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

Dad down by the stream, against a backdrop of moonlight and the soft rushing of the rapids, with reeds sticking out of the water like dark antennae behind him. He was standing at the bottom of the bank, just by the water’s edge, clutching an eel. It was small, too small to take home and eat, really. But, as eels are prone to do, it had swallowed the hook so completely that it had disappeared down its throat; Dad was squeezing the eel, trying to jiggle the hook loose, but it kept writhing around his arm, up over his wrist, which was shiny with slime, and the hook refused to come out. Dad hissed, softly through gritted teeth: “You bastard.”

As I watched, unease grew inside me. That thick slime, almost impossible to wash off, clinging to the skin of his arm and clothes like stinking glue. The eel’s tiny button eyes, which seemed to stare at me but never returned my gaze. The slow movements, the body arching like a flexed muscle, twisting around its own axis until its white underbelly shimmered in the moonlight.

Dad squeezed the eel even harder, yanked at the line and tried to pry its jaw open, but it bit down hard and continued to writhe in his grasp, resisting sluggishly. Blood was dripping from the eel’s mouth; Dad frowned and said, even more softly: “Bloody let go already. You bastard!” His words may have been aggressive, but his tone slowly changed, becoming gentle, pleading, almost tender. He shook his head. “No, it’s not working.” And I handed him the knife, the long fishing knife whose blade had been whetted so many times it was thin as a reed, and he squatted, held the eel against the ground, and firmly pushed the point of the knife through its head.

Dad liked animals a lot. All kinds of animals. He liked being in nature, by the stream or in the forest; he read books about animals and watched nature shows on television; he liked horses and dogs, and seeing an unusual wild animal made him very excited. Sometimes we went bird-watching. Just him and me with one pair of binoculars between us. We walked around aimlessly, passing the binoculars back and forth whenever we spotted a kite or a woodpecker. We didn’t keep a log of the species we saw; it was never a sport to us. We just liked looking at birds.

He was fascinated by all the strange and wonderful forms life took. He told me about the bats down by the river, how they navigated using sonar. “They can’t see a thing, barely as far as their own noses, but they let out these high-pitched squeaks that we can’t even hear, and then they listen for the echo; when it comes bouncing back, they know straightaway if there’s a mosquito or a tree trunk in front of them. It takes a fraction of a second.”

Sometimes we heard rustling in the tall, wet grass and saw a frightened grass snake slip into the stream and swim away, its yellow spots like glimmering lanterns on its head. Sometimes we spotted a heron standing on the opposite bank, its neck bent like a fishing hook and its giant beak pointed down at whatever was hiding under the surface.

Dad told me about the mink that lived by the stream. A small, slender, almost entirely black creature that crept along the water’s edge at night. At least that’s what he said. I’d never seen it and wasn’t sure Dad had either. But sometimes we would find half-eaten fish in the grass. “Must be the mink,” Dad would offer.

He said they were lovely animals, but also crafty and dangerous, maybe not to us, but to the stream and the reason we visited it—the fish and the eel. “It kills for sport,” he told me. He said the mink goes for mice and frogs and fish, definitely, and that it doesn’t stop until it’s killed everything in its path. Every time it runs into another life-form, it has to kill it. It’s in its nature. It was an intruder, not just by our stream, but in the very ecosystem. It would be capable of emptying the stream of eels pretty much single-handedly. It fell to us to put things right.

So Dad built a trap. It was a simple, rectangular wooden box, maybe three feet long, with an opening at one end and some kind of trip lock meant to make sure the mink couldn’t get out once it was inside. We baited the trap with a dead roach and placed it by the water’s edge, at the bottom of the steep bank. Then we left it overnight while we fished for eels.

The next morning, we crept through the wet grass toward the trap as silently as we could. On the lookout for any sign of movement, listening for the sounds of the animal that was almost certain to be inside. But the trap was empty. The roach was still there, untouched. And that was how it always turned out, every time we set the trap, in many different spots along the stream. A single, reeking roach, left untouched. Not once did we see the faintest sign of the mink ever having been near it.

In time, I started doubting whether the mink was real, but more than anything I was relieved I didn’t have to encounter it. Because what would we have really done if we’d caught a mink? I suppose Dad would’ve killed it. But how? With his bare hands? Or a knife? Would he have submerged the whole trap in the stream and drowned it? A small, slender, beautiful animal with bright eyes and soft, shiny fur. Was it right to kill an animal like that? It felt foreign, an act completely different from killing a roach or an eel.

WHAT MAKES A HUMAN DIFFERENT FROM AN ANIMAL? I KNEW NOTHING about that. The only thing I knew was that there was a