The Book of Eels, Patrik Svensson [bill gates best books .TXT] 📗

menacingly, but everything below the surface was hidden from us. We had no way of knowing, but we chose to have faith as from time to time a person must. Fishing is often about exactly that.

“Yes, this’ll do,” Dad repeated, turning to me; I pulled a spiller from the bucket and handed it to him. He pushed the stake into the ground and quickly gathered up the line, picked up the hook, and gingerly pulled a fat worm out of the jar. He bit his lip and studied the worm in the flashlight; after putting it on the hook, he held it up to his face and pretended to spit on it for luck, always twice, before throwing it into the water with a sweeping motion. He bent down and touched the line, making sure it was taut and hadn’t traveled too far in the current. Then he straightened back up and said “All right,” and we climbed back up the bank.

What we called spillers were really something else, I suppose. The word spiller usually denotes a long fishing line with many hooks and sinkers. Our version was more primitive. Dad made them by sharpening one end of a piece of wood with an ax. Then he cut a length of thick nylon line, about fifteen feet, and tied one end to the wooden stake. He made the sinkers by pouring melted lead into a steel pipe and letting it set before cutting the pipe into short pieces that he would then drill a hole through. The sinker was placed about a hand’s length from the end of the line and the fairly sizable single hook right fastened at the end. The stake was hammered into the ground, the hook with the worm rested on the streambed.

We would bring ten or twelve spillers, which we’d bait and throw in, one after the other, approximately thirty feet apart. Up and down the steep bank, the same laborious procedure each time and the same well-rehearsed hand-holding, the same gestures and the same spitting for luck.

When the last spiller had been set up, we went back the same way, up and down the bank, checking each one again. Carefully testing each line to make sure there hadn’t been a bite already and then standing around for a minute in silence, letting our instinct convince us that this was good, that something would happen here if we just gave it some time. By the time we’d checked the last one, it would be completely dark—the silent bats visible now only when they swooped through the shaft of moonlight—and we climbed up the bank one final time, walked back to the car, and drove home.

I CAN’T RECALL US EVER TALKING ABOUT ANYTHING OTHER THAN eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream. I can’t remember us speaking at all.

Maybe because we never did. Because we were in a place where the need for talking was limited, a place whose nature was best enjoyed in silence. The reflected moonlight, the hissing grass, the shadows of the trees, the monotonous rushing of the stream, and the bats like hovering asterisks above it all. You had to be quiet to make yourself part of the whole.

It could, of course, also be because I remember everything wrong. Because memory is an unreliable thing that picks and chooses what to keep. When we look for a scene from the past, it is by no means certain that we end up recalling the most important or the most relevant; rather, we remember what fits into the preconceived image that we have. Our memory paints a tableau in which the various details inevitably complement one another. Memory doesn’t allow colors that clash with the background. So let’s just say we were silent. In any case, I don’t know what we might have talked about if we did.

We lived just a mile or two from the stream; when we got home late at night, we would pull off our wellies and waders on the front steps, and I would go straight to bed. I’d fall asleep quickly, and just after five in the morning, Dad would wake me up again. He didn’t need to say much. I got out of bed straight away, and we were in the car a few minutes later.

Down by the stream, the sun was rising. Dawn colored the lower edge of the sky a deep orange, and the water seemed to rush by with a different sound, clearer, brighter, as though it had just woken up from a deep sleep. Other sounds could be heard all around us. A blackbird warbling, a mallard entering the water with a clumsy splash. A heron flying silently over the stream, peering down with its large beak like a raised dagger.

We walked through the damp grass and stomped our way sideways down the bank to the first spiller. Dad waited for me, and together we studied the taut line, looking for signs of activity under the surface. Dad bent down and put his hand to the nylon. Then he straightened back up and shook his head. He pulled the line in and held up the hook for me to see. The worm was gone, probably stolen by crafty roaches.

We moved on to the next spiller, which was also empty. As was the third. Approaching the fourth one, however, we could see the line had been dragged into a stand of reeds; when Dad pulled on it, it was stuck. He muttered something inaudible. Grabbed the line with both hands and tugged a bit harder, to no avail. The current might have carried the hook and sinker into the reeds. But it might also have been that an eel had swallowed the hook and gotten itself and the line caught up in the plant stalks and was now lying there, biding its time. If you held the line taut in your hand, you could sometimes feel tiny movements, as