Read Monterra's Deliciosa & Other Tales & for Free Online

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