Eels

by James Prosek

  A few people had gathered around the skillet, watching expectantly as the eel steaks turned golden brown in the fat.

  “The skin fries up like pork cracklings,” one elderly Maori woman said, smacking her lips.

  I asked Papa Bear if eel was served in New Zealand restaurants.

  “Ah, nah,” he said, “it’s just not done. I’m not sure why they’re thought of here as second-class fish, maybe because the Maori eat them.” He laughed. “More for us.”

  In the afternoon sun the red-faced pakeha and the deep-brown-skinned Maori began to prepare for yet another night of partying. They cleaned out the grills, washed pots, picked up beer bottles, brushed their teeth, and shaved in small mirrors leaning on shelves over washbasins. I half remembered, as my hangover lifted, playing guitar and singing the night before. The green grass was trampled like playing fields after a tailgate, and damp under the tents, and the sea breeze was suffused with a crushed green smell. The eels we had not yet eaten still hung on the line in the sun.

  A Maori bush guide who resembles a cross between a cowboy and an Indian, Daniel Joe is tall and lean, with a long nose and a casual swagger. He wears a silver pocket watch in a leather pouch (wristwatches, he says, get hung up in the bush) and a pig-hunting knife in its sheath side by side on his belt.

  To meet up with DJ, Stella and I drove from Hawke’s Bay to the region south of Lake Taupo where he lives. I’d first heard of DJ and his home, called Double Crossing, from my friend David Seidler—they had fly-fished together for years—and it was through DJ that I had come to know Stella in the first place. By this time in our trip, I’d heard enough stories about him—the loner, the adrenaline junkie—that he had taken on a kind of mythical aura, as had his cryptically named home on the Taupo-Napier road.

  I’d imagined that DJ’s place was called Double Crossing because some bad deal had gone down there—that someone had died in a shootout, Old West style. The name had arisen, though, from the simple fact that in order to get to DJ’s home you had to cross a pair of rivers. The first crossing is a small stream that can be driven through with an all-wheel-drive car at most times of year. The second is a formidable river, the Waipunga, and there’s no bridge, only a cable and a small plywood car.

  When he first gave up years of working in the freezerworks (the colloquial term for a slaughterhouse), DJ moved to Double Crossing, a piece of tribal land he inherited from his grandfather. No one had lived there since the early 1900s. There were no buildings or amenities on the site and no apparatus for crossing the Waipunga. For the first year he lived in a bus that he towed across the river with his friend’s tractor. Whenever DJ came or went, he had to ford the river on foot (waist deep if the water was low) or take his horse across. When any of his bros came to visit, they brought DJ something—a chair, a mirror, a window, a mattress. He lived on pigs from the bush behind his house that he hunted with his mastiff dogs and a knife, trout and eels from the river, and squash, lettuce, and kumara (sweet potatoes) from his garden. Eventually he brought out a small prefab building, arranged some furniture, built bunk beds, and all but concealed the building by transplanting full-grown ponga, or tree ferns, around it. DJ started bringing timber across the river, one plank at a time, to build a larger home of his own design, while the bunkhouse slept occasional visitors. He put cement footings on either side of the river to support a cable across it, and outfitted the cable with a cage on a pulley so he could traverse the river with some supplies, or his dogs, without getting wet—such a cable car in New Zealand is known as a flying fox. Double Crossing had been revived.

  When he’s not guiding fly fishermen, white-water rafters, or Korean and German pig hunters (“the Koreans are in it for the gallbladder,” DJ said), there are times of year when DJ won’t leave the Crossing for weeks. He has a radio that runs on batteries (when he has batteries), from which he gets BBC news tailored for New Zealand, but there is no electricity at the Crossing, no TV, no telephone. His girlfriend, Nikki (Stella’s cousin), was visiting with her kids one day and the kids were talking. “What’s that you’re on about, plane bombs?” DJ asked. The September 11, 2001, attack on New York had happened two weeks before.

  Stella and I pulled off the road as directed, at the Rangitaiki Pub. DJ was having a beer and “a yarn with the publican.” He invited us to join him, asking for three more Tui beers. He hugged Stella and we told him a bit about our trip so far.

  “All right then,” he said, “let’s go.”

  DJ led us to his driveway a few miles down the road. The entrance was well hidden—a treacherous left turn. We followed the pitted road through the first river, water over the bottom of the doors of our rental car, until the track dead-ended on the banks of the second river.

  DJ helped us unload our gear from the car and whisked us across the rushing currents of the Waipunga in the flying fox.

  “I call it Air New Zealand,” he shouted as we flew.

  Double Crossing was a farm of sorts, skirted by native bush and embraced by a horseshoe bend of the river. DJ’s home was ringed by large tree ferns, and behind was a grove of kahikatea trees over a hundred feet tall. In the uppermost branches large wood pigeons cooed. Several horses grazed on the flat green common, and his three bullmastiff-greyhound dogs greeted us with tails wagging.

  “Hey there, Football-head,” DJ called to one. “Hey, Nunu, hey, Bruiser.”

  DJ helped Stella and me settle in the guesthouse, concealed by tree ferns and vines. Inside there were a few bunk beds, a kitchen, bookshelves, a couch, and a dining area. Wood figures adorned the shelves and available counter space, one of a twisting eel DJ had carved, its mouth and eyes natural features of the burled wood. A resident cat named Pussy Galore was asleep on the couch, curled up in a slanting ray of late afternoon sun. And on a windowsill above the couch were a pair of pig skulls.

  DJ popped a beer for each of us, and we sat on the porch looking off across the farm.

  “I don’t take many trout from this river,” he said. “They taste a little like clay, but they’re okay smoked over manuka wood. What do you say we catch a few for dinner, eh? Then we can use the heads to bait the hinaki, leave it in the river tonight, see if we can catch a few eels.”

  Stella stayed behind at the house while DJ and I hiked upstream with our fly rods. We drifted our flies through the cold, milky currents of the river and in an hour of fishing managed to get three good-sized rainbow trout. I strung each of the silvery fish through its gills on a supple willow branch, and we carried them back to Double Crossing. On the way we stopped at a blackberry patch and got our fill of berries. DJ pointed out the call of a tui bird in the bush and said he often heard the mechanical song of bellbirds in the mountains behind the house.

  Back at Double Crossing, we hung our waders on the porch of the guesthouse and put away our fly-fishing gear. I filleted the trout while DJ lit a fire in the fire pit to smoke the trout over manuka chips. Stella came outside the guesthouse to help prepare dinner.

  “Maori traditionally smoke fish with manuka,” she said, watching DJ prepare a metal plate with shavings of the wood. “Honey from manuka flowers is renowned throughout the country.”

  “There are two methods commonly employed for smoking fish,” DJ instructed, “hot smoking and cold smoking. Cold smoking is done when you have time. Hot smoking is done when you’re hungry.* Maori used to cold-smoke the heads of their enemies and relatives.”

  Stella began preparing salad and boiling potatoes on the gas stove inside the guesthouse. While the trout was cooking DJ poured me a glass of wine and then put me to work mending holes in the eel pot we would set that night. DJ said that if every hole wasn’t plugged, the eels would find their way out, tail first. My mending passed inspection. In the meantime, the trout was cooking on the grill over the smoldering manuka chips.

  DJ suggested we set the eel trap before dinner, otherwise we’d have a hard time walking back along the river in the dark. The heads from the trout we’d caught went into
a mutton-cloth sack that was tied to the far end of the trap. The eels could chew on the bait inside the mutton cloth but not get at the bait itself. When the trap was wired shut, DJ and I carried it upstream from Double Crossing, threw the trap into the river, and tied it to a tree on the bank.

  It was now dark. A rising moon had lit up the riverbed and brought shining highlights to the gurgling riffles of the river. When we returned to the Crossing we opened another bottle of wine and DJ added a few more logs to the fire. We watched the fire in silence.

  DJ poked the fire with a stick. The flames illuminated the strong angles of his face. “The way I see it, there are three players in the river: the rainbow trout, the brown trout, and the eel,” he began. “The trout are British imports. The eel is the cultural factor. Everyone forgets about the eel because you don’t see them. You don’t see the eel, but he’s there, and he’s relentless in his efforts to catch the trout. He’s always stalking them. Ultimately, he’s the survivor. He can take the other two out anytime. He might wait years to catch them, till they get old and weak. The eel, old Tuna, he’s got time. He’s been there before the trout and he’ll be there after. We call that morehu—the survivor.

  “I liken that to our present situation in New Zealand,” DJ continued, “between the Maori people and the Crown. The Maori people now are the morehu. We’re in pursuit of correcting the wrong that the Crown brought to us. Stella and the ones who are getting educated in the universities, they are told by their elders, like I was told by mine, that we have to fight. Our land is our economy, and the last foothold is the foreshore and the seabed. They want to make it legal through legislation, to take those rights from us.” DJ paused to drink some wine.

  “Eh there, Stella?” he said to her. Her long black hair looked especially dark this night.

  Stella responded with a sedate “Yeah.”

  I looked at the largest of the trout, its flesh a beautiful orange-gold color. Back home this trout would have been a trophy; here trout this large are commonplace. Ironically, while the large size of New Zealand trout could be attributed to a rich food supply and mild winters, another contributing factor was the eel.

  The Acclimatization Society was correct to think that the eel was a predator of the trout—eels eat plenty of them. But in the years that the eradication efforts continued and anglers and society members killed thousands of large eels, they saw their trophy trout fishery change. The trout in eel-free rivers had become more numerous, yes, but the average size was much smaller.

  In the 1950s, a biologist named Max Burnett studying the interaction of trout and eels in the streams of Canterbury discovered that the eel, maligned and needlessly slaughtered, was actually in part responsible for the now world-famous trout fishing in New Zealand. By preying on the trout, the eel was culling a population that soon became overpopulated and stunted without them. With the eels in the rivers, the trout were fewer but much larger. Burnett’s work showed that the presence of eels was beneficial and single-handedly turned around public opinion of them. The killing stopped.

  A young technician working with Burnett on the study, who as a child had killed eels for money, became fascinated with the life history of the snake-like fish, and in the process he has become one of its greatest advocates, not to mention one of the world’s best-known eel scientists. His name is Don Jellyman.

  The fire burned to embers, the night grew cold, and we moved inside to eat dinner at a long table lit by candles. The tabletop itself was a conversation piece, a single slab of wood about twelve feet long. “The tree was from the property,” DJ said. “It’s an endemic called matai. My friend Alex, a helicopter pilot, had to fly in an old portable Patterson saw to mill it. We cut a hole in the wall with a chain saw to get the tabletop in the building.”

  We picked at the meat on the trout skins. The flavor conferred by the manuka was light and sweetly smoky. Football-head, for all his intimidating massiveness, was tranquil beside us, chewing on his cow femur. DJ poured us another glass of wine. Stella asked DJ if he’d ever had a run-in with a taniwha. DJ picked his teeth with the end of a flat matchstick.

  “My friend Alex and me were deep in the bush hunting pigs,” DJ said. “We went up on horseback, so we had our horses, and we were pig hunting, so we had our dogs. And we’d camped under this permanent shelter, a hut. It’d been there forever. We’d had a long day of hunting and we were cooking a big feed. It was getting toward dark, like now, and all of a sudden the bush went silent.” DJ paused. “Normally the bush is full of sounds at dusk. Well, it all went dead quiet. Then the horses started acting up and the dogs went ballistic. We’re told as kids, ‘Don’t ever camp on top of the track,’ but we did—we were set up right on it. I’m always trying to reason, and I thought, there’s some logical reason why they’re acting up. I thought it was possible that an experienced horseman was riding up in the dark, up the track along the steep ridge that we’d taken up there. People do it all the time, it’s possible. I waited for that horseman, but he never came.”

  Stella looked into the candle flame on the table.

  “Well,” DJ said, “now we were up on our feet and we went for cover. And then this roar came, a deafening sound. I don’t know how else to describe it, and I never heard it since.”

  I momentarily thought of the eel trap sitting on the bottom of the frigid, dark river, and I was glad that we were warm and safe in the guesthouse. Before I fell asleep I wondered if any eels had found their way into the trap; if they had, I hoped they weren’t taniwha. At some point DJ left the room and went back to his house ringed by ponga to sleep.

  At five-thirty in the morning I heard DJ rattling pots in the kitchen of the guesthouse, boiling water for coffee. He was waking me up because we had to pull the hinaki at first light. DJ maintained that if you pulled the eel pot after the sun was up, the eels would escape the same way they came in.

  It was a cold morning and dark—summer was winding down (by this time it was late March). I could still see the odd star in the sky. I put on my waders and followed DJ down the horse track to the riverbank, through the blackberry brambles where we’d gorged ourselves on fruit the night before. Searching in the early platinum light, DJ found the rope that attached the hinaki to a tree onshore, untied it, and hoisted the trap out of the river. It had four eels in it, and one of them was big.

  “It’s a good haul,” DJ said. “It’s all of five kilos that one, eh. It’s heavy. Why don’t we each grab one end of the hinaki.” In my eyes the eel was a monster. I looked at it hard to make sure it didn’t have any red eyes or stripes. It was all dark brown, dark eyes, a fish of the night, mysterious and moving its muscular body forward and backward with equal facility.

  Once we were back at the horse corral, DJ began the process of cleaning the eels by putting them in an old sugar bag with ashes from the fire pit. While the ashes were desliming the eels, DJ suggested we have some breakfast.

  Stella was out of bed and joined us for lamb chops and a can of spaghetti with toast. Bruiser and Nunu lay half asleep at our feet.

  Stella, still in her pajamas, cleaned up some of our mess from the night before. DJ and I went out under a grove of giant macrocarpa trees and overturned the sugar bags, spilling the ash-covered eels out in the grass. The biggest one started moving through the grass, white ash glued to its skin. DJ took his pig dagger out of its sheath and handed it to me.

  “You do it, James,” he said.

  “Stab it through the skull?” I asked.

  DJ nodded.

  I did as I’d seen eel fishermen do in Europe—just stick them in the top of the head with the point of the knife. I stuck the three smaller ones, but when I got to the big one I turned away.

  “I can’t, DJ. You do it.”

  “No, James, I think you ought to,” he said, and looked at me coldly. I felt a shiver of vulnerability even though I was the one holding the knife. The big eel made its way across the grass, covered in leaves and dust and ash, downhill toward the river.<
br />
  “I can’t, DJ,” I said again, turning the knife and extending the handle to him. He wouldn’t take it.

  “No, James, you’ve got to do it all yourself, mate.”

  “But why won’t you do it?”

  DJ laughed his hard heckle. I felt like I was still asleep and dreaming.

  “Why?” I asked DJ again. “Have you ever killed such a big eel?”

  “I’ve killed them bigger than that.”

  “Then why won’t you do it?”

  He looked at me again and smiled his sparsely toothed smile. It wasn’t a friendly smile.

  “I reckon it’s all yours, mate.”

  I looked at DJ again. He looked at the ground.

  I walked across the grass and took the big eel in my left hand. My thumb and forefinger went only halfway around its girth. I grabbed it right behind the pectoral fins, pinned it to the ground as it did its best to squirm away, took the pig sticker in my right hand, and stabbed the eel between the domes of its fat head. I handed DJ the dagger and he wiped the blood off the blade on the grass.

  The eel continued to crawl across the ground.

  “How many pigs have you killed with that?” I asked DJ about his knife.

  He didn’t answer right away. We were both focused on the eel.

  “I reckon you should stick it again,” he said, “but further up the head.”

  So I took the knife and plunged it again, but it met with resistance. I pushed the knife deeper through the skull, heard it crack through, and felt the blade scraping in the sandy soil beneath.

  “The rest is just nerves,” DJ said.

  Stella came down from the guesthouse and we walked the big eel over to DJ’s house, where he had a scale to weigh it. It weighed about fifteen pounds.

  “How old you reckon that eel is, Stella?” DJ asked.