The south bank wanted nothing of me on Sunday, which is exactly why a returning traveller is glad to see it. The light at first honk was thin in the way this paper has more than once called kind. The western reeds stood where they had stood on Friday, before I left. The water was unmarked. Drake Halford took his usual turn at the east-shore bend. The Deputy of the Warden of the Sluice was at the gate, writing something in her notebook, as near as I could tell from where I stood. The Warden was not there.
I had come back from the upper bend at first honk by a route I am willing to call direct (ish), with no plan beyond putting a return on the record. I had spent the previous evening up there. I had seen nothing I did not already expect to fail to see. I was tired, and not, in any way worth reporting, the wiser for it.
By the third honk the older drakes had gathered at their station on the bank’s western end. Their talk ran, as the talk of older drakes has run on Sunday mornings since there were older drakes, at a pitch I did not try to reach. I took my usual spot at the usual remove and waited to learn whether the journey would come up. It did. One of them, the eldest I think, though I would not swear to it, called across the little stretch of water between us to ask whether anything had been seen. I let him know it had not. He nodded once. He put it briefly to the two, or possibly three, drakes beside him, then went back to whatever had been under discussion before the question arrived. The matter, as I read it, was closed for the hour.
The long-resident frog was not at his station in the southern waters. The frog presently resident in the southern waters was: there, silent, and settled into a place the long-resident frog has been seen to hold at this hour. I had no instruction and would not guess at the meaning of it. A small leaf went by. The smaller frog did not stir.
Nothing came across from the west pier. The eldest of the dabchicks stood at the seaward end. The heron held the spot at the west pier it has lately taken for its own. The fish stayed out of sight. None of this has changed in a while, and the pond seems happy to keep it that way.
In the early afternoon the Travelling Drake came along the east shore, headed, I gathered, toward the Lammas-aftermath conversations he had told a passing party on Saturday he meant to hold. He did not stop. He marked me with a tip of the head, and I returned it. There was a purpose in his line that told me he had business elsewhere and was not yet quite done with this place.
Late in the afternoon I went off for a short nap. The pond, unwatched and unrecorded, presumably carried on without me.