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

cells in their limbs, which give them some degree of vision. But what’s more; if you cut off an octopus’s arm, it doesn’t just continue to move, it acts almost like an independent creature. Throw it a piece of food and it will seize it and try to feed the head to which it’s no longer attached.

I’d seen similar behavior in eels. I had cut one’s head off and watched the rest of the body slither away as though trying to save itself. It continued to move for minutes without a head. To the eel, death seemed relative.

For my part, I ate eel only if I had to, not because I felt sorry for them but because I didn’t like the taste. The greasy, slightly gamey flavor made me nauseated. But Dad loved eel. He ate it with his hands, gnawing the bones clean and licking the grease off his fingers. “So fatty and tasty,” he’d say. If he didn’t eat the eel fried, he ate it boiled. The same four-inch pieces were placed in a pot of salted water with allspice and bay leaves. The meat turned completely white with an oily slickness to it. I liked boiled eel even less than fried.

I didn’t, however, mind taking care of the fish we’d caught. When we returned from the stream in the early morning, we brought the eels in that black bucket full of stream water. We filled an even bigger bucket with clean water and transferred the eels. Then we let them sit there for a few hours, sometimes all day. We might change the water at some point.

I would often go outside to have a look at them. My mother ran a day care center, so our house was full of children; I used to take them out to the garage, where the bucket was. I’d poke the eels, trying to make them swim around. I’d demonstrate how to hold them, with your index and middle finger on both sides of the body and your thumb like a hook underneath. I’d pick the eels up and let them writhe and flex in the air. They could lie completely motionless in the bucket, as though dead or paralyzed, but as soon as I picked one up, it would become suddenly violently powerful, wrapping itself around my arm. I’d reek of eel slime. I never let the other children touch the eels.

As evening came on, we’d kill the eels, a brutal spectacle. Dad would pick up an eel and hold it down against a table, grab his fishing knife, and ram the sharp point straight through its head. The eel would writhe in rapid convulsions, tensing its body as though it were one big muscle. When it calmed down a little, Dad would pull the knife out and put the eel on a three-foot-long wooden board. He’d secure it to the board with a five-inch nail hammered through its head so the eel hung suspended as if on a crucifix. With his knife, he would then make an incision, all the way around the body, right below the head.

“Let’s take off its pajamas,” Dad would say and hand me a pair of pliers. I’d get a firm grip on the edge and pull the skin off in one long, fluid motion. It was blueish on the inside. Like a child’s pajamas. Sometimes the body would still be undulating slowly, sluggishly.

We opened the eel and cleaned out the innards, cut the head off, and then it was done. If it was a big eel, we sometimes weighed it, but they were almost always roughly the same size, between one and two pounds. The girth and color would vary slightly; some were paler and others a darker yellowish-brown, but on the whole, they looked remarkably alike. In all the years we fished for eels, we never caught one that weighed more than a little over two pounds. Granted, we considered that gigantic, but we also knew there were supposedly eels that weighed as much as four or five. These were the eels my father dreamed of. He’d read in the paper about an amateur fisherman transforming himself into an expert at catching big eels.

“He’ll sit by the stream for three days straight,” my dad told me. “Day and night. He just sits there, waiting. He can sit for three days without anything happening. And then suddenly, there it is. A four-pound eel!”

Patience was apparently the first prerequisite. You had to give the eel your time. We thought of it in terms of a transaction.

We also tried different kinds of bait. We put frozen shrimp on the hook. We tried plump slugs and beetles. Nothing worked much better than anything else. Once we found a dead frog in the grass by the stream. It was thick and shiny; we might have accidentally stepped on it. Dad put it on the hook and threw it in, but the next morning it was gone and the hook clean. So we went back to worms and kept working on our investment. One day, the big eel would come.

It never did, which only contributed to the eel’s mystique. I think it was what made my dad an eel fisher. He was always telling me about glass eels, yellow eels, and silver eels, about how they changed shape, about eels older than any human, eels living in cramped, dark wells. He told me about their long journey across the Atlantic, back to their birthplace, a place far beyond anything I knew or could even imagine, about how they navigated using the movements of the moon, or maybe it was the sun, and about how every eel for some unfathomable reason simply knew where to go. How could they be so sure about something like that? How could anyone feel such overwhelming conviction about the path he or she had chosen?

When dad talked about the Sargasso Sea, it sounded like a magical fairy-tale world. Or like the end of