Sunday morning came to the south bank in the way the season’s late weeks have taught it to come. The light arrived a little later than it had at the same hour a fortnight back. The older drakes were already at their station when I reached the willow, meeting the stillness with the brand of patience that group keeps for mornings of this kind. The water was warm. The reeds were still. The breeze was not.
The older drakes had taken their places along the south bank’s western end in the arrangement they have settled on for a Sunday since the warmer evenings began. Three sat at the customary line. The fourth, this once, sat a little south of his usual place, in what I will venture, with the small risks attached to such ventures, to call the shade. That shift of the fourth is the one departure from the previous Sunday. It was carried out, by every visible sign, without remark.
Their conversation, held at the customary volume and on the customary topics, never once in the hour I watched carried far enough for a single word to be pinned down with confidence. Fragments reached me. The first, in the order I caught them, was “as I recall”. The second may have been the word “still”. Then came a silence longer than usually sits between their exchanges. After it the formula “well, then” arrived, delivered by one of the four with the air of a bird closing a matter that had not, until the moment of closing, been in any urgent want of one.
Knowing that the older drakes’ deliberations are, by this paper’s long convention, a species of weather, I did not approach. I noted only that the matter under their care, whatever it was, looked, by the length of the silences and the spacing of the fragments, like one they had met before and would, I have no doubt, meet again.
The pond gave up nothing else of consequence in the hour I gave it. The heron held its accustomed spot at the west pier. The dabchicks were in formation. The fish were nowhere in evidence. The light, on the whole, was kind.
I let the morning be. It had not asked me for anything more.