The Eel
The eel appeared on the third year of the drought, when the creek was so low that the swimming hole grew a green velvet lining of algae.
It was winter, and even though the water was cold, there were no flies to swat, so it was a pleasant time to pick over the mica-flecked stones in the exposed creek bed.
I was bent over glinting a flat rock in the sun when I saw the flash in the water. Just a foot away swam the eel. Its head was still and its body swayed like a ribbon of cold honey stirred in a glass of tea as it examined me through the root-tannined water. The eel was about a metre long, and green with black speckles, not unlike a trout. Its eyes gazed roundly, unblinking, and not at all fishily. They were the eyes of a chicken, with golden irises.
~
After a flood, we'd find the paddocks strewn with dead yabbies, claws big as vice grips, and so brilliantly chalk blue that we wondered why we'd never seen one in the creek. Like many of our neighbours in the wild, we find clues to their existence, or a dead body, but their lives are mostly a mystery.
Maybe this eel lived on yabbies and frogs. Especially after rain, and then especially at night, the frogs bong, conk, and reverberate, metallically to woodenly, loud enough that we hear them through the windows in our house 100 metres up from the creek.
But the frog chorus had dried up with the weather. Maybe the eel was hungry.
Without undue haste, I backed away from the eel, climbed up the creek bank, and ran home; returning with Griffith and a couple of eggs.
Griff squatted on the rocks by the now featureless pool.
"You can try," he said, but without any expectation.
I walked into the pool and broke open one egg with a stone, pouring the contents into the water in front of my feet. The egg, laid that morning, had a solidity of albumen to golden yolk that made it hang like a galaxy with one fantastic sun. There was almost no current.
The water opaqued as a cloud passed overhead. The pool was flat and green-black, almost totally still. We waited in our respective crouches, growing stiff. Then with silent abruptness, the cloud tore away from the sun, and light pierced the depths of the water. And there was the eel, its head looking out from under an ancient fallen tree half caught in the bank, a hazard to us swimmers, but a shelter to this eel and how many other creatures, I'd never put my hand underneath to know.
Out from under the log it swam, straight towards me. It opened its mouth and the yolk and most of the albumen seemed to swim straight in. Then, with a flick and a snap, the eel snatched the last shreds of milky egg white from the water.
While the eel hovered in place, I moved back and Griff took my place. He broke his egg just above the water with the eel poised and grabbing the whole slippery galaxy just as it hit the surface.
~
That winter we read all we could about eels, which wasn't much. It was a short-finned eel, and one day would want to migrate to the sea to spawn, and then die. We couldn't tell the sex, but decided on female. And we called her Angie, short for anguilla, the rather nice name for what is a common freshwater fish with an uncommon lifestyle.
Eels are voracious eaters at the best of times, and this drought was a lean time for all. As blue skies followed upon themselves unabated, the brown grasses were clipped ever shorter by the kangaroos and wallabies that now lived in the valley, driven here by the sparseness in the hills where they usually browsed, and still slept during the day.
After a couple of hungry wedge-tailed eagles picked up a surprisingly easy meal of two chickens one day, our chickens had to be confined to their night pen. For a while, the eagles visited the site of their chicken pick-ups every day. They'd hang over the valley like two massive kites, then swoop down to sit on the roof of the pen, finally giving up to crouch round-shouldered in the branches of the trees by the creek, just watching the chicken pen 50 metres away. I didn't worry about the chickens any more though. They were safe, if bored.
The eagles' usual easy meals of rabbits and small native game were scarce now, and the marsupials would not breed until the drought broke.
~
Up at the house, the grass was pulled threadbare by the teeth of roos, and the spinifex roots dug up by a wombat whose clodhoppery stumbles banged against the walls at night.
The parrots were still happy, crunching blackbutt and stringybark gumnuts in the forest at our back.
Angie seemed happy, too. She was now a very tame lithe eel, decidedly fatter than when we had first discovered each other. We fed her once a day, and after the first week, she was always waiting for us at noon.
At first, dinner was an egg that we broke into the water. Then, one day I dropped the egg before breaking it, and the whole thing slid to the bottom of the creek with only the smallest bump. Angie opened her jaws around the egg and encompassed it, shell and all.
We read about the way eels often travel overland on their migrations, and how they need wet conditions for this, so as not to damage their thick slime covering.
And we heard farmers only half laugh over their "escape artists", the eels raised in dams only to gallop off in their snake-slither way to running water at the first wet-spell opportunity.
That winter, with the daily visits, I felt ever closer to Angie, with that special love one feels from the thrill of earning the trust of a wild animal. By now, she ate out of my hand. She played around my ankles, sluicing around them so that it was hard to feel which was her, which water. She tickled my ankle in a gentle nibble game, and tunnelled her body through the "O" of my hands. The only thing she hadn't done was travel on land, and I wanted to see her do this. To capture this special ability in action became my pet project.
First, I'd put the egg closer and closer to the edge of the water. She seemed shy to go too shallow, and sometimes she was inextricably anxious altogether. I soon discovered she was frightened by flitting shadows. And also, that she didn't like travelling on dry stones. I built a ramp of sod and grass, and sluiced it with a bucket, and when she felt comfortable, that worked. But try as I would, she still wouldn't come up onto the bank.
"It's too dry," Griff said. "Wait till it rains."
~
On September first, it finally did—most of the night, in a steady drizzle. We woke late to a darkened room. The sky, an unbroken blue for so many days that cerulean had become ugly and the otherwise beautiful early and late shadows only accentuated the sharpness of hunger—that sky was gone—replaced by a soft and lovely cover of woolly grey.
The whole morning it drizzled. Birds sat dripping in the trees. Currawongs and finches sang.
"Today's your day," Griff said.
"Let's record it," I twittered.
We set up the tripod and telephoto on the balcony, and zoomed it in to the perfect spot, the top of a rise just 20 metres from the creek.
I ran down with two eggs and a strip of meat for good measure. She loved meat. The smell of her meal would be irresistible, especially since we'd figured for a while now that all her meals these days were on us. It was 11:45 but she was waiting.
She was unusually lively with this rain, and there were no shadows to frighten her.
I showed her the eggs and waived the strip of meat in the water. Up the hill I backed.
She watched, keeping her head still but making all kinds of fancy turns of the rest of her body.
The first egg I put on the top of the ramp.
She came into the shallows, and then started up the ramp.
Moving backwards, I placed the second egg and the meat on the designated high spot, then turned and ran back to the house, bursting onto the balcony in time to see her lift her head, smell and sight the second part of her meal.
Griff moved away from the camera so I could look through the lens myself.
And I could see everything in detail. She made it all the way to the second egg and was perfectly in the centre of the shot when the eagle swooped.
The photo shows Angie in the claws of the eagle—a long, limp, streaming ribbon.
That day, the drought broke, to be replaced the next day and the week after, by the flood.