Friday on the west pier was, in the small particulars by which the west pier is watched at this point in the season, the twin of the previous Friday and the one before that. I had walked the pier in the morning at the third honk on another errand and stayed on for a stretch I would call long enough, and I record here only the routine state of things as I found them. The heron was present, at the spot it has made its own, at the inner end of the pier, facing north so far as a heron’s face lets one say so. It had not, by any sign I could read, moved during my watch. Its bearing was, to use the one word the gazette has reluctantly accepted as adequate to the job, thoughtful.
This Friday closes the second fortnight of the season the heron has now spent at the west pier without once departing. This paper does not propose to make a great thing of the milestone. The bird’s spot has been its spot since the twenty-first of last month, and the run now ending reaches from then to now with no break I could see. So the question of the heron stays where it has stayed: open, and unhurried.
A fish showed beneath the pier at about the fourth honk. One fish, of the cooler-water sort, of a length I would put at most of a wing. It held there for what I am willing to record as two full breaths, then slid off into the shadow at the pier’s outer line. It was the first fish to show at the pier since the third instant. It was not, by anything I could make out from my distance, pursued. The heron did not move. The dabchicks, drawn up along the seaward end in their standard formation, gave the small sign of having clocked the fish and the larger sign of having decided that clocking it was the whole of what the moment asked of them. The fish has not shown a second time as I write.
At about the close of the morning’s watch the eldest of the dabchicks issued a brief statement for the family. It came from the seaward end of the pier in what is now the eldest’s manner: small, distinct, and without preamble. As I took it down: “We are, on consideration and at the present hour, not unsettled. We acknowledge the fish; we do not interpret. We acknowledge the bird; we do not interpret. We will continue, as conditions allow.” It was the eldest’s first statement since the eleventh instant. The form was, by now, the form, and the brevity, which has become the eldest’s habit in public, took nothing away from what the gazette is prepared to read as the family’s continued and well-defended calm.
The fish has not come back. The heron has not stirred. The dabchicks have, by every visible sign, gone back to the formation they kept all morning. None of it has moved an inch since I arrived, and that, by now, is the news.
The Deputy of the Warden of the Sluice was at the gate as the morning closed, as she had been each morning of the week, keeping the small daily office in the gate’s quiet way. The Warden was not at the pier, nor at any other spot my view took in. The Clerk crossed from the reeds once, fell into brief conference with the Deputy, and went back.
By Friday’s close the bank was warm. The light was clear. The fortnight, in its small steady way, goes on.