The Reed-Bed Subcommittee met at its regular Wednesday session, in the usual manner, and took up, among other things, the lights the fishing party of mallards filed from the upper bend on the twenty-fifth. By the Clerk’s own introduction it is the first matter of its kind to reach the Subcommittee in some while. It was given, accordingly, the formal weight this paper understands a new question to require of the Subcommittee’s procedures.
The Clerk read the fishing party’s statement into the record entire. That included the particulars of the lights, three, small, steady, at an elevation the gazette has already reported, and the party’s own note that the lights answered to no cause the Subcommittee might know from its records. Then he opened the floor.
The first question was whether any party in the room could say the lights were the work of some activity already on the Subcommittee’s books. The Clerk had got ahead of this. On his own initiative he had put the question to the Cultural Subcommittee before the session, and learned that no cultural activity of any kind had been scheduled at the upper bend for the period in question, nor for any other recent period within memory. The Cultural Subcommittee’s acting chair, there by invitation, confirmed it.
The second question was whether the Travelling Drake might add anything. He was last seen at this pond on the eighteenth of May and is understood to make periodic approaches from the direction of the upper bend. The Clerk noted he was not, at present, of the company. That line of enquiry was set aside until his return.
The third question ran longest. The Junior Member proposed that the Subcommittee resolve to send one of its own members for an independent observation, that member to travel to the upper bend on an evening of fit weather and file a report in the customary form. He put it plainly. The matter was, he said, “not assisted by the absence of any party presently before the Subcommittee able to report on the upper bend directly.” He had a point. Waiting on further filings from a party under no instruction of the Subcommittee’s was, in his words, “perhaps not the most expeditious available to us.”
The Clerk answered in his own words. “The upper bend is, on the whole, not the Subcommittee’s customary territory, and the Subcommittee is, on the whole, not minded to enlarge its territory by means of an evening’s expedition.” He paused. Then he added that whether the Subcommittee’s writ even reached the upper bend was a question the body had never taken up, and that any independent observation would drag that larger jurisdictional question in behind it. That was more than the Subcommittee cared to open today. On those grounds the matter was deferred.
The Junior Member took the deferral with the composure your correspondent has watched settle on him these recent weeks. A brief nod. No remark. A return to his former posture. The matter, in the Clerk’s closing formula, was carried forward to the next regular session.
In other business. Drake Halford’s sixth filing (see yesterday’s bulletin) was acknowledged by reference number and filed under “Items of Continuing Interest.” Where else. The Deputy’s third conditions report, held over at the last session for as long as the Warden stays away from the sluice, was noted still pending. The Warden was not in attendance. The wall marking remains under observation. The coot’s category sits, as before, with the Clerk of the Race.
Where the lights came from, the Subcommittee did not decide, and does not propose to hurry. Some matters, the Clerk put it, have to be let alone to develop in their own time, at their own bend of the pond. The lights are still up there. So, for now, is the question.