The west pier on Thursday evening presented, to a correspondent who had walked the long way round to verify it at the right hour, a configuration recent readers will recognise without further description. The heron was at the west pier. No fish showed at all. The dabchicks held their accustomed formation at the seaward end. The light was settled. No party was, by any visible sign, attending to any other.
The heron kept the place it has kept since its last reappearance, which our records place at the fourteenth of last month, and which it has since neither materially altered nor briefly vacated. It kept a short distance from the water’s edge and a slightly shorter one from the pier’s third post. It did not move in the hour I watched. It gave, at no point, the impression that it meant to. What it has established with readers, by long practice, is that the question of its movement is not one the matter at hand depends on.
The fish were not visible, as has been the case at the west pier on every inspection since the ninth of July, bar the brief return of the eleventh. I looked, at the depths and in the places that in another season would have been productive, and report nil. The water at the seaward end was, at the hour, of the clarity that in another season would have made the fish easy to find. The fish were not there to be found.
The eldest of the dabchicks was at her station. The rest of the family were at theirs. The eldest, approached at a respectful distance and asked whether the family had a statement, considered the question for the interval the dabchicks have set, since the spring, as the customary minimum, then gave the household’s note in three words. “As before, sir.” It was the shortest statement the family has issued in our record-keeping. It was also, by her bearing as she gave it, the most settled. The family appears, in such terms as it permits to be used of it, to have arrived at its position.
A pair of older drakes, out from the south bank for what one of them called, as I passed within range, “a look at the situation,” conferred at the landward end for a few moments and then went back the way they had come. Their conversation, at the customary distance, was inaudible. One of them seemed, briefly, to be counting on his wing. The other seemed, briefly, to be disputing the count.
Of the matters not raised on this occasion: the heron’s identity, where the fish go in the stretches of their absence, what the dabchicks know that no one at the pier does. Each is a matter on which this paper has, in earlier dispatches, set down what was there to set down. Each, in the still and settled afternoon of the sixth of August, declined to advance itself by a single new particular.
I withdrew at the second honk, toward the south bank. The west pier was, on the leaving as on the arriving, in the condition of a place that has, at last, learned how to be itself.