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

at its chain like a trapped animal. Dad stood motionless, studying the murky water rushing by both faster and with more force than usual. “I’ll be damned, the water has risen,” he said and spat in the grass. “All right, let’s give it a try anyway.”

We’d brought the sledgehammer, two long poles, and one shorter one; we put them and the trap in the boat and pushed off.

“Want me to row?” I asked.

“No, I’ll do it,” he replied. “You set it up.”

He rowed some way into the stream, turned, and started struggling against the current, away from the rapids. The crutches squealed when he heaved at the oars. The current pushed back at every stroke, lifting the prow straight up. He muttered and cursed and leaned his whole body back every time he pulled. After about a hundred yards, he stuck the oars almost straight down and braced with his arms, trying to keep the boat still. It lurched from side to side as if trying to tear free. Dad pumped the oars to parry the movements.

“Take the long one and bang it into the bottom,” Dad said, nodding impatiently toward the side. Fumbling, I found the pole and plunged the sharp end into the water, pushing it into the muddy streambed as hard as I could. The boat dashed about as though it were trying to buck me, but I managed to reach the sledgehammer and get in some half-decent blows. Brown, dirty water splashed my face.

We were wet and filthy by the time I’d finally managed to bang down both long poles and tie the wings at the trap’s opening to them. Dad’s face was shiny and he was breathing heavily. He raised the oars and let the boat glide along for a few feet so I could set up the shorter pole as well and tie the tapered end to it. The trap spread out before us, hidden in the murky water, with its opening in the middle of the stream and its mesh bag like a secret room beneath the surface.

Dad pulled the oars out with a sigh and let the boat float along at will. He spat in the water and looked at the two poles sticking up like the masts of a sinking ship.

“This should bloody well get us some eels.”

That night, I fell asleep with images of eels flashing before my eyes. Tons of eels, flashing yellow and brown, crawling around my feet. They were gaping and glaring and gasping for air, struggling to climb up my legs like creepers climbing toward the light. Their eyes were like black buttons.

The next morning, the water had already subsided a little. Dad was holding the oars, studying the stream. The current seemed to have slowed, the water had cleared, and he didn’t have to try quite as hard to turn the boat against the current and row toward the trap.

But we could tell from a distance something was amiss. One of the long poles stood slanted in the water, the other was missing entirely. The whole trap had been pulled along and overturned so the wide opening was pointing downstream instead of upstream, secured now only to the short pole.

“Damn it!” Dad said.

He rowed up to the short pole. The trap was swaying this way and that; I yanked the pole up and hauled in the cold, wet mesh, which was covered in dark green plants. The water soaked my trousers, and my hand grew numb; Dad put the oars up and took the trap in silence, tossing branches and large clumps of shiny seaweed overboard, folding the mesh into a pile between us.

That’s when I spotted it. At the very apex of the narrow end, partially hidden by seaweed, was an eel, writhing sluggishly from side to side. It was the size of a blindworm, just over seven inches long, thin and with tiny black dots for eyes, and I thought that it shouldn’t have had a problem getting out through the mesh.

It goes without saying it was too small to keep, but we put it in the bucket anyway.

“I want to bring it home,” I said.

“What for?” Dad asked. “It’s too small to eat. Better leave it to grow.”

“I could keep it in the tank, the one in the basement,” I said.

Dad smiled and shook his head. “An eel as a pet . . .”

When we got home, I put the tank in my room. It was small, maybe a foot and half across; I poured sand into it, added a big rock, and filled it with water. I dropped the eel into the tank; it sunk to the bottom almost without moving and settled behind the rock.

I never named it. Over the weeks that followed, the eel just lay there behind the rock, and I sat next to the tank, staring at it through the glass, waiting for it to move, for something to happen, to suddenly see something behind its seemingly dead black eyes. I tried to feed it, dropping small bugs and worms into the water, but it didn’t react. Just lay behind the rock as though hibernating, as though time had ceased to exist.

I tried to imagine what it saw when it looked out through the glass, what it felt. Was it scared? Was it playing possum? Did it think the world had ended when it was ripped from its usual environment? Could it imagine an existence other than the one it had now?

After a month, I still hadn’t seen the eel move. It was lying dead still behind the rock. Its tiny gills pulsating gently on the sides of its head, the only sign of life. The water was getting murky. It reeked of decay.

“It’s not eating,” I told Dad. “It’s going to starve to death.”

“Oh, it’ll eat when it needs to, I’d wager.”

“But it’s not moving either. I think it’s dying.”

A few days later, Dad came to my room and checked the tank. He looked at the filthy water and