Eels

by James Prosek

  “They wanted me to bring you by for an official welcome,” Stella said to me.

  The runanga building itself was modest and unadorned, like a small country school. Stella and I walked into a kind of conference room where I was welcomed warmly by a man named Digger, handsome, middle-aged. A few other Maori men and women sat around a large table. It looked as though we had interrupted a regular meeting. Stella and I sat down in the only two vacant seats.

  “Welcome,” Digger said, rather formally, “as a visitor to New Zealand, a friend of Stella’s, and a friend of our iwi. The eel has been considered a pest by pakeha, because they prey on the trout, introduced by the British. I hope you will find that the eel is a cultural icon to all Maori throughout New Zealand—rich Maori, middle Maori, and poor Maori. We wish you luck in conveying the importance of the eel worldwide.”

  Digger then told an eel story. All the others in the room listened.

  “I grew up near Lake Waikaremoana,” Digger said. “Hundreds of years ago, the lake had been cut off from the sea by a rockslide. No one knows how the eels got there from the sea, though some Maori speculate they’ve been there since before the rockslide. The eels there are old and big. The females circle around the lake in fall when they get the urge to spawn, trying to find a way out to sea, and they keep circling until the urge goes away. They put their noses up above the surface of the water to try to smell the rain. They’re waiting for a big typhoon to come and wash out the rockslide so they can get out to sea. But in the meantime they keep living, and growing bigger. The scientists don’t believe that they will keep waiting, that they can live for hundreds of years. I’m sick of scientists saying, ‘Where’s the proof?’ ” Digger said. “Saying that is talking against our Maori culture. Eh, Stella?”

  Stella sat humbly in her seat and gave a quiet “Yeah.”*

  Stella had used my visit as an opportunity to fulfill an overdue obligation: to give a brief presentation on her master’s thesis work, the education that the iwi had assisted with scholarships. The runanga board members who sat around the table were mostly silent, prepared to listen to what they had invested in.

  The iwi seemed to inhabit contentious ground, between wanting their young Maori to have the advantages and opportunities (such as a university degree) that would help them compete in a westernized world and being wary and skeptical of that world. Stella said to me later that she had met with a lot of goodwill from her iwi for the academic work she’d done.

  “‘You’re so young, and female, and you’ve done all this work on eels,’ they say. They want to help me. A lot of people have said to me that they wish there were more young Maori people like me doing what I’m doing.”

  Stella introduced herself: “My mountain is Kahuranaki, my river is Tukituki, my hapu is Ngati Kurukuru, my marae is Taupunga, my iwi is Ngati Kahungunu, and my name is Stella August.” And then she read aloud from a two-page abstract of her paper. Her investigations were concerned with how moon phases and water temperature affect the migration of shortfin and longfin glass eels up her tribal river, the Tukituki. Over two different years, September through November (the New Zealand spring), under the stars six nights a week, often with friends, Stella counted the small fish (two to three inches long) that came into her nets. In the first year 50,287 glass eels were captured, counted, and released, and in the second year 19,954. The largest single-night capture occurred in the first year, 18,619 fish, coinciding with the largest spring tide, a new moon, and rising river water temperature (she found that the glass eels were more likely to move upstream into freshwater when the freshwater was warmer than the seawater). Stella explained to her audience that through this work she had formed an even more intimate relationship with the river and the eels.

  At the end of the presentation, Digger thanked Stella. The others in the room remained mostly silent and expressionless. They got up and shook my hand and gave Stella hugs as we left.

  Everyone we talked to remarked about the big storms that I had just missed. Stella explained that the heavy rains had probably allowed all the migrating silver eels to go downstream, even eels that had been trapped in ponds and puddles with no access to the sea for many years.

  “Eels will cross over land in wet weather,” Stella said. “On rainy nights on the farm, our cat Buddy brings eels up on the porch with their heads munched off. He catches them in the paddocks. His neck is covered in dried slime where the eel wrapped itself around him.”

  All along the highway we saw “slips,” where hillsides stripped of vegetation by grazing sheep had become oversaturated with moisture and collapsed into rivers and across roads and bridges. Some of the slips looked like avalanches of rock, sod, and mud, maybe with a few sheep mixed in. Riverbanks were cut almost to the steps of homes, roads and bridges were blocked, and some houses had even fallen into the rivers, like one we passed on the Rangitikei River.

  North of Napier at the far eastern end of Hawke’s Bay is a settlement called Whakaki, where the people are known as the Eel People. The kaumatua we visited at the marae (the social and religious gathering place for Maori) in Whakaki was named Walter Wilson.

  “We’ve adapted to the eel title,” Walter said. “It gives us a distinction. We’re thick-skinned and slippery.”

  In the town of Whakaki there is a lagoon that is separated from the sea most of the year by a bar of sand and gravel about three hundred feet wide, what Walter called a “shingle bar.” Periodically the bar is breached by storms, allowing young eels to enter in spring and mature eels to exit in fall. The unique topographical features of this “lake” attract the eels, and the Maori have been fishing them there for centuries. From the lawn of the marae you could see the lake and, immediately beyond, the ocean.

  Walter said that traditionally in spring the Maori dig a channel from the sea to provide passage for the glass eels into the lake. In autumn the exodus of adults is more dramatic. The mature eels stage at the ocean side of the lagoon waiting for a storm, and when the big waves are pounding on the beach, they make a break for the ocean en masse over the shingle bar, sometimes in a huge ball. Walter described this natural phenomenon as Stella and I sat across a table from him in the marae. He rolled a cigarette from a bag of Port Royal tobacco, lit it, puffed, and deposited the ashes in a paua, or abalone, shell.

  “This is when our people fish for the eels, during migration season, when the eels are staging by the lakeshore. The eels are waiting for what we call the tai tipi, the big tides. I wouldn’t call it a tsunami or whatever, but it’s a big wave caused by a storm out at sea. The eels gather by the thousands, you see them, and when the tai tipi arrives they go, they go, over the land, side by side, over the sand and the shingle.”

  I asked Walter what alerts the fishermen—how do they know when the eels are beginning to gather for the run? He became slightly defensive.

  “I know when to go down!” he said. “But I ain’t gonna tell you. I can’t take you to the place we fish. The trustees would have to decide if that’s okay.” He paused to tap ashes from his cigarette. “Why do you want to know? To explain it? The knowledge is used for money. My opinion is that we give away too much knowledge.”

  By “we,” he meant the Maori people. He believed, for instance, that the stories told in the recent movie Whale Rider—a modest New Zealand production that had garnered praise from Hollywood—were used illegally, without permission. “This is Maori intellectual property,” he said.

  Walter, who looked to be in his late sixties, had a reddish face and wore a wide-brimmed hat and a long-sleeved shirt. Stella and I followed him outside the marae into the bright sunlight. He took us in his truck to the beach, a short drive away, to see the dunes and the shingle where the eels cross. It was a black sand beach with pieces of white pumice and driftwood. The surf pounded loudly.

  Walter said he couldn’t show us specifically where the eel nets were set. Traditionally an elder passes on his knowledge to one person before he dies, and that person isn’t search
ed for but makes him- or herself apparent. The knowledge is not shared with anyone else.

  “It’s just how it’s done,” Walter said somewhat apologetically, changing his earlier tone. Then very abruptly, leading us down the sunny beach, he said, “Who owns the sun? Here you are, come see it yourself.”

  We stood, our clothes blowing like flags behind our bodies. I was looking from the lake to the sea, from the sea to the lake and back, wondering what it would be like to witness thousands of eels crossing the bar.

  “The dunes are so dynamic,” Stella said, watching the stiff sea breeze blow the sand into the air. “They are always changing.”

  “That’s nature’s artistry, I call it,” Walter said, lifting a piece of driftwood from the sand.

  Noticing that Walter’s attitude had softened, I decided to recast a previous question.

  “How do you know when the typhoon is coming,” I asked him, “the tai tipi?”

  “You can hear it,” he said. “It booms up in the bloody hills. That’s how you know it’s a tai tipi. The big, big waves come only now and then, and the eels make their way to the crest of the dune, at night, to catch the wave. And then they go. Once they get onto the ridge of the beach and they’re heading down into the sea, they’re gone.”

  Walter said that when the eels are ready to leave, they develop a thicker skin, an “extra layer,” he called it. Their noses become more pointed, their skulls structurally change, and their eyes enlarge and cloud over in a bluish haze. These physiological changes are consistent with ones that other migratory freshwater eels undergo the world over.

  As we were walking back to the marae, Walter said to me, “The only reason you’re here is because of my connection with Stella’s father.”

  We sat in the marae, our faces flush from the wind and sun, and Walter made us a cup of tea. When Walter began speaking, I turned on my small digital recorder and placed it next to my notebook without asking permission. I was afraid that if I asked, Walter would say no.

  “That’s why I asked Stella how much you want to know. Why do you want to know? For public consumption?” Walter said, addressing me. “I’m not being rude, that’s just a thing. This run of eels happened before Maori got here, before humans got here. As long as the lagoon has been here, that’s been happening.

  “What happens here at Lake Whakaki is unique to this part of the world. The only other place that I know that it happens used to be Lake Ellesmere in the South Island. I’ve never been there to see it, but they tell me that it happens there, too.”*

  Walter went on to talk about the health of the fishery and how it’s managed. For the Maori, the harvest season is mostly during migration, and if a thousand eels pass through a weir, net, or trap, they take only a hundred, just the ones that look good to eat. The fisheries regulations in New Zealand, Walter said, were faulty, because they managed the fisheries to let the small ones go and keep the big ones. “The problem is that the fish that are released are most often males, because males on average are much smaller, and all the big egg-bearing females are taken. The Crown has the nerve to tell us Maori how to manage a fishery we’ve been managing just fine for hundreds of years.”

  Before leaving the marae, I asked Walter if he had any thoughts about where the eels go once they leave the lagoon for the sea.

  “They’re going to die,” he said, lighting a cigarette. “They’re going out there to die. Once they have laid their eggs and fertil- ized those eggs, they all die. And some sharks out there have a great big banquet.”

  “I’d love to see where they go,” I said.

  “And I hope you never find out.”

  As we drove away from the marae Stella scolded me. She said that several times during Walter’s monologue I had interrupted him to ask him to explain something, or repeat something I didn’t understand. Stella was adamant that I not interrupt any more of the people we were going to visit.

  “Because Maori is an oral language, you are expected to listen,” she said. “That is your role in the conversation. If it’s your turn to speak, they’ll listen to you. If you miss something that they say, that’s your problem. Don’t interrupt to ask them to repeat themselves.”

  The next morning there was a story in the local paper, Hawke’s Bay Today, of apakeha boy named Hayden who speared a giant eel in small stream running through his suburban neighborhood in Napier. The piece was headlined “Monster Eel Couldn’t Escape Hayden” and showed a photo of the nine-year-old boy triumphantly holding the dead eel draped over his shoulder.

  The reporter’s slant was that for the boy it was an act of heroism, that this boy had slain a monster. In the days following, letters to the editor weighed in. One reader wrote: “I found the story of the boy and the eel appalling. How would Hawke’s Bay Today have reported it if it had been someone’s pet rabbit or cat which had been stalked, tortured, stabbed in the head and tail, dragged home, and put in the freezer?”

  One Maori man came to the defense of the boy: “I feel it is very inappropriate for mature adults to pillory him and reduce his actions to a shameful and senseless deed. As adults we have gathered a lot of experiential knowledge, and most of us use it wisely. But as a young person, we are still moving into the realm of experience and achievement through adventure.”

  Later that day we visited a Maori man named Haetia Hihi who had his own take on the story. “It was a fault of the boy’s elders,” he said, sitting in his home in Napier. “You can’t really fault the boy.”

  Haetia told us a few stories of growing up eeling.

  “We’d be sitting with our grandparents by the candle,” he said. “When the moths appear that was our signal—while we were having an evening meal. Take a piece of hoop iron and tie it to a piece of wood. You swing the hoop iron over the back of the eel and then gaff it. We call this ripi. The water was up to our knees. The matarau, the spear, had two prongs made of number eight fencing wire. Some people used a pitchfork. The boys would gaff them. The older people preferred no barb on the spear.”

  The thing that was destroying the fishery wasn’t the boy in the ditch with a spear; it was the issuing of commercial licenses and the catching of eels for overseas markets. Haetia spoke of his people noticing a decline in the eel population. “Lately we put our hinaki [nets] in overnight, in our own river, the Esk, but the problem is there are no eels left around.”

  The absence of eels, Haetia said, was leading to the end of certain Maori rituals. “Eels are eaten at wedding ceremonies. In Runana they still observe these practices of the past to catch the eel for ceremonies, weddings and such. Two or three men get naked and go into a lake. They know the holes in the bank where the big eels live. They get at either end of the hole and one man grabs the eel by the gill and pulls it out. These are big eels, over six feet long.” Haetia said at the wedding you see the big eels hanging before they are prepared for the party. But now the pakeha farmers have given permission to the licensed commercial fishermen to catch eels there. “They found where their holes were and they took all the big ones.”

  Stella and I spent the night in a building that used to be a jail, on the property of a couple named Bruce and Kate. Bruce was a fishing and hunting guide on and around the Rangitikei River. Kate’s family owned more than ten thousand acres along the river. She was half Maori, though she had fair skin, fair hair, and freckles.

  At dinner Bruce told a story of a small pond where they used to shoot ducks.

  “The pond was no more than twenty feet across,” he said, “a small pond, but ducks came to it and we shot them. There were eels in the pond, lots, and big ones, and they would smell the blood when the ducks landed dead in the water, and if you didn’t retrieve the ducks fast, the eels’d grab them and eat them. Finally the farmer who owned the pond decided to take all the eels out because they were pests to the hunters. In that little pond they harvested over three ton of eel, and no one even knew how they got in there.”

  In New Zealand, it seemed, almost everyone, Mao
ri or pakeha, had an eel story.

  In the morning, Stella and I visited Charlie Hamlin, who lived alone in a one-room flat in the settlement of Te Hauke. Charlie was eighty-two, old enough to have lived a traditional Maori childhood, where the entire village journeyed to the river to catch eels in a pa, or weir, during the autumn downstream migration.*

  Stella told me before we arrived that Charlie was elderly and almost blind. A bed was in one corner of his quiet room, and we sat at a table near a small kitchen with a cooking range and a sink. The numbers in Charlie’s phone book were written an inch tall apiece with a black marker. There was a bucket of water next to the table.

  “Mind that,” Charlie said, as I had almost tripped over it. “I catch rainwater for my tea. I don’t trust the water from the tap.”

  “Would you like us to boil some water, Charlie?” Stella asked.

  “Sure, sure, that would be nice. The kettle is on the stove, there’s water in it. And there’s a plate of eel here my son prepared.”

  Stella got up to make tea. I stayed seated at the table across from Charlie.

  “The frogs used to sing out here,” he said, adjusting his hearing aid. “When they sprayed, the frog eggs died. They spray Roundup on the drains to keep the culverts clear so that when it rains a lot it doesn’t back up with weeds and debris. But the Roundup burns the gills on the fish, and it kills the watercress, where the frogs hide, and kills the tadpoles, the primary food of the eels in our lake, Lake Poukawa. They introduced willows, perhaps for flood protection,” Charlie continued, “but the willows suck all the water out of the swamps. There are not many tadpoles or native fish. The giant kokopu are gone. They’re cleaning out the drains and they dredge up the mud and toss it up on the bank, and many young eels dry in the mud with it. You can’t bloody explain it to the regional council people. You can’t talk to the bloody pakeha about it, they’re bloody brainless.”