Learning the River

In the spring the heron lost its corner of the river.

For six years it had fished the same slow bend below the mill, where the water turned once and dropped its weight and the small fish gathered in the shade. Then the men came with machines and took out the old wall, and by April the bend had straightened. The water there ran fast and clear over stones, and nothing waited in it.

So the heron flew upstream, into a region of the river it had never hunted. This water was shallower, wider, brighter. On the first morning it stood where it had always stood, in the open with the sun behind it, and every fish in the shallows saw the long shadow before the heron saw the fish. It ate nothing that day.

It came back on the second morning, and the third. Slowly it began to understand the new water. When the sun was low, the shadow lay right across the shallows and everything scattered. When the sun was high, the shadow was small and sat under the heron's own feet.

So it came late. It stood under the willow on the far bank, in the dark green water where the shadow of the tree hid its own, and it waited patiently, without moving, the way it had waited below the mill.

By the middle of June it was fishing well. It knew where the eels lay in the afternoon. It knew which stones held nothing at all.

Then the summer turned. The rain came in August, and the river rose brown and quick, and the willow shadow meant nothing any more. The eels moved. The shallows were not shallow.

The heron stood on the bank in the wet grass and looked at the water, which had changed again, and which would change again after that.

It had taken a season to learn this corner. It began to learn the next one that afternoon.