by James Prosek
Charlie’s vision was bad enough that he couldn’t see that I was pakeha. But he had good reason to call the white politicians and farmers brainless.
Charlie said they sprayed the peaches with insecticide, and the poison spread to the ground and the mowers spread the poisoned clover. He was putting posts in the orchard when he was younger and stronger, he said, and the poison caused his skin to pock up on his arms; it got in his eyes and killed all the blood vessels. That’s how his eyes became white, and how he lost vision completely in his left eye.
Stella brought the tea and poured some in Charlie’s mug. “How many sugars, Charlie?” she asked.
“A few,” he said.
She spread a piece of smoked eel onto a cracker for him. “Not me,” he said. “I eat it all the time. You guys try it.” The smoked eel was soft and buttery and melted in my mouth. I had another piece and washed it down with tea. It was delicious. We sat back and listened to Charlie talk about the traditional ways that Maori fished for eels that he remembered from when he was a boy.
Where Charlie and his family went eeling, they had one of the biggest pa tuna around. Maori used to come from miles away and live in temporary settlements near the weir during the autumn migration. “There were other places to catch eels,” Charlie said, “but they used to come here because they’re the best eels you can get. Their backsides are closed up, their eyes are glazed over, they’re a fat, beautiful eel. You can just about eat ‘em like they are. And they’re passive. Lift a big eel up like that”—he demonstrated—“he’ll never say a word.”
Maori centered their whole lives on the eel run at that time of year, late January and February. They’d move their villages to the weir, “bring all their horses and pigs and all that,” Charlie said. There were always a few eels that went through the weir early, before the big run, and that’s what they ate while they were getting ready for the big event. In one night when the run happened, they could catch four tons of eel. “And they reckon the whole run was ten to twelve tons,” Charlie said. “This is on what we called Poukawa Lake Stream. The creek was only two meters wide, but when it flooded the eels were everywhere. You can’t stop ‘em, you just can’t stop ‘em.”
Charlie pushed the plate of smoked eel toward us to encourage us to eat more. I helped myself. “These are from Lake Poukawa. They’re better than Whakaki eels,” the ones from Walter Wilson’s lake. “It’s beautiful out there on Lake Poukawa. That’s our playground.”
Charlie explained that in the old days they didn’t have cloth or fiber netting. All the traps and pots for eeling were made from a woody creeping vine called supplejack. He remembers watching his parents and relatives making their own.
“My parents, they had a net from about here to the door, made of supplejack. You can twist it around and knot it, that supplejack, it’s not heavy. It grows up in the bush, and it grows fairly long. You know Maoris got a lot of spare time in those days. They sit in the sun, and they start making the hoops. They tie four supplejacks and they plait it. Them Maori, they got their way of making everything. They run out of supplies, they just go off in the bush and get some more.” He laughed.
Down at the swamp at Pekapeka, Charlie said, they had two big weirs that were repaired and rebuilt for the fall migration of eels. In preparation for the run the Maori would go upstream of the pa tuna and clean up the whole creek, because when the flood came they didn’t want sticks and things to lock up the net. When it rained and the river started to flood, they sent scouts up the creek from the weir. The scouts then signaled when the eels were coming.” ‘Oh, here they come!’ they’d say, and they’d get all excited.” Charlie laughed and laughed with his eyes closed as if he could picture the frenzy in his mind. “You can smell eels, you know, when you pass a river and they’re running.” He took a big black marker and drew the site and the weir as he remembered it. “They call the baskets or eel pots hinaki, made all of supplejack vine,” Charlie began, sketching on the newspaper in front of him, “and when the eels were coming they tied it on the mouth of the funnel-shaped leading nets, or tawiri, which were attached to the weir structure at the bottom of the V. They have to hold up the eels in the pa tuna until the full hinaki could be rolled away and replaced with an empty one. They have to work fast because within an hour, the whole run is gone.” Charlie paused to recite a whakatauki, or old Maori proverb: “Kia hiwa ra, kia hiwa ra, moe araara kit e matahi tuna,” which roughly translates as “Be watchful, be watchful, or you’ll sleep and miss the eels.”
“It’s a big flood, eh,” Charlie continued, “and the tawiri fills up quick. They empty the eels into the pits, big holes on the bank, oh, ten by ten feet, and, oh, eight feet deep—there’s eight of ‘em down there. Each pit holds one ton. Some of the pits are still there, but most of ‘em are filled in. You know, by the end everybody’s down there, the whole bank’s bloody loaded with Maoris from everywhere, then they have a big hangi, a big party. This was in the old days.”*
Charlie said they stopped fishing at Poukawa Lake Stream in the traditional way, with the old weirs and basket traps made of supplejack vine, in the early 1930s, when Charlie was a boy.
“We had twelve kids in my family. My mom used to have one big plate. And she’d serve up, boil the eel up, and mix it up with potato and puha [sow thistle]. She used to call it penupenu. There was a lot of oil in eel and the oil was pretty good for you. Everyone had a drink of warm milk to wash it down. That’s how she fed us in the early days, ‘cause we didn’t have no table and we had no plates,” he added with a laugh, “just the one. And none of the eel went to waste, even the backbone. You boil the bone until it’s soft, put onions in and a bit of stock, let it cool, a bit of bread and butter. That’s a meal.”
Charlie, eyes open, licked his lips. I imagined he was remembering his childhood home filled with the smells of his mother’s cooking.
In the town of Dannevirke, Stella took me to a suburban home. A large man named Robert Hape was sitting on the couch watching television. The small house was bubbling with clatter and movement, children running around the carpeted floor chasing cats and kittens. Talk turned to personal experiences that they or their acquaintances had had with taniwha eels.
“I had a friend,” Robert began, keeping his eyes fixed on the television, “who caught an eel with a red stripe down its back. He took it home in a bucket and during the night he heard it crying like a baby. He left it in the bucket, and the next morning he went outside and saw the eel on the ground dead. Just then, at that moment, the phone rang in the house. It was a call telling him his father had died.”
In the next room Robert’s son said: “Sometimes we been out there, some parts in the lake, really deep, and you look and there’s always one eel, and he’s poking around and he’ll come up to you and he’ll look at you like this.” He strained to bend his neck. “And I say, ‘Undo the net,’ and away that funny eel goes. And he knows, too. When you lift up the bag he goes straight through—see you later.”
Robert overheard us from the TV room and called to his wife, Molly, to tell us her taniwha story. We sat beside her at the kitchen table, the refrigerator humming. “In our hapu,” she said, “all the men went out one day to the mountains, leaving the women and the kids behind. The hapu had a pet eel and the men told the women and kids, ‘Feed the eel while we’re away, but make sure you cut off the heads of the fish first.’ Well, the boys in the tribe got smart, and they went ahead and fed the eel the fish heads. The eel got upset and left our hapu, and as it moved it carved a gorge through which the Manawatu River now runs.* It swam up to this place where there’s a mountain peak. When the men came back they tried to beg our taniwha to come back, but it wouldn’t. His feelings were hurt. Now whenever someone from our hapu goes near that peak, the peak forms a cloud over it, because the eel is weeping from humiliation. They still ask the taniwha if he would come back, but he won’t,” she said. “Hopefully one day it will.”
Near Waimarama, we visited Bill Akon
ga, a rangatira, one who carries the knowledge of the hapu. We sat down with him in his kitchen and listened while his wife put on a kettle for tea.
Bill talked of fishing as a kid with a piece of harakeke, native flax—a stringy-leafed plant. He explained how they would string the piece of flax with worms, no hook, and put it in the stream. When the eels grabbed hold of the worms their sandpaper-like teeth got snared by the flax and they could pull the eels in. He called it bobbing for eels.*
Mostly, though, Bill said, they speared eels. “There’s a special place in Havelock there called Wahaparata, a little stream that flows in to the Karamu Stream. We speared there at night. The old folks used to just put their hands in the water round the bottom of the spear when they hit an eel, just so they wouldn’t slide off. And sometimes the eel was bigger than their arms. They were huge things, the sort with the tusks and the dome head.”
“Tell them about the barking eels,” Bill’s wife said. “All eels bark, don’t they?”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Bill. “Do they?” He looked at Stella and pointed to her. “Here’s the expert.”
“Barking like dogs,” said Bill’s wife. “Just like dogs.”
“I’ve heard they can cry like a baby, too,” Stella said.
“Never heard one cry like a baby,” Bill said. “But I heard them bark. Oh yeah, quite loud, oh yes. It’s usually when there are a lot of them, though. I’ve never heard them bark when there’s only one or two. Usually it’s when they’re fighting for food that I’ve heard them bark. They come out of the water—well, their heads anyway.
“When we first moved here,” Bill continued, looking toward his wife, “I told her that eels bark, and she laughed at me. So we set a hinaki down the river, way down there. We went down there at night. Used to drive to it at that time. They were cutting trees, had a bridge put across the river. And we went down, way down to the paddock down there, and set the hinaki. We went back ten, eleven o’clock at night, we got there, it was pitch black. All of a sudden, we go over and I said, ‘Listen for the eel.’ That was the first time she’d ever heard them bark. And when we turned the lights on, whoa! There must have been hundreds of them. It looked like the water was just churning with eels. There was quite a lot of them barking. They were trying to get in the hinaki, but the hinaki was full. And they bark just like a dog. Eerie when it’s, you know, pitch black. No moon, no anything.”
Bill Akonga told us to go down the road to see an old friend of his. “Andrew Farmer used to smoke eels in his chimney. Hung ‘em in the top—fell in when they were done. He’ll spin a good yarn.”
We found Farmer, a thin, frail elderly man, in his home down the road. A small tabletop radio was set beside his arm.
“In the town of Clive,” he said, “they have an annual competition. Best-dressed eel. And the prize is a thousand dollars. You know, put little dresses on them, stand ‘em up. John Wooky’s son won one year, dressed it as a bush bug.” The radio chirped indiscernible sounds.
“We didn’t have a smoker,” Farmer continued, “so we smoked eels in the chimney.* All the fat drips down and the fire goes up. The old Maori used to use ash to get the slime off. Maryanne’s mother used to eat eel heads,” he said, nodding toward his wife across the table. “Boil up an eel head, eat it all except the skull. Those big eels, the domeheads, have a lot of meat on the head. Not just the head but the cheeks.” He played with the watch on his wrist.
Farmer’s wife perked up.
“We were children,” she said. “I was, oh, eight. And we were down the creek, and the creek went through this gully in the forest. And we heard a bark—it was loud, like a roar. Just like a dog. We went home and my mum told me it was an eel, a taniwha, warning us not to go down there. We never did again.”
My feet were propped up on the dashboard of the car, my pen moving across the page of my notebook. Stella and I had been on the road together for a week now.
“You spend more time writing in your notebook and reading than looking out the window,” Stella said. “You’re in New Zealand and you’d rather live in a book. I don’t think you’d experience things yourself if you didn’t have to.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “If that were the case, I would never have left home.”
“When you’re not reading a book, you’re trying to fit your life into a book.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s interesting.”
“Ka-klunk!” Stella said, smiling.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“That’s the sound of a thought falling into your head.”
Stella and I made our way to Wellington, where we caught a plane to Dunedin. On the way I thought about what she’d said about my compulsion to define (what is a taniwha?) and record what I heard and saw—to fit my life into a book at the expense of missing the beauty of the moment. There was truth in this, but I was not blind to the fact that Stella was classifying me as well; I was a Westerner, a pakeha.
We were flying to the South Island essentially to visit one man. Kelly Davis, in his fifties, had devoted the latter part of his life to helping protect the longfin eel. He was the Maori man who had challenged Don Jellyman at a fisheries conference, asking how tracking eels to their spawning grounds was any help to the eel.
“Nobody should ever know,” he’d protested, “where these creatures reproduce.”
Kelly lived in a modest one-level farmhouse with his wife, Evelyn, and two foster children, a brother and sister named Tristan and Lovey. His lawn was a graveyard of fishing equipment—nets that needed mending, an aluminum boat on a trailer, buoys and tangles of ropes. Kittens and puppies and chickens ambled around the perimeter of the house and on the driveway, which sparkled with the opalescence of crushed abalone shells.
Kelly, of medium height and heavyset, greeted us at the door in a pair of old sweatpants, flip-flops, and a torn-up T-shirt. He spoke with a heavy Kiwi drawl and wiped his longish hair away from his warm, likable face.
He invited us to sit in his living room, and sank into the depression of an off-white couch. A kitten jumped up on the couch and walked across the back of it, nestling between a pillow and Kelly’s meaty shoulders. The TV was on. Kelly started right in.
“The longfin eel is my passion,” he began, “my obsession. I am a longfin.”
Kelly’s home stream is the Waihao, but he did most of his eel conservation work on the nearby Waitaki River, one of the largest rivers on the South Island. The Waitaki has eight hydroelectric dams along its length that collectively generate 20 percent of New Zealand’s electricity (75 percent of New Zealand’s electricity comes from hydropower, much higher than the world average, 15 percent, or the U.S. average, 10 percent). The country and the power company, Meridian Energy, proudly advertise clean, renewable electricity generation, but the dams required to make that electricity create anything but a renewable environment for the migratory eel. “In my mind there are two main forces causing the destruction of the longfin eel,” Kelly said, “hydrodams and commercial fishing.”
He went on, “I remember when I first came back from overseas in the navy in seventy-three.” A tattoo of a monkey on his hand and a mermaid on an anchor on his arm were relics of his days in the service. “When I returned home, our fishery was in dire straits. There wasn’t the same thing you saw when I was a child. I went away in 1963, so in ten years it went from a fishery where we were walking on eels, you know, where it was hard to take a step without feeling one with your feet, to where all that sort of thing is gone.”
The major change had taken place in 1958, when construction commenced on Benmore Dam, at the top of the Waitaki. It took seven years to complete what would become the largest earthen dam in New Zealand, 360 feet high and more than 2,600 feet long, creating the largest artificial lake in New Zealand and effectively cutting off any movement of eels to or from the upper river. Seven more major dams were built on the Waitaki, part of one of the largest hydroelectric power programs ever initiated in New Zeala
nd or anywhere else. It effectively prevented any adult eels from returning to the sea and any juvenile eels from populating the river upstream of the dams.
Kelly says that when a female longfin eel is ready to migrate to the sea in autumn, she’ll circle the lake trying to find a way out, and if she can’t, “she’ll just keep circling the lake, until the urge goes away.” The eels, he says, will just keep living until they have the opportunity to get out. Or they will feel the pull of the water as it runs through the electricity-generating turbines in the dam and, taking the path of least resistance, will try to swim through the turbines and get chopped up or maimed.
The dams have turbines like giant window fans that spin horizontally as the water goes through, transforming the kinetic energy of falling water into electrical energy. The power companies don’t want the eels going through the turbines, as they can damage the equipment. Meridian Energy has tried all kinds of ways to keep eels away from turbines in dams on the Waitaki—screens, high-frequency sounds, lights—to no avail. The eels feel the pull through the penstock, the tube that funnels water to the turbine. The instinct to preserve energy for their long journey turns out to be deadly.
“We’ve found the big migrating eels just wait for a flood and roll downriver. They don’t even swim; why should they?”
Kelly hadn’t thought about the consequences of the dams until he came home from his service in the navy in the early 1970s and observed what was happening. “Once the hydrodams went in,” he said, “the eels had no chance of ever returning to the sea to spawn. They were landlocked.”
Simultaneously, a new and lucrative commercial fishery had emerged supplying eels to overseas markets in Taiwan, Japan, and Europe.
“I was up in Twizel to interview for a job,” Kelly said (the town of Twizel was originally built to house the dam workers),”and I saw guys commercially fishing on Lake Benmore there. And they were bringing up eels, without a word of a lie, that had heads on ‘em like a full-grown Labrador dog. And they were cutting their heads off and throwing them over the side. And I remember going up to the fishermen and saying, ‘You’re going to destroy this fishery if you continue doing that!’ And they said, ‘Oh, they’re too big, you just can’t sell ‘em.’ So they just killed them. Why? ‘Cause the big eels kept stealing the bait in their traps. And today we’re wearing that fact. If they hadn’t cut the heads off those eels and thrown them over the side, they’d still be in the lake today. Between dams and the commercial fishing, in thirty years the fishery had been decimated.”