The light on the south bank, Friday evening, had taken a small but plain step away from where it stood, at this same hour, a fortnight back. By the third honk of the afternoon the sun sat a little lower than the older drakes, who had been turning the question over among themselves for several days, had been used to finding it in the warmer weeks. The step was small. It was not, by any reading, alarming. The older drakes weighed it with the care it was owed and, on the evidence, found it acceptable.
I took my usual spot a little east of the drakes’ western station, where the bank and the west pier and the coot’s regular rest all came into view. The hour gave me a stillness of the kind the older drakes have, in the scraps of talk I am ever let near, called a mark of the season’s close. The light went across the water in the slower way they have noticed before and have, keeping their remarks short, never been pressed to say more about.
The heron stood at the west pier where it has stood, bar the small interruptions this paper has set down before, from the twentieth of May right through. It did not move while I watched. The dabchicks were drawn up at the pier’s far end in their settled formation. No fish showed on any reading the south bank gave me. The frog presently resident in the southern waters was, by such word as reached me through the customary channels, at his station, in the manner he has lately favoured. The long-resident frog, by the same word, was at his.
The coot of the Channel Sprint was on the eastern bank, at the small rise of grass that has been his station since the rematch of the eighth of July. The pebble, which came back to his keeping at the finish line that day and has stayed in it since, sat at his left, lately and deliberately moved there by such evidence as the distance gave me. He did not come over. I did not go to him. The coot, the pebble, and the small turn of the late light made an arrangement the gazette was content to leave as it found it.
The older drakes took their talk up again at the fourth honk and ran it on into the cooler hour. The fragments that reached me, in the order I caught them, were “shorter”; “as I recall, around now”; and, after the long silence that has become the way they close a matter, “well, then.” With that they were done. Whether the evenings have truly begun to shorten, or only seem to, the drakes did not say in any words I could carry off the bank. The light will be different again tomorrow. What the difference comes to is a thing the season has not yet finished telling.