by James Prosek
The big eels in Lake Benmore that Kelly observed being slaughtered were on average between twenty-five and sixty years old. Some of them, Kelly pointed out, had no doubt migrated to the upper Waitaki River years before he was even born (and many years before the dams were built).
Kelly and some Maori cousins began grassroots efforts to trap the mature eels as they accumulated above the dams during the fall migration and transport them in tank trucks to the sea. This “trap-and-transfer” program was emulated on other rivers, wherever Maori took it upon themselves to help. “It may seem futile to just move a few hundred eels in a season,” Kelly said, “but you figure every big female that has a chance to get to the spawning grounds is carrying about thirty million eggs, so we know it makes a difference. That’s a fish that would otherwise never get out there.”*
Kelly was concerned that there weren’t enough eels returning to spawn. He imagined the route the eels took to the spawn- ing grounds as a trail marked by scent—that the adult eels left some trace of themselves behind that acted as signposts for the orphaned young to return to freshwater rivers.
“It’s my theory,” Kelly said, “that their pathway to where they migrate leaves that scent. And I’ve no other reason to believe it than stories that our old people talked about.”*
A ray of sun spread through the window and across the floor onto Kelly’s face. The kitten on his shoulder momentarily opened its eyes, stretched and squinted in the sunlight, then curled up and went back to sleep.
“People don’t understand what value the eels are for us Maori,” Kelly said. “The old people knew when the eels ran that it was time to prepare for the cold months—they were like a seasonal indicator, a calendar.
“We went seasonally to fish the longfins during what we call the hinapouri [darkness, or new moon], when the eels gather to migrate. We would only fish for sustenance, not to trade or anything. It was the time I liked most as a kid ‘cause we had the week off school to fish eels. We fished channels in the shingle at the end of the Waihao in the Wainono Lagoon. The eels were gathered waiting for a storm so they could roll over the shingle bar.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever seen ‘em try to migrate,” Kelly continued. “It’s the most amazing sight. I’ve seen ‘em roll up in a big ball and just roll straight over, over the beach. They go way up the river and then they swim furiously down the river, and they just roll, like a big ball, rolling over. And that’s usually round about the end of April when that happens. At night you can go down there and you can see the eels, trying to work their way through the shingle.*
“The right size eels, about three or four feet, we took home [the big females were carried over the shingle bar and released in the sea]. We had a process we called pawhara where we open the eel along the back and clean it and hang it by pieces of flax on a wooden drying rack. Each family had a quota. Down here, for our family of six, we took two bags full, and they were huge bags—and that was enough to keep you fed for winter.
“Different people have a different affinity for eels. I mean, for us Maori, it’s the highest-protein food that we can ever have in this country. A lot of things have taken over since I was a kid in terms of food, but it’s still a major diet if we can get them. I take the opportunity now and again to get a feed, whereas when I was a child, we had eel at least three, four times a week, two to three times a day. I used to take the dry eel to school for lunch—it’s like jerky, you know, you rip it off and eat it. It was something that sustained us, really. When money was scarce, we lived off the river and the sea; we had no other option. And we grew vegetables and stuff like that. I’ve been trying to tell our young people, this stuff is great for you!”*
Kelly continued to share his mountains of experiential knowledge. “The glass eels used to come in so thick they looked like an oil slick on top of the water. They come into the river year after year and hide in the stones and the watercress.” When the young eels decide it’s time to go upstream, after waiting in the lower river for as long as ten years, they go all at once, if necessary forming braids with their bodies to surmount vertical walls. “If one goes up the wall, they all want to go up. They’re amazing.” Kelly described diving in the rivers with big eels, watching them suck the meat out of freshwater mussels. He told stories of going out on rainy nights in farm paddocks with a ferret on a leash, hunting eels traveling overland from one body of water to another. Kelly told tale after tale of the physical challenges the eel faced and of the importance of the eel for the Maori as a source of sustenance. And then he shared a more personal strain of the story: the interweaving of the eel’s fate with the Maoris’ own.
In the 1860s the British settlers in New Zealand established a kind of department of wildlife they called the Acclimatization Society, meant to help British immigrants acclimatize to life in the new colony.* This was accomplished through the introduction of familiar species, including red deer, pheasants, quail, ferrets, rabbits, possums, foxes, swans, ducks, and geese. From the sportsman’s point of view, one of the more successful of these introductions was the brown trout, which arrived as a British import (via Tasmania) in the 1860s.
The streams and lakes of New Zealand, cold, clear, and rich with aquatic insect life, were more than suitable for trout. The speckled fish rapidly established themselves in the streams, rivers, and lakes, reproducing naturally and growing rapidly up to weights of five to ten pounds, a trophy trout for any angler. Within decades of the initial introduction, New Zealand was renowned worldwide for some of the best trout fishing in the world.
But there was a strange predator in the water that British anglers were unaccustomed to seeing. Occasionally while a trout was on the line, a shadowy form would emerge from the depths and devour it. A four-to-five-pound trout was no match for a five-to-six-foot-long eel. Once the British settlers identified the giant eels as a threat to their prized gamefish, members of the Acclimatization Society set out to eradicate them. The society pinned up “wanted” posters in bait shops, offering a bounty of twopence for each tail clipping that verified an eel kill. Huge longfins were caught and left on dry riverbanks to die. Instructions to kill eels appeared on the back of all New Zealand fishing licenses, like this one from 1950:
Make War on Eels
Excepting erosion and flood scour, eels are the greatest enemy of trout in our rivers.
Eels are also competitive with trout for feed; when they are not eating trout they are depleting trout food.
Therefore, every angler should KILL EELS every day he is on the water. Always carry in your fishing bag a shark hook, attached to about 3 yards of stout line. Bind the hook to the end of any stick and carry the line up the stick to your hand. Jag the eel, discard the stick, and pull the eel ashore and destroy it!
“The Acclimatization Society took as many big longfins out of the river as they could,” Kelly said. “My dad and me, we used to go behind the men and kick them big eels back into the water. This was in the mid-, late fifties. It wasn’t until they found a market for them overseas that they stopped killing them willy-nilly.
“The slaughter of eels by the society,” Kelly said, “was akin to what the Europeans did to the buffalo in North America. Like the Great Plains Indians relied on the buffalo, Maori relied on the eels for sustenance and for our faith. I’m not sure the Acclimatization Society didn’t know what they were doing.”
Kelly’s wife, Evelyn, brought a tray of tea and biscuits into the living room. Stella and I had been glued to our chairs—hours had gone by as we just listened—and Kelly still sat deep in the couch with the kitten warming the back of his head. He stopped speaking briefly to take his tea on the couch. He showed us an amulet that Evelyn had carved for him out of pounamu, or greenstone, in the shape of an eel. He put it on the tea tray and continued.
“There’s more at stake than just losing the fish,” Kelly said. “It’s our way of life. We have to preserve that sense of wonder in our children, have them see one of these giant creatures. I’ll
stop and show children, pick a big mother eel up in my hands and let them touch it. We had some big ones in a catch basin that we caught in Lake Benmore, ready to take them down to the sea. And this car went past and stopped. I pulled this huge eel out of the bag, a big migrant female with big blue eyes, and held it in my arms. And these little kids started climbing out of the car window to have a pet at the thing. They couldn’t believe it was so docile. And it was twenty-six pounds, just a huge eel, massive! And I told them the story, that the longfin eel is endemic to New Zealand, that they only live in the waters of this country, and I told them what we were doing and why we were doing it, that we were taking these big eels to the sea—it was an experience they never had.”
Stella got up to get more sugar for Kelly’s tea. “What’s the biggest eel you’ve seen in your life?” she asked.
“I was up and above where the flows are upstream,” Kelly said, stirring his cup of tea with a small spoon. “There’re some huge eels up there. I mean, I’m talking probably twenty-, thirty-kilo longfins. I’ll tell you, without a word of a lie, there’s one up there, one night we were just spotlighting off the bridge—it was huge. Out of the corner of my eye was this eel coming, this thing like a powerboat, going upstream, so we shined the light on, and she just turned around, flicked her tail, and went in under the watercress. It would have been from here to that table, a good three meters long and bigger around than my thigh. And that’s no rubbish. There were a number of us saw it. The amazing thing about it was that the girth continued right up through to the end of the tail, like a barracuda.”
Stella asked Kelly what was the oldest eel he’d ever heard of.
“I’ve personally aged eels, specimens that died in the dams or the trap-and-transfer program, at over a hundred years.* The oldest eel documented was a hundred and six years, a speci- men from Lake Rotoiti in the South Island. It wasn’t even that big, only seven and a half kilograms. They say the eels in that lake mature at ninety-six years old!”* Kelly said, marveling. “They’re just fascinating.” Before Kelly had personally aged such ancient eels, he says, scientists such as Jellyman doubted customary knowledge of eels living that long.
“I mean, if they talked to us before they did a lot of things, if they talked to our people, my father and my family that lived on this river for sixteen generations … if they’d have talked to my father and sat down and listened to the stories he had to tell—they would have learned something.
“Our local knowledge is useful to scientists, but they just take what they want and toss the rest. I taught my girl where to get the wood pigeons in season, where the miro berries grow and ripen. I was out pig hunting one day and got a pig, and on the way back I stopped just after first light at a patch of miro berries I knew. The pigeons, we call kereru, come in and gorge themselves.”
Kelly described the scene in the berry patch, where the pigeons eat so much that when they try to fly they sometimes crash-land and die. “Their crops just explode, and they can be collected on the forest floor,” Kelly said. “I stuffed thirty birds in the belly of the pig and made my way out of the bush. On the way back, I ran into a guy from the Department of Conservation and he saw me with the pig and saw a pigeon sticking out of the pig’s mouth. He wanted to pinch me because the pigeons are protected. I said, ‘I’m allowed to do this, it’s my customary right,’ and I said, ‘Besides, I didn’t kill them; I just picked them up off the ground. They killed themselves.’ He didn’t believe me. He said, ‘We need to know where this place is,’ so I took the guy and showed him the pigeons, dead all over the ground. He was amazed. I said to him, ‘That’s why they taste so lovely this time of year, they’re so fat with berries.’ ”
And still, not knowing certain things had always been of equal importance to the Maori as knowing—for instance, where the longfin eel goes to spawn.
“Look, mate,” he said, “I prefer that they leave them alone. That’s my feeling. I mean, they’re very interested in finding out where this house is where they breed. Why? To benefit the commercial interests?”
Because New Zealand eels are some of the largest in the world, they can accommodate a sizeable tracking device, and therefore offer the best opportunity to track eels to the spawning grounds given the existing technology. Don Jellyman placed a tag onto each of ten large female eels (using a nylon bridle to hold them into place) and released them into the sea near Lake Ellesmere on the Canterbury coast of the South Island.*
“Jellyman’s work didn’t come to anything,” Kelly said, pleased. “After all that money”—each tag cost $4,500—“the tags and the eels went missing. That money could have been used for trap-and-transfer, to help the eels around dams. How much more do you want to study them? The research that they’ve done hasn’t been beneficial to the eel, that’s my view.”
After hours of talking, and some tea and biscuits put away, Kelly drove us to his local marae, the Maori tribal meeting place.
“When you come back,” Kelly said, “you stay here. You just come and be my shadow and I’ll show you things you’ve never seen.” He was standing on the steps of the marae in a heavy wet drizzle. We walked around the back of the marae and he showed us a waka, or sea canoe, he built with the local children, made entirely out of bundled reed grass. When I asked if it was seaworthy, he said, “You bet.” He told Stella and me the story of how the South Island was actually the waka that the first New Zealanders had taken to this area. The canoe beached on the South Pole, they say, on the shoals of Antarctica. Then Maui, the leader of the expedition, fishing from the beached waka, pulled up a giant stingray, and that became the North Island. And if you look on a map of New Zealand, the South Island does resemble a canoe, and the North Island does look like a stingray. Kelly told the story not as if it were myth, but as it was to him—the beginning of his genealogy as a Maori. The rain fell harder and we got back in the car.
* Useful data on depth distribution and swimming direction were obtained, though.
* In Maori,”wh” is always pronounced”f.”
** In the Reed Dictionary of Modern Maori, the translation of taniwha is “water monster, powerful person, ogre.”
* The modern word taboo, used in English, is a bastardization of the Pacific Island word tapu.
* With the exception perhaps of the tropical eel, Anguilla marmorata.
** The endemic longfin, Anguilla dieffenbachii, and smaller native shortfin eel, Anguilla australis, which is also found in Australia, are by far the largest of New Zealand’s twenty-five native freshwater species of fish. Of the two eels, the long- fin is longer-lived, and can be distinguished from the shortfin by a dorsal fin that starts closer to the head.
* The shortfin eel does not go up rivers as far as the longfin, spending its life in estuaries and lowland lakes and rivers.
* An eel can rotate fourteen times per second.
* The white meat of the coconut is sometimes called te-roro-o-tuna, “the brains of Tuna.” In some versions of the story, Sina, also called Ina, falls in love with the eel, named Tuna, who can take the form of a handsome man. One night there is a big flood and Tuna, in eel form, offers his sacrifice in order to stop the flood.
In his book The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, Joseph Campbell juxtaposes the Pacific island story involving the eel, the woman, and the food tree, with the biblical story of Eve, the snake-seducer, and the fruit in the Garden of Eden:
“Paradoxically, then, it would appear that although we are moving eastward into the Pacific we are also coming closer to the biblical version of the mythological event through which death came into the world; and something rather startling is beginning to appear, furthermore, concerning the relationship of Mother Eve to the serpent, and of the serpent to the food tree in the Garden. The voluptuous atmosphere of the lush Polynesian adventure will be different, indeed, from the grim holiness of the rabbinical Torah; nevertheless, we are certainly in the same old book-of which, so to say, all the earliest editions have been lost.”
> * Joseph Campbell writes in his 1976 book The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology:”In the long view of the history of mankind … essential functions of mythology can be discerned. The first and most distinctive—vitalizing all—is that of eliciting and supporting a sense of awe before the mystery of being. Professor Rudolf Otto has termed this recognition of the numinous the characteristic mental state of all religions properly so called. It antecedes and defies definition. It is, on the primitive level, demonic dread; on the highest, mystical rapture; and between there are many grades. Defined, it may be talked about and taught; but talk and teaching cannot produce it. Nor can authority enforce it. Only the accident of experience and the sign symbols of a living myth can elicit and support it.”
* To be fair, the early Polynesians were also responsible for introducing nonnative species. They brought their own creature comforts with them to New Zealand: the dog in particular and (whether intentionally or not) the kiore, or Polynesian rat. The eighteenth century saw the introduction of the pig by Captain Cook, leading to the local name for wild pigs, Captain-Cookers.
* Stella later explained that part of the reason she pursued science was to“provide that proof for her people.”
* The fishery in the lagoon at Whakaki, though unique, is not entirely unlike eel fisheries in other parts of the world where similar conditions exist—where lagoons or lakes with eels are very close to the sea. Comacchio, Italy, in the delta of the Po River near Venice, is a famous example. Lake Forsyth, or Waiwerea, in the South Island of New Zealand is separated from the sea by a gravel bar, shaped by tides and storms, that varies in depth and thickness. The Maori figured out long ago that if they dig channels in the gravel bar from the lake heading toward the ocean, but not entirely through the bar, then during the fall migration the eels will be tricked into thinking there is a way out, and they will swim into the channels, where they are gaffed.