The Eel.(Short Story)

The eel appeared on the third year of the drought, when the creek was so low that the swimming hole grew a green velvet lining of algae.

It was winter, and even though the water was cold, there were no flies to swat, so it was a pleasant time to pick over the mica-flecked stones in the exposed 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 a hundred 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.