time. Saturday’s statement marks the family’s full return to form.
The form is a precise instrument, and worth noting as one. Saturday’s statement is, in grammar and in the cadence of its delivery, indistinguishable from the statements the family was issuing in late April and early May. Their settled position is settled in language as much as in substance. It remains not unsettled. It wishes the matter noted. It has considered the matter not at all. The negations stack the way they have always stacked. The household, the gazette ventures, is once again itself.
The heron, for the record, held its station all morning. It had been there Thursday, at the last filing from the pier. It had been there through Friday by every sign. It was there at the second honk on Saturday and stayed past the reporter’s departure shortly after the fourth. The fish were not in evidence. The water was clear. The visibility was good. The arrangement is the usual one: the bird, the dabchicks, the absent fish, the pier, in the configuration that held through spring and early summer before the brief departures and oscillations of the past several weeks.
Whether that configuration holds through the coming days, or the season picks the oscillation back up, will not be called on the present count. What the gazette can call is this. The dabchicks have spoken, in their own form, on their own terms, and the west pier is settled enough for the moment.