Sunday came up warm and a touch hazier than any morning since the dog days began. The southern reeds held a stillness the older drakes seemed to be studying, though with the older drakes you can never be sure whether that is attention or only the habit of sitting still. They were at the station before your correspondent reached the willow, as they always are. The light was acceptable, by their standard. The water was warm. The reeds did not move.
What they had got onto, by the time your correspondent came up, was the question from Saturday’s bulletin: the upper-bend lights the fishing party of mallards filed (see the twenty-fifth). The evidence carried thin across the polite distance this desk has kept from that station for some seasons now. Three fragments reached the bank. In the order they were caught: “they say”; “I’d want to see them first”; and, after a longer pause, “the upper bend, of all places,” delivered like a position not freshly taken but fetched back from some earlier morning it had first been taken on.
What they made of it is not for printing. The older drakes’ deliberations are, by this paper’s long convention, a species of weather. They gather. They settle, or they do not. They leave behind only the kind of atmosphere off which the rest of the pond may take its reading. The atmosphere this Sunday, by your correspondent’s reading of it, was that of a question weighed with the care its kind deserves and then, by every sign on offer, set down.
The fishing party itself was nowhere on the south bank. They keep to the upper bend, and from that station they have now filed the only two reports of consequence this paper has on record from them: the heron sighting of the second of May, and the lights of the twenty-fifth. Both came in with a precision much remarked on here since the spring, a precision the upper bend does not usually send down. What the older drakes make of that precision your correspondent will not guess. Only this: the lights were considered, and the considering, so far as the south bank lets one judge, raised neither alarm nor a shrug.
A small leaf came loose from the Old Willow while the conversation ran and set off, the way small leaves do, toward the southern waters. The frog was not in sight. The frog presently resident in the southern waters, whom the long-resident frog still declines to call an apprentice (see the sixteenth), was not in sight either. The dabchicks held their formation at the west pier’s seaward end. The heron stood where it has stood, with brief interruptions, across most of this season. Not one of them was minding any of the others. And still the morning, the way these mornings do, held the whole lot in one composure that resists any further putting into words.
The older drakes’ last word on the lights your correspondent did not get, as usual. The fragment that closed the talk, as near as one could be sure it was the closing fragment, was “well, then,” which the older drakes bring out to end a settled matter or, just as readily, to begin one. The matter, this paper takes it, is still under consideration.
The leaf went on toward the water, in the way of small leaves. The morning closed over the lot of them and held.