The Old Man and the Sand Eel

by Will Millard

  My moment came when I was lost somewhere deep in West Papua, the Indonesian side of New Guinea. I had dragged my friend and medic Callum with me and we were now without food having barely escaped a maiden white-water descent with our lives. I had made a terrible error of judgement that had led us not onto an ancient trade route, but down into a vast, uninhabited, 400-mile square of thick forest that it would take us weeks to escape from. I lost two and a half stone, and we walked out with our lives, but Callum and I would never work together again and I left behind something vital of myself that I never quite recovered.

  I had gone almost as far as I could with my expeditionary career, probing towards my own breaking point and plumbing the pits of a very real, very visceral, fear of death, but I couldn’t seem to escape my hard-wired desire to push even further. Leading expeditions was my full-time job by the end of my twenties, and I didn’t feel qualified to do anything else. I pressed onwards and downwards into ever more dangerous territory: the Pennine Way alone in a tent in minus 10°C temperatures, the first solo descent of the river that marks the war-torn border of Sierra Leone and Liberia, alone and afraid, but blinkered to the damage I was doing to myself and everyone who cared about me. I had a recurring nightmare during that time in which I was an animal being hunted by an unseen but very deadly predator. I would put distance between me and my pursuer and almost slip free, only to suddenly discover I didn’t know how to run any more and instantly find myself back in front of its fangs. Its hot, smelly breath would pound the backs of my calves and I knew I was seconds from death, and then I would awake covered in my own sweat.

  A hundred million years ago the first freshwater eels left their sea home and were also settling in to a new way of life somewhere off the coast of Indonesia.

  We still don’t know exactly how the eel reproduces and an eel egg has still never been found. We don’t know the nature of the adult eel’s extraordinary navigational skills or why the European eel doesn’t just join the American eel in making the much shorter hop to the American continent from their shared breeding sea. We have yet to witness an adult eel actually die from the exertion of spawning, and, despite thousands of assaults on the Sargasso, a breeding adult eel is yet to be recovered. According to Tom Fort, there has only ever been one record of an adult eel being found in the open Atlantic: it was semi-digested and in the stomach of a sperm whale somewhere off the Azores. We may not know any of these things for sure, but there is one thing we do know: during my twenties the eel experienced a catastrophic decline in its numbers.

  By 2010 the Environment Agency had recorded a 95 per cent decline in the European eel. In keeping with the astonishingly one-sided ratio of questions over answers whenever the eel is involved, it still isn’t clear precisely what is driving eels towards early extinction. One factor could be illegal fishing and the over-exploitation of the elvers; the eel, after all, is one of the only fish to face such abuse of their young; but another possibility involves the spread of a particularly nasty nemotode worm that feeds parasitically on their swim-bladders. Then there is the increased use of hydroelectric dams and their thwarting of eel migration, and surely there can be no question that climate change, which has warmed the Arctic ice cap and slowed the Gulf Stream, has hampered the procession of thin-heads to these shores. The truth is, it is probably a mixture of all of these factors, but actually getting a firm grip on how to reverse the crash is proving extremely difficult.

  Export bans and tighter restrictions on fishing have helped, as have restocking programmes, but the benefits are only found locally in those places that care enough about the eel to invest in its future; elsewhere, the outlook is still very bleak indeed. My entire childhood was spent trying to avoid the attentions of the eel; then, for almost twenty years, I didn’t catch a single one. I felt deep shame at having taken this fish for granted.

  I shuffle along the towpath in the pitch black, glad of the half-light recce. Everything changes after dark. Things move around and obstacles emerge from nowhere. I want to limit the use of my torch, to allow my eyes the time to adjust naturally, but also to slip through here without disturbing the eels, or any other animals that could be watching from the shadows for that matter.

  The elemental vulnerability of spending time in the dark alone can quickly bring a deep sense of paranoia with it. A fear of the dark is something we dismiss as adults as being somehow childish, but ask yourself this: how much time do you actually spend in the true dark? When the light switch isn’t within reach and you have only your own mind for company? Total darkness was for a long time a CIA-approved ‘enhanced interrogation technique’, and those who have experienced interrogation in Guantánamo Bay claimed it to be the most feared torture method; proof that there is not much worse than being forced to retreat into your own mind to find out what fears feed down there.

  I was used to hiding in the dark. On expeditions, especially as I started to go solo, I would pride myself on my ability to conceal my camp. I felt far more fear of the random acts of people than I ever did of the more predictable behaviours of the wild animals that roam the forest floor. When night fell I would retreat well away from any paths or watercourses and pull myself into the densest foliage I could find. One night in West Africa I remember being near paralysed with fear as a pair of poachers hunted the banks of the river I was following. I could see their torches, scanning the bushes like a searchlight from a prison, and was absolutely convinced they were about to discover me. They came so close I could see the whites of their eyes and teeth and smell the pile of dead and dying primates they had gathered in a sack, but I remained undiscovered.

  This canal might not be Conrad’s ‘heart of darkness’ – it’s just a towpath in the Midlands after all – but it still has the ability to really scare. Here I have nowhere to go and nowhere to hide. There is no shelter, just one way in and one way out, and I’m perching myself right on the main thoroughfare, where anything could pass: a person, a badger, a fox, perhaps even a ghost.

  I’m glad of the moon then. It is almost full. So bright and lumpen in appearance, like it has been drawn by a child or moulded out of porridge, but it means my way is lit comfortably enough, and I’m able to shuffle my feet along the path to my chosen spot without too much emotional upset.

  I take a deep restorative breath and my heart rate starts to drop. A beautifully soft ethereal smoke drifts off the fields and a pair of spectral-looking moths flutter past, using the canal’s unnatural break in the treeline as an unencumbered passage. I wonder if they will make it past the squadron of pipistrelle bats though.

  In West Papua and West Africa, any break in the wilderness provided by rivers was always a relief from the intense claustrophobia of the forest. If I could, I would always use them to expedite my passage on a particular bearing, and many of the coolest things I’ve ever seen have been thanks to them. Rivers have a magnetism for people and wildlife – it was one of the reasons I continued to love them so much – but if you were potential prey you knew your life was out of your hands every time you opted for this clear path through the forest. It was why I spent so much of my projects hiding.

  I peel the lid off my bait bucket. In keeping with all I’ve learnt about the particularities of the eel’s nose a putrid cloud fills the air with the smell of microwaved vomit. The bait is suitably horrendous then, pellets soaked in fish oils for over a year and dead fish from the depths of the freezer: a lamprey, a smelt, a small joey mackerel. I’ll fix their heads to large single hooks and throw a generous handful of dead maggots over the top. I set up two bite alarms paired with stiff carp rods and strong lines. Who really is to say what could come to my baits out here in these under-fished passages? Whispered rumours of giant catfish, hulking canal pike and record-shaking perch brush shoulders with monstrous eels, snapping turtles and at least one truly massive python. The canal systems of Britain might have been made by man but they have long since been reclaimed by nature, both natural and discarded, so it pays to be prepared for
anything.

  It is surprisingly hard to sever the head of the lamprey from its body. I use a knife and the plastic top of the bait bucket and stick to my dour butchery till I have successfully parted tendons and spine. It oozes blood and oil, the perfect chum for the eel, a connoisseur of the gruesome. The dark feels right for this work, but I try and keep my mind focused on the task at hand and steer well away from the grim acts that may, or may not, take place in these hedged lands after dark.

  I underarm the lamprey head out into the dark and listen as the line fizzes satisfactorily from my reel. By some miracle it lands with a splash somewhere in the far bank hole and I feel the lead meet a solid bed. It is sat right on the fringe of the bushes. Perfect.

  Ten minutes later, with both traps laid, I flick my bite alarms on. Momentarily they light up, just to let me know the battery is charged and they are ready to go, before settling into the night’s watch. I too settle. Keeping my profile low to the moonlight, I pull the hood of my sweater over my head and hunch forward over the water like a gargoyle.

  When I was a child I was warned that the eel was known as ‘the Devil’s fish’ and that if you lay them out in a cross shape they will remain that way until they die. Later in life I learnt that they are actually just an unusually sensitive fish. They are armed with thousands of sensors along their bodies that aid them when hunting in the murk, and I discovered it was actually possible to crash their nervous system by simply tipping them up and running a finger along their lengths. It made unhooking them a much more straightforward task, as they simply fell into something of a trance. The crucifix stuff was a nonsense, of course. The eels had simply been subdued, and stupid people had just seen what they had always wanted to see, but the power of suggestion can’t be underestimated. Night fishing to exorcise freshwater snakes from brown water certainly sounds like fiendish work.

  The alarm on the lamprey lets out a single bleep and my adrenal glands eject their load. Something is out there. Something is stirring in the dark. I hover over the rod. ‘Do it again,’ I whisper, and the alarm obliges with another bleep. Do I strike? Do I not strike? The mind swims with what it could be: something with a pulse for certain – the canal is far too still and the lamprey far too dead for it to be anything else.

  It bleeps again. One more time and I’m definitely going to hit it. The giant could be out there right now, just mouthing the bait. I don’t want to snatch it from its jaws before the hook is in place. Perhaps it’s just a small perch though? Pulled in by the fishy scent. Or maybe it’s a crayfish gently stripping the severed head from the hook? I wouldn’t be too surprised if they were in here – they seem to be everywhere else – in which case I should definitely reel in and check the head.

  The rod settles again, and this is where madness lies. Do I reel up and check the bait is still there or leave it out in what I know is the perfect spot? Do I risk disturbing a swim with a feeding fish for an unnecessary investigation? What if I can’t cast it back into that perfect spot again? But what if I’m now fishing on a bare hook? I’ll never ever catch and all this time is wasted. I sit back down and reposition my hood. ‘What the hell am I doing down here?’ I say, to no one in particular, suddenly feeling very restless and quite scared. An intense feeling of disquiet enters the pit of my stomach. ‘I don’t like it here,’ I whisper through gritted teeth. In fact, I don’t like it here at all.

  When I was younger I used to believe in ghosts. In fact, I was so convinced the house I grew up in was haunted I once persuaded Paul and Lee to come over and stake the place out for a night. It was a disaster though, and the worst thing we captured was Anna smashing our carefully laid cotton trip lines and shouting ‘woooooo’ down my tape recorder at the top of her voice in the middle of the night. I did have one very odd experience when I was twelve though. The family were all staying in an old fisherman’s cottage in Little Haven and my brother Tom and I were sharing a bunkbed in one of the back rooms. In the middle of the night I woke to see the shadow of a boy hanging over me on the top bunk. I assumed it was Tom and told him to go straight back to bed, slightly surprised he had managed to climb the ladder without me waking, especially since he was only five years old and pretty clumsy on his feet. The shadow simply waved at me, before noiselessly drifting away from view. Shaken up a little I flicked on the light switch and discovered Tom was sleeping soundly and I had been staring at a wall no more than a foot from my face the entire time.

  Weird things seem to happen around water and those associated with it, but in all the years I’ve spent fishing in the dark alone I’ve only experienced a handful of occasions when I’ve felt genuinely unsettled. Certainly this night eel fishing on the canal is one of them, but there is also one pond in the Vale of Glamorgan that I simply will not fish in the dark no matter how much you pay me – as soon as the sun falls behind the trees I am out of there like a whippet from a trap and so is almost every other angler I know.

  The best, and certainly the most convincing, of all stories of the paranormal are the ones where ‘the weird’ catches you utterly unaware though, when you aren’t already in an anxious state and primed to elevate a suggestion into a full-blown apparition. One autumnal evening I was walking home along a stretch of Cardiff’s River Taff with Emma when we both heard the distinct sound of a cycle bell right behind us. It was no great surprise given we were on a route frequently taken by cyclists, so without even breaking our conversation, we took to walking in single file as the bike rushed past. Except there was no bike. Just the hair-raising sensation of having something pass right through your body that isn’t really there at all. We stopped, looked up and down both banks, waited for a few moments, and concluded there was not another single living soul for hundreds of metres.

  As I said, though, I don’t believe in ghosts. The inner machinations of our complex brains and their multitude of ways of interpreting the world on our behalf seem to me to be both deeply fallible and something that we are only just beginning to understand. However, I do absolutely believe people who say they have seen ghosts. In their mind’s eye they definitely have, in which case they are telling the truth. I just don’t necessarily think what they believe they’ve seen is evidence of the undead.

  Still, the paranormal naturally appeals to the fisherman in me. Not necessarily the idea of things that go bump in the night per se, but more the idea that if anyone spends enough time really focusing on the world, and I mean really intensely focusing, they will naturally begin to notice things that deviate from the norm. Fishing by its very nature is prying into the unknown, dropping a line into a largely unseen world and trying to make a connection. Certainly, the best fishermen I know have something of a supernatural instinct about them. They can literally feel the presence of a fish and will go on to catch with such an enviable sense of inevitability it is almost as if they have arrived from a realm in the future where they have already seen the precise location of every fish on earth. It must be sublime.

  Yes, if pressed, I would say I am an open-minded sceptic, but I recognize we are still a very long way from fully understanding ourselves, and nearly completely ignorant of that mysterious other part of the world that operates all around us, in spite of us, and not because of us.

  The red light on the alarm lights up once more in the black. It is like something from a fantasy novel, the crimson eye of a demon approaching me in a tunnel. So I can conclude that the head of the lamprey is definitely intact then, unless a fish has simply swum into my line. One more bleep, but still no full-blooded run. The first hour alone on the canal has been a bit like being buried alive in a coffin, a sensory deprivation chamber that has left my nerves shredded and my wits screaming at me to switch on my torch, but once I committed to denying myself that indulgence my body tapped back into a set of skills deep within us all.

  The animals start to creep out of their holes since it has become clear I am not a threat. The featherweight rustles of rodents disturb the leaf litter, those miniature tigers emerging to hu
nt the night-crawling insects, worms, bugs and spiders, followed up by larger crashes and intermittent barks and moans from the brush behind me. Disturbing, but actually just a family of foxes burrowing their way through the thin wooded strip between this canal and the M1. The fox is one of the great mammals of our time. Adaptive and loathed, just like the eel. I didn’t see an urban fox till I first moved to London, and could scarcely reconcile the mange-filled and greying creature before me with the snatched glimpses I had had of the fenland fox, back implausibly arched as it leapt over another fence line and vanished. The mammalian expression of the wild as we know it today is a plucky Vulpes vulpes strolling through the Marble Arch with an entire KFC chicken carcass trapped between its teeth.

  Every sound is amplified when your eyesight is dimmed. The movement of mammals is thunderous, like pressing your ear to a metallic track as a train approaches, and the rolling fish of the canal resemble a whale breaching right at my toes. I know that can’t be, that this is just my body over-compensating for the loss of one of its primary senses and that the still water itself is acting as an amplifier, but it’s a compelling idea. This is precisely where monster legends originate from of course: I see an eel and report a Nessie, I hear a tabby cat and report a panther, I smell a badger and report Big Foot.

  A large rat slips into the canal and sends shockwaves out across the water’s surface. They detonate on the brickwork bank like a bouncing bomb so I use a fingertip to check the line is still running under tension to the bait. I can feel the pulse of my heart and the gentle give and take of the water. All is in place still. The torch stays off, the baits remain out, and I keep still.

  Another hour passes and I realize my eyesight has not departed me: it has just taken longer than my other senses to come to the party. As brain and eye eventually pull together I am prised from the blanket of pure darkness and into the multi-textured world of the colour black. Against the bushes on my bank the coal black is so uniform it lends the whole scene a one-dimensional effect, as if the bushes are simply the stuck-on backdrop to a shadow puppet theatre, but where the moonlight casts a silver-tipped black on the scene my adjusted eye is able to pick out textures: the outline of the branches, the frame of a crow’s nest, the denser hollows in the shrubbery that taper into a fine inky black at the water’s edge.