The Heron Who Stood Very Still

The tide was out, and the estuary lay in the dark like a plate somebody had licked: wide, wet, and shining a little at the edges.

Godfrey stood in it.

He was a heron, and he had been standing in that particular place, on one leg, at the edge of the channel where the river came down through the mud to meet the sea, for so many years that the channel had moved twice and he had simply moved with it. He was grey, and tall, and folded, and if you had not known he was there you would have taken him for a post. Several things had.

Dilly knew he was there. She had known for about ten minutes, and it was ruining her night.

Dilly was a turnstone, which is a small, busy, stripy bird that runs along the tideline turning things over to see what is underneath, and she was young, and it was her first winter, and she had lost the flock at dusk. Not badly. She could see them, or see where they were: a low grey huddle on the rocks across the water, out of reach until the tide went down enough to walk it. She was safe where she was, on a bank of shingle above the mud. She was fed. There was nothing wrong with her at all, except that she could not stop.

She had run up the shingle and down it. She had turned over eleven stones and a bit of weed and a crab shell, and found nothing worth the trouble under any of them, and turned them over again in case. She had tucked her head under her wing and taken it out. And all the time, twenty yards off, at the channel edge, the heron had not moved at all, and she could not stand it.

She went over.

“What are you doing?” she said.

Godfrey did not look down. Herons do not need to. “Standing,” he said.

“What for?”

“Fish.”

Dilly looked at the channel. It was a foot of grey water going quietly past over mud. “There aren’t any.”

“Not yet,” said Godfrey.

She waited for more. There was no more. She ran a little way along the channel and back, and turned over a stone, and came and stood beside him, and it was very hard, standing still next to something that was so good at it. Her feet wanted to go. Her head wanted to turn. She turned it, and looked at him, and he was exactly as he had been, one leg, neck folded, beak a little down, eye open and pale and fixed on the water.

“Doesn’t your leg get tired?”

“Which one?”

“The one you’re on.”

“I change them,” said Godfrey. “You’ve not seen me do it. That’s rather the idea.”

Dilly thought about this.

The tide turned. You could not see it turn, but you could hear it: a change in the sound of the whole estuary, out beyond the mud, a long breath in where before there had been a long breath out. The channel beside them seemed to pause. Then it began, very slowly, to fill.

“Now what?” said Dilly.

“Now the same,” said Godfrey.

She stood. It was easier than she had expected, once the water started coming, because the water was doing something and she could watch it do it. It came up the channel in a thin bright line with a bit of froth on the front, and then it was a wider line, and then it was not a line at all but the whole channel, brown and moving, with the shingle bank going under it a stone at a time. Godfrey did not move back. He did not need to. He had stood where he stood because the water would come to him, and it did.

Something went by along the far tideline, low and quick and red. A fox, going home. It did not look at them. It did not know they were there.

“It didn’t see us,” Dilly said, very quietly.

“No.”

“Because we were still.”

Godfrey said nothing, which she was learning meant yes.

The moon came up. It came up out of the sea at the mouth of the estuary, huge and low and the colour of a shell, and it laid a road across the water straight to them, and Dilly, who had seen the moon before, had never seen it from standing still, and found that it was different. It went up. You could watch it go. It was so slow you could not see it moving and so steady that when you looked away and back it had moved, and she looked away and back a great many times, and it was always a little higher, and the road it made across the water was always a little shorter, and she felt, in a way she could not have explained, that she was being let in on something.

“Godfrey,” she said.

“Mm.”

“Is this what you do all night?”

“Most nights.”

“Every night?”

“When I’m not asleep.”

“When are you asleep?”

Godfrey turned his head, then, for the first time, and looked down at her with one pale eye, and there was something in it that might in another bird have been a smile. “You’d not know,” he said, and turned it back.

The water was up to the top of the shingle now, and still. High tide is a quiet time. Everything that was going to move has moved, and everything that is going to feed has not started, and the whole estuary lies full and flat with the moon on it, like a thing that has been put down carefully. Dilly stood in the middle of it, beside the heron, and her feet had stopped wanting to go. She noticed this. Then she stopped noticing it.

And out in the bay, beyond the mouth, where the moon road went, something rose.

It was very slow. It was very large. It came up out of the flat water like a hill deciding to be there, dark, and wet, and shining along the top, and it went on coming for longer than seemed possible, and then there was a breath, one, that they heard from all that way off, a great soft blowing sigh, and it went down again, and the water closed, and the moon road lay across the place where it had been as if nothing had happened.

Dilly did not say anything. She did not run anywhere. She did not turn anything over.

“Whale,” said Godfrey, after a while, as if she had asked.

“Do they come often?”

“No.”

“Would I have seen it? If I’d been running about?”

“No,” said Godfrey. “You’d have been running about.”

The moon went on up. The tide, having filled, began, in its own time, to think about leaving. The huddle of turnstones on the far rocks had gone to sleep, every one of them, heads under wings, and Dilly’s head, she found, was under hers, and she took it out, and looked at the heron, and put it back.

She slept standing up. She had not known she could.

Godfrey stood beside her. The water went down past the shingle, past the mud, back into its channel, and in the channel, towards morning, a fish came, one, and stopped, and Godfrey’s neck went out and came back with it, the whole thing so quick and so quiet that the small bird beside him did not stir.

He swallowed. He folded. He stood.

The moon was going down over the land now, and the sea was going out to meet the morning, and on the edge of the channel where the river met it, the tall grey bird and the small striped one stood together in the shallows, one leg each, not moving, while the estuary breathed.