This paper has not, in the four months of its appearing, filed a dispatch datelined from the upper bend. The omission has been less editorial reservation than plain distance. The upper bend is a long way from the pond’s settled stations, and matters arising there have, until this quarter, reached us by way of whatever party was prepared to carry them. The lights, now on the agenda of two consecutive Subcommittee sessions, the editor judged worth closer attendance than that route allows. I set out on Saturday morning, reached the bend in the early afternoon, and stayed until first honk on Sunday.
The upper bend, on first inspection, looked much like the reports I had received and filed. The water is broader here than at the south bank, and quieter. The reeds are taller. The southern margin gives way, at a point I did not undertake to map, to ground I understand to be the boundary hedge’s distant approach. I did not approach it.
The fishing party of mallards was at the spot it customarily takes its evening meal, some way west of the bend. The party is four mallards, three of whom I had met in the spring over the matter of the heron sighting. They received the visit with courtesy and were ready, in particular, to be interviewed on the lights.
Their account, when it came, was precise to the smallest detail the matter admits. The three lights were “small and steady,” they said. They sat “approximately one wing-span above the water, perhaps a hand’s breadth less,” by one member’s measure. Another, working with his wing, put the configuration as “broadly equidistant, but with the right-most at a slightly greater remove than the centre, and the centre at a slightly greater remove than the left.” That was the whole of the geometry. The lights held, the party estimated, for “between four and six minutes,” and then ceased.
On every other particular the party was vaguer. The date they had last fished the upper bend, the quarter the lights had appeared in, the direction of the wind: on each, in the gracious phrasing one member preferred, they were “less able to be definitive,” and said so plainly. I did not press. The gap between precision on the main thing and vagueness on its surroundings is, to my mind, the kind of evidence an honest witness produces.
The long-resident frog was also at the upper bend during my stay, which I record with the appropriate caution as to inference. He was not seen in the company of the mallards. He was seen at a reed-margin to the south of them in the late afternoon, and again at a small inlet to the east in the early evening, in what I took to be a deliberate progress around the bend’s principal features. The frog presently resident in the southern waters was some distance from the senior party and appeared, at the one moment I watched him, to be examining the water beneath a reed-cluster. I approached the long-resident frog as the evening closed and asked the nature of his business. He replied that it was a matter on which he would prefer not to be quoted.
No lights were observed while I was there. The evening of the seventh was clear and unremarkable. The moon was at a phase not to be called unusually bright. The boundary hedge, in such features as the bend allowed me to see, was present and unaltered. I waited at a reed-margin for the interval the fishing party had recommended, then for one more. Nothing came. I went back at first honk on Sunday, by the route I had come.
So the question keeps its own counsel a while longer: what the lights are, and whether they return, no one at the upper bend was able to tell me. The bend, on one visit, is not less reliable than the rest of the pond. It only sits that bit further from the gazette’s usual reach.