Eels Read online

  * Also called a pa tuna, a pa is usually V-shaped, just like the weir Ray Turner used to catch eels in the Catskills, except instead of it being primarily built of stone, these weirs were built of wood and vines. And like Ray’s weir, they were used for catching fish on a downstream migration. At the vortex of the V was a trap, usually a woven basket. Some weirs were shaped like W’s with two vortices and two traps where the eels collected.

  * The following is written in a display on eel fishing in the Auckland National Museum: “In autumn, the dawn appearance of Matariki (Pleiades) in the east not only heralds the start of the Maori new year but is also the time to get ready the hinaki (traps) for harvesting adult tuna (eels).

  “Their migration downstream is foretold in the stars as Te awa o te Tuna (the river of eels) in the sky reveals itself. Te awa patahi is the start of the river. As eels move downstream they sometimes twist themselves into a tangled mass. This whiri (knot) can be seen in the cluster of stars in Te Tuna Whiri (the knot of eels).Then they move on past the eel weir te Pa-tuna to the hinaki (eel trap). Its mouth Te waha o te hinaki is formed by a group of stars in Te Koko (Corvus, a star), and the bottom end by Pekehawani (Spica, a star). The latter imparts energy to the eels enabling them to continue downstream whilst the ritual of mating commences, when the females select the males (Te kawao o te tairaka).”

  * This refers to Manawatu Gorge, which goes from the east side of the North Island near Norsewood, across the mountain range to the west at Palmerston North, and then to Foxton.

  * They have a similar method for catching eels in England and other parts of Europe, with worms on a string and no hook.

  * A parallel description of smoking eels in the chimney can be found in Thomas Howard’s book The Jonnycake Papers, about early nineteenth-century life in New England: “They [the eels] were then washed in clean sea water and hung up in the kitchen chimney, with its wide, open fireplace, for one night only. Next morning, the eels were cut in short pieces and placed in a gridiron, flesh side next to sweet- smelling, glowing coals, made from green oak, walnut, or maple wood.”

  * Bill Kerrison, a Maori man we visited later in the trip, has spearheaded a similar trap-and-transfer program on the Rangitikei River (North Island) -not only to help adult eels get past three major dams on their downstream migrations to the sea, but also to help the young eels get up above those same dams. He moves more than a million young eels upstream of Matahina Dam (the largest earthen dam on the North Island) every year.

  * Eels have one of the most powerful senses of smell of any creature. According to the German ichthyologist Friedrich Tesch, author of the most comprehensive scientific book on freshwater eels, Der Aal: “The eel is almost as sensitive to smell as the dog, which is not surpassed by any other animal.” Tesch wrote that eels can perceive the smell of roses diluted to the degree of “one ml of scent in a body of water 58 times that of Lake Constance.” (Lake Constance in Europe is 39 miles long and 830 feet deep.)

  * Though I had never seen balls of eels, I had heard many stories about them. A commercial fisherman named Roger on the Seine near Rouen, France, told me that he once caught a ball of eels in his nets. The ball was so tight that he couldn’t pull the eels apart with his hands, so he and his friend loaded the whole ball into the back of his car. When they got to Roger’s house the ball of eels was still tightly woven, and he had to use a hatchet to break them apart. A 1966 paper by J. C. Medcof in the Journal of the Fisheries Research Board of Canada, titled “Incidental Records of Behaviour of Eels in Lake Ainslie, Nova Scotia,” has several accounts of eel balls, this among them: “Frequently the migrating eels knot themselves together, and large bundles, often a fathom in circumference, are seen lying in the lakes or trundling down the streams.” Bill Kerrison told Stella and me about balls of eels he’d seen as a boy in the North Island-tight, compact, and almost perfectly spherical.”I was standing on the riverbank with my grandmother, and we saw this ball of eels go by, and I asked her, ‘Why do they do that?’ She said, ‘Because they’re in love.’ The Maori felt that eels formed balls as part of their courtship.”

  * Indeed, a recent study published in the New Zealand Herald showed that Maori who consumed eel meat almost daily had fewer health problems. High in omega-3 fatty acids, eel is especially good at preventing type 2 diabetes (the form linked to obesity). The study showed that Maori who ate eel several times a week had virtually no cases of type 2 diabetes, which was otherwise epidemic among modern Maori.

  * The Acclimatization Society was not unique to New Zealand, but existed in other colonies of the Crown, including Australia.

  * The only reliable way to age an eel is by counting the rings of a cross-section of the otolith-a small stone-like sensory organ in the inner ear-and the fish must be dead to obtain it.

  * Two years later I visited Don Jellyman in Christchurch on the South Island. He confirmed what Kelly said; at least, the numbers were close. Don said the mean age of the female eels leaving Lake Rotoiti to spawn is ninety-three years.

  * The tags could be timed to release from the eel and, being buoyant, come to the surface and transmit data of the fish’s whereabouts and daily activities via satellite to a computer. Don’s first effort to tag eels, in 2001, did not yield a great deal of information about where the longfins went to spawn. Perhaps the most intriguing bit of data retrieved from one of the eels was its pattern of traveling in an undulating formation, swimming near the surface at night and diving to nearly three thousand feet during the day. Don later told me that the reason for this behavior could be to evade predators or delay sexual maturation in the cold depths until the eels get to the spawning place. Similar travel patterns were observed in results from a 2006-07 study tracking European eels from the west coast of Ireland to the Sargasso Sea.

  chapter four

  More-Tables

  OF Taniwha

  Stellas father, Falla August, with a longfin eel

  It is hard to see freshwater eels in their habitat. Oftentimes they live in murky water, are active mostly at night, and flee if approached. It is an unusual character trait of the New Zealand eels that they come out willingly to feed during the day and can be found in rivers and streams that are crystal clear. This offers a good opportunity to observe them in their element. I had brought some snorkeling gear and told Stella I was determined during our trip to watch eels underwater.

  After visiting Kelly we returned to the North Island. Stella said she knew a good place to see big eels on our way back north to Napier and her family farm, and that I could try out my snorkeling gear there.

  Standing on a bridge, peering into the creek at Mount Bruce Wildlife Preserve, I watched Stella toss mackerel chunks into the water to coax the eels out from the undercut banks. As the huge eels came out from the dark shadows, I was stunned by their enormousness, their sleek mysterious movements.

  “Having second thoughts?” Stella asked.

  I walked carefully down the steep muddy bank to the creek and eased into the frigid currents wearing a mask, snorkel, and wet suit. As I swam among the big eels, they came up to me and bumped their noses against my mask. It was hard not to flinch as one approached, torquing its muscular body, thick as the calf of my leg and close to five feet long.

  How to define it? Was it an ocean fish or a river fish? At that size, bigger than an average large salmon, it felt to me more like an ocean fish. Yet how much history it had with the land—the seasons, the storms, the farm animals, the stones and leaves, the bird songs, the insects, the daily cycle of the sun, things tangible to us. In the ocean it was capable of traveling in the aphotic zone—at depths where no light penetrates. How did it navigate? The eels’ motion in the pool at Mount Bruce Creek was beautiful, lyrical, sinuous, symmetrical, but also fearsome. It was a sacred moment being in the water, body fully immersed with them.

  The images of the large eels lingered in my mind as we headed to the farm where Stella had grown up, on an isolated stretch of coastline near Hawke’s B
ay. Over the next few days she and her family would be throwing a big party to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of their good friend Papa Bear.

  The land at the end of the dirt road was broken and hilly. Through a haze of sea mist there was ocean, and between the road and the waves was a clutch of buildings half hidden by bushes and trees whose tops had been sculpted into teardrop shapes by exposure to the persistent southerly winds.

  Stella’s mother, Shirley Cunningham, an Englishwoman with a face channeled by the wind and sun, greeted us, smoking a cigarette. With little delay Shirley enlisted Stella to help corral sheep into a pen before dinner. Stella jumped right into the mud and helped her mother push and pull the wet animals until the job was done.

  Stella’s family had moved to this piece of land from town when she was seven years old. As a girl she took to the untamed surroundings, developing an affinity for the sea and rivers. She and her father gathered kaimoana, seafood—diving for paua (abalone), pulling up crayfish pots, and collecting karengo (seaweed) and bubu (whelks) from the rocks at low tide. She learned to always respect Tangaroa, the god of the sea.

  When she was eleven, Stella’s mother left, and the girls were alone on the desolate coast with their father. In those years her knowledge of the natural world only increased, as did her sense of independence. Two weeks before Stella’s sixteenth birthday, her father was killed when a rogue wave overturned his boat while he was launching it from their beach. Stella’s last memory of her father was helping him into his wetsuit the morning he died. Devastated, the two teenage girls asked their mother to come home and look after them. Stella’s mother had lived at Kairakau ever since, tending to the sheep and cows with her boyfriend, Ray.

  Ray was excited to hear about my interest in eels and suggested we set a hinaki in the creek that night. At twilight we went off in his truck along a treacherous and deeply pitted road to a wooden shack. Ray said an old Scot used to live there, who made his living culling rabbits for the government. Leafless pink flowers with single stems jutted out from the ground like lollipops.

  “‘Em is called naked ladies,” Ray said,” ‘cause they have no leaves.” Ray pulled the wire eel trap out of the bed of the truck, put in two fresh sheep livers, and secured the top.

  “The old Scot fished this corner’ ole in the creek. It used to be good eeling’ cause they dumped dead livestock there.”

  Ray lobbed the trap into the hole and we watched it disappear as it sank to the bottom. He tied the trap to a tree and we headed back to the farm.

  After a dinner of lamb cooked on the charcoal grill, I pitched my tent near the beach and got in my sleeping bag. I listened to the surf pound from my cozy place, the wind whooshing in the trees. I rolled up my jacket to use as a pillow and fell asleep.

  Early the next morning, Ray and I returned to the rabbit hunter’s shack to pull the eel pot from the creek, but all that was in it were two wet sheep livers. By the time we got back to the farm the guests had started showing. Throughout the day family and friends arrived in droves, pitching tents, parking their trailers, cooking food, playing music, transforming the desolate beach into a party ground.

  A friend of Ray’s named Carl saw our empty trap in the back of the truck and said he’d help me catch a few eels in the creek that night.

  Carl and I started drinking beer in the early afternoon along with everyone else. By dusk we were all pretty buzzed. Carl suggested we set the net before we drank too much and before it was dark, so we hiked up the beach to the mouth of the creek and then further upstream to scope out a good spot.

  Carl’s trap was different from Ray’s, made of netting attached to concentric wire hoops—a fyke net. He also brought different bait: the tail, head, spine, and entrails of a sea fish called a gurnard.

  The creek was very winding and off-colored, which apparently is how it always was. Carl rolled a cigarette and puffed while he read the currents.

  “See,” he explained, “this spot’s no good ‘cause it’s a mud bank. But up there the bank is hard, and the stream goes under the bank. Now, there’s a spot an eel would like. You got to think like ‘em, eh? If you were an eel living there and there was a flood, you’d have a chance of not being washed down. If I gave you a choice, would you live in a shelter made of paper or cement? It’s just common sense.”

  I watched Carl as he began to lay out the net in the creek. “I set the net in the fast water,” he said, “so it’s harder for the eels to suck the bait through the mesh. They feed by sucking, and when they grab hold of something they spin.”

  Carl set the net with the mouth facing downstream, in the riffles at the top of the pool. The net was cone-shaped when extended. He staked the net to the ground on the bank, he explained, so a big eel could not pull it loose.

  “We only just started fishing this creek,” he said, putting the last stake in the ground. “It’s loaded, mate.”

  On the way back in the dark, we walked along the stream bank on sheep trails through tikouka, or cabbage trees. I was startled at turns by magpie calls and the wing-clapping of wood pigeons roosting for the night. We made our way out of the trees and toward a berm that separated the windswept beach from the wood.

  As we walked I asked Carl if he’d ever seen a taniwha.

  “I don’t believe in all that superstition,” he said. “Many of the people who eel a lot, Maori and pakeha, don’t go for the legends.” Yet a few steps further along the trail he began to recount a strange eel experience from his boyhood.

  He was fishing a tributary of the nearby Tukituki, the river where Stella had done the research for her master’s thesis. It was spring and the glass eels were running up the river in force.

  “I was just a little weaner,” he said, “and I was scooping glass eels with a jar from the creek, just dip the mouth of the jar and suck ‘em in. And it’s weird—I turned around, there was no reason I should have except I had this feeling, and there was this clear eel holding in the current with its tail cocked. It was clear as glass, and fat and about as long as my leg. All you could see was some red below its head, like his heart. The tiny glass eels were coming up and this thing was coming downstream, like it was guarding them. I felt like the eel was trying to warn me not to take any of the baby eels coming upstream. I didn’t.”

  Back at the party grounds, the group had erected large tents and rigged lights. Carl and I were hungry, since we’d been away two hours, and we were happy to see, and smell, a huge banquet laid out. It was a real hangi, as Stella called it—paua fritters (the abalone collected right off the beach that day), crayfish (like a lobster, but no prominent claws), steamed green mussels, pork, lamb. Everything came from the sea or the paddock and was prepared specially for the party.

  Papa Bear’s friends got up and toasted him. A few people addressed a recent political speech by Don Brash, leader of the National Party, about ending preferential treatment for Maori. The most pressing issues were related to traditional fishing rights to the foreshore and seabed. Those of Maori heritage claimed that under the Treaty of Waitangi, that right had never been passed to the Crown. Brash’s speech had created new waves of resentment for Maori—an attempt to polarize New Zealanders in hopes of winning the next election against the incumbent Labour Party.

  “But here we are,” one of Papa Bear’s friends said, “Maori and pakeha together, in this beautiful place.”

  Sometime in the dark and damp morning hours, I woke to find that I’d fallen asleep on the grass under the big tent. I stumbled to my tent and crawled into my sleeping bag. By the time I woke again it was light, and my tent was warm from the sun. Carl and Ray had already pulled the hinaki, which overnight had filled up with eight big eels. Ray had the eels alive in a large plastic barrel and was about to pour powdered laundry detergent on them to kill and deslime them.

  Eels can be killed and prepared many different ways. Back home in Connecticut fishermen usually remove the skin by cutting a ring around the head and pulling it off like a glove off your ha
nd. People who smoke eel usually leave the skin on the fish but remove the unappetizing slime with salt, ash, or detergent.

  Even Ray, who had worked in slaughterhouses his whole life, admitted their method was cruel—removing their protective slime while suffocating them.* The eels reacted by writhing and rolling in the dry detergent, trying to use their tails to get it off their bodies, but it only spread the caustic powder.

  When the eels were dead Ray rubbed them down with a sugar sack to remove any leftover slime, snipped their tails to bleed them, and hung them by their heads. After they had hung for several hours, Shirley took the task of splaying open the eels for drying.

  She made an incision along each side of the long dorsal fin, running the knife blade along both sides of the spine until the flesh was free of the bone. The guts came out with the head from the back, the belly skin holding the two fillets together. The pawhara’d eel was then heavily peppered and hung to dry.

  Since the assorted members of the camp didn’t have any manuka, the preferred wood for smoking eel, Papa Bear offered to fry some. He sliced the eel into chunks and cooked it in a skillet with beef tallow, skin side down. He said he usually ate the skin, but only if he’d cleaned the eel himself. He did not trust other people cleaning it. “I don’t approve of the use of powdered detergent to get the slime off,” he said. “I prefer wood ashes.”