Eels

by James Prosek

  “You’ll see,” she said.

  Down the road a bit further the smells of the sea became stronger. Stella slowed the car when we were in full view of the ocean. She pulled off the road at a moss-covered gate where a small sign hung; on it was painted a black eel. Stella opened the gate and we drove down the gravel drive to a modest ranchstyle home.

  Barely visible beside the house was a pool of water that collected seepage from a cold spring. Below the pool ran a small brook, choked with watercress. Stella and I got out the cans of dog food and opened them. An old man came out of the house to greet us.

  “We’ve come to see your eels,” Stella said.

  “Oh, them eels isn’t mine, they’re her thing,” he said, referring to his wife. Soon the wife appeared and the old man went inside. She introduced herself as Beryl and described how the pool of eels had come to be.

  “We moved here ten years ago. The place was covered in blackberry and gorse. When we cleared the yard we found the spring, and dug it out just enough to hold a few ducks.”

  Soon the crystal pool was rimmed with a green collar of watercress, and large dark shapes began to appear as if from nowhere, attracted by the bread that Beryl fed her ducks.

  “I don’t know where they’d come from. I guess they’d always been there.” She looked into the pool. “They just keep getting bigger and bigger. They’re my babies, just like the three bulls, the two goats, the dog, the dozen odd chickens.”

  The ducks, Beryl added, had relocated to another pond on the property since the eels had showed up.

  “Are you ready to see some eels?” Stella asked.

  “Let me get a bit of meat,” the woman said.

  “Oh, don’t go to the trouble,” Stella said. “We have dog food.”

  The old woman insisted it was time for her to feed them anyway, and soon returned from the house with a bit of steak. She tied the steak to a string and we watched her wade out into the shallow pool in her gumboots. As she waved the steak in the current, I saw a few large heads emerge from the watercress, seemingly from nowhere. Giving in to a natural reflex, I took a step back.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Beryl said, “they won’t harm you. Unless you’re holding food—they might bite you by accident.”

  As Beryl lifted the steak on the line out of the water, a huge eel, about as big around as the calf of her leg, lifted its head out, dancing to and fro to keep its body up, not unlike a cobra.

  “Oh my God!” I said aloud, my mouth agape.

  When she lowered the meat into the water, five or six big eels, their heads five to eight inches across the back, vied for a piece. They grabbed on, making loud sucking sounds to try to get an advantage on the steak, and then they rolled their bodies to tear pieces off.*

  Stella had taken off her flip-flops and was walking barefoot across the grass. She spread the contents of one of the cans of dog food on the grass near the edge of a pool. With a stick, she pushed some of the meat chunks toward the pool. A single big eel came to the rim of the concrete ledge to investigate. It sniffed a few times, then tilted its head and body, propelled itself over the ledge onto the grass, and began taking pieces of the dog food into the side of its mouth. A few smaller eels followed, and soon the grass was wet with slime.

  I could see their features clearly: wide mouths, broad lips, and nostrils like tubular horns. These eels were big, but the biggest eels in the pool barely approached the ledge, hanging back in the darker depths. Once in a while I caught a glimpse of a real monster, exposing its head from the thick mats of watercress, but never its whole body.

  Stella feeding eels by the pool at Kawhia

  Stella squatted on the grass, her long black hair nearly touching the ground, letting the eels glide up between her bare feet, touching one and then another on the top of the head, petting them.

  Tuna—the Maori word for eel, and on some Pacific islands a synonym for the phallus—is also the name of a prominent figure in Maori mythology, a god in eel form, often found wrestling with Maui, the Pacific islands’ equivalent of Hercules. In one story, which varies from place to place, Maui finds Tuna in bed with his wife, Hine, while she is sleeping. Maui chops Tuna in half, the head becoming all the freshwater eels of the world and the tail all the saltwater eels of the world.

  It is thought that the stories in which the snake plays the role of monster-seducer and/or guardian trickled down into the Pa- cific from India and Indonesia to the islands of Micronesia and Polynesia. The Pacific Islands, however, are largely devoid of native snakes, so the role is assumed by the creature closest in appearance and movement, the eel.

  The eel is not always simply an unwelcome seducer in native stories; sometimes it is a pet or a lover. One of the most common eel stories in Polynesia involves Tuna the eel and a beautiful girl named Sina.

  One day Sina goes to the spring-fed pool to get water for her mother’s cooking. She dips the pot in the water, and when she gets home, she realizes there’s a baby eel in it. Sina nurtures the eel as a pet and comes to love it. When it grows too large for the pot, Sina’s mother puts it in a tub of water outside their home. The eel gets bigger and bigger, outgrowing the tub, so they release it back in the spring hole it came from. Every time Sina goes to bathe in the pool the eel comes out and swims around her playfully, but eventually it gets so big that Sina becomes afraid of it. One day, Sina is doing her washing in the pool and the eel wraps around her leg, violating her with his tail. She runs home to the village and tells her mother and father, and a warrior from the village goes down to the spring to kill Tuna the eel. Sina follows, and as the warrior is about to chop Tuna’s head off, the eel asks Sina to bury his head in the sand and then visit the site day after day. Sina promises she will, and cries because she still has love for Tuna, who had once been her pet. When the warrior kills Tuna, she takes the eel’s severed head and buries it in the sand, and from that spot grows the first coconut tree. The Samoans and other islanders say the eyes of the coconut are the eyes of the eel, and the soft part below the eyes, from which you drink the coconut milk, is Tuna’s mouth. So every time Sina drank from the coconut, she was kissing Tuna.*

  Tuna’s head and the coconut tree

  What I’d witnessed on the banks of the spring-fed pool in Kawhia was some strange reenactment of a Pacific Island myth—at least in terms of the girl and her affection for the eel. The vision of Stella by the spring, with the eels at her feet, compounded the awe of seeing such a large fish feeding out of water. But somehow, too, it breathed life into what I had felt were beautiful but otherwise lifeless stories. Seeing the large eels and Stella together, I instantly understood that what I had been getting in books was a very small part of a deep and old relationship that carried the weight of time. Expecting to understand the impact of a Polynesian myth from just reading it was like trying to know the glow of a flowering plant from its pressed and dried blooms. The oral stories had been compromised the minute they were written down, then more so when they were taken out of the environment in which they were created.

  I only later realized, during further travels in Polynesia and Micronesia, why the stories of Hine, Maui, Tuna, and the taniwha had seemed pale to me on paper. They evolved to be heard, and not just anywhere, but amidst the sublimity of nature: in a dark forest, near a booming waterfall. The tales did not transcend their original contexts well.

  From a Darwinian point of view, that was the error of the indigenous people’s spiritual platform. The survival of the Maori faith (as with the faiths of other indigenous peoples with animal deities) depended on a connection with nature being maintained, and also on nature remaining intact with all its creatures. When colonists came from Britain and elsewhere and developed the land, the wilderness became fragmented, and so did the native people. Movies about modern Maori, such as Once Were Warriors or Whale Rider, show a broken people struggling to keep a foothold in cultural forms that existed before colonization, while having to adapt to the patriarchal structure and hierarchy of the
Western world. Because the health of Maori culture relies on the health of nature, the Maori cultural resurgence, which Stella and Wiki are at the forefront of, is inevitably an environmental conservation movement. To resurrect a nature-based spiritual society, you need nature to be intact, to protect the sources of awe that inspired spirituality in the first place. What happens to the taniwha if the giant eels that brought that monster to our imaginations become endangered or extinct?

  I had been awakened by what I had seen: the longfin eel, a magnificent creature, a living myth. The mass and muscle of the large eels had illuminated the Polynesian stories I’d read at home. I understood the impossibility of a foreigner like me ever fully grasping the nuances of the Maori spiritual world, but having grown up in nature and been moved by its wonders, I felt I had an inkling of that connection with what has been referred to as the numinous.*

  In reading Elsdon Best, I had gotten the sense that he understood the limitations of his recorded material regarding Maori culture. He had felt the gravity of the stories the Maori told him, but knew he was not getting the whole picture—and even if he had been, he felt, he would never be able to fully communicate it. To add to his frustrations, the culture he was attempting to record was changing rapidly before his eyes. In one instance, while recounting a tale of Maui and Tuna that a Maori elder had told him, Best wrote: “It is not a good illustration of a Maori recital, approaching as it does too closely the clipped, cramped, unadorned modern style of diction.” He was witnessing a profound transition in mind and spirit of the native people, whose culture, language, and religion were being supplanted.

  Where the nature-based faith of the Maori was failing, the imported Anglican faith of the British colonists flourished. Christianity is portable. It does not rely on anything being intact. It can be practiced and understood in a city or in the countryside, under a roof or out in the open, by any people anywhere. But the faith of the Maori is specific to New Zealand. It cannot be easily packed up and taken somewhere else. Polynesian faith would not be comprehensible in Alaska, where the totems are eagles and bears instead of eels and kiwi birds.

  Many of the elder Maori that Stella and I visited believed that colonists ultimately diminished the Maori not with guns but by cutting the forests, building dams, introducing insecticides and herbicides, and making the native bush less and less contiguous. The colonists brought with them their own religion to replace the indigenous one, but they also brought their own familiar species of animals—the trout, the hare, the stag—that in some cases successfully displaced the native creatures, the totems of the Maori.*

  The next morning Stella and I set off from Hamilton toward Hawke’s Bay and the more remote east coast of the North Island. We were headed to visit our first Maori elder, Brown Wiki, a history teacher at Hastings Boys High School (and the father of Stella’s flatmate, Kare).

  Brown was an imposing man—broad-shouldered, heavyset, with dark freckled skin, big round eyes, a flat nose, and purplish lips that looked like they had been painted. With permission, I set down my small digital recorder and took an account of what he chose to share, making occasional notes in my spiral notebook. He had agreed to our meeting as a favor to his daughter. When he spoke, he mostly addressed Stella.

  “Well,” Brown asked, “what would you like to talk about?” Stella explained to him why I had come. Outside, schoolboys in uniform played handball against a wall. A mild breeze blew through the classroom where we sat.

  Brown said that every hapu has its own eel stories and every individual in that hapu has his or her own version of those stories; this makes the stories very personal and diverse. Brown said that although Maori culture had been forced underground by colonization and the language forbidden in schools, it had always been there and was coming back with force. Like Stella’s father, Brown had learned Maori language at home from his grandparents.

  “The older men we’ll be visiting,” Stella had said, “they grew up speaking Maori in the home. They’ll be telling a story to you that they heard in Maori, and as they tell it, they’ll be translating it in their heads. Words have different meanings in different sentences. In different circumstances different words apply. When the Maori language is translated into English, it makes for beautiful sentences.”

  “Eels did not live on earth originally,” Brown began in his deep voice with its Kiwi accent. “The eels were all up in the heaven. When the planet they were on came too close to the sun and was too dry, they followed Tawhaki’s trail down [Tawhaki is a godlike being connected with thunder and lightning]. Here on earth they found plenty of moisture, plenty of water. The eels we eat today are small edible eels compared to the big ones that followed Tawhaki.

  “The Pakipaki [River] down the road had a guardian eel. The eel was guarding the sustenance of the family. The family knew which eels to keep for consumption and which to keep as guardians. They could tell by the shape of the head and the color of the eyes. The really big eels, their eyes can turn red. Maori people treated guardian eels as part of the family, feeding them and bringing them offerings.”

  Brown proceeded to tell us about how construction on State Highway 1 to straighten the stretch of road through the swamp in Meremere had been stalled by the guardian eel. His story was similar to what the newspaper and Stella had said on the matter, but in his own words.

  “Why didn’t they take the road straight through in the first place?” Brown asked. “Because, well, there’s a good reason—apparently that’s where the kaitiaki eel, the guardian eel, lives, in the swampy part of the bush.

  “And apparently there was a digger, trying to drain the water, came up with a huge eel. It was a huge monster. And that’s why, going through the bush, they halted. And had to agree to divert the road again.

  “But you see, some of these things, they either … they’ve got no understanding of legends like that. They were up against something they ignored. We can laugh, but there is still things like that. What they were up against was real, it’s real, those things.”

  Brown said that the eels in the Meremere swamp came out of the Waikato River, which is known for having some of the largest eels in New Zealand. He said that the Waikato taniwha eel is so big that it has to go out to sea to turn around, and the average eels from the river are large enough that you can use their skins as riding chaps.

  In freshwater, Brown said, the taniwha usually takes the form of an eel. In salt water it is most often a shark. “Where I was brought up the eel was not a staple. We lived off the sea. When we fished for sharks it seemed like you’d smell like shark forever. They would call in whales to the harbor with a conch and do an organized culling of the young. Our people came to New Zealand following the whales from Tonga and Samoa in A.D. 950. They followed the whales along the currents. Some migrated back to Tonga with the whales.”

  Sometimes the taniwha is an outright angry monster; other times it is a kind of guardian of the resource that only acts when humans break tapu, some sacred restriction. In Hawke’s Bay there is a story of a guardian that took the form of a shark named moremore.

  “We had a friend who went out to dive for shellfish,” Brown went on. “We told him, ‘Don’t be so greedy, don’t take so much.’ But one day he was bit by a shark. Then on his way back he was stung by a stingray. The guardian shark warned him. The shark made his presence known.”

  Driving away from the boys’ school, Stella said to me that Brown had been holding back. “Because you were in the room,” she said. “Because he was trying to explain things on your terms.” We drove on for some distance before she spoke again. “What you understand as myth,” she said to me, “in our culture, they are not myths—they are stories about real events. Before, the mystical was part of everyday life, the real mixed with the fantasy. There was no distinction made between the two.”

  She continued, sounding slightly irritated. “If I were writing a book,” she said, “I would not try to describe what a taniwha is. A taniwha is completely personal�
�your opinion of it is based on your own experiences. Yes, it is a mythical being in Maori culture, but there are differences between hapu and between iwi [tribes] all over New Zealand.”

  Elsdon Best, in his book Maori Religion and Mythology, Part II, wrote of the taniwha in the past tense. “The taniwha,” he writes, “were supposed to dwell in remote places, in the depth of the forests, on rugged mountains and high bush-clad ranges, in broken country where cliffs, canyons and caves are found, and in deep-water lakes, rivers and ponds.” He seemed to suggest that the taniwha had somehow gone extinct before the end of the nineteenth century. “As our Maori folk become more and more Europeanised,” he observed, “one hears less of supernormal beings and miracles.” What, I wondered, did Best mean by this? Was he being ironic? That one hears less of supernormal beings because they never existed? Or was it that Maori had chosen to speak less of things such as taniwha because they’d learned a foreigner could never grasp the concept of one, and that even if they tried to explain their belief in them, they would only be ridiculed?

  Stella did not believe that Best deserved any credit for subtlety. “They were not sensitive,” Stella said of the European ethnographers of Maori culture. The authors who recorded the oral stories of native people, she told me, saw them as quaint folktales, because they did not believe them.

  “I believe that life is governed by many unseen forces,” Stella said emphatically.

  As we neared the city of Napier, the presence of the sea was palpable. We drove by vineyards glimpsed through gateways between high hedgerows. This region, along the coast called Hawke’s Bay, was in the territory of Stella’s iwi, Ngati Kahungunu (pronounced “nati kahununu”), and we had an appointment to meet some of the tribal leaders at the runanga, or management center for the iwi.