It consists of grandchildren, golf and, well, I stood watching as he pulled four white metallic sheets from the back of his ute and unfolded them until each was about eight foot long by a foot wide. Having tethered them to the river bank he slid the sheets into the water side by side. They half sank.
He screwed together two long sections of aluminium tubing and attached a net.
He pulled out two picnic chairs and worked the back legs into the bank until the seats were level. There was a cavity in the arm of each chair to hold a beer. He handed me a beer.
And thus, for the first time in my life, on the Heathcote River in suburban Christchurch, a few hundred yards from Mike’s house, I was whitebaiting.
Being by water is always good. Ducks paddled up river to inspect us, urban ducks who see human beings as a soft touch, a source of tossed bread and sentimentality.
They brought a mob of new-hatched ducklings, fluff balls of squeaking buoyancy.
Neat little scaup came by, then dived and disappeared, and a single white duck the size of a goose.
Swallows hawked the surface of the water like fighter planes, and downstream of us a collie dived into the river with a splash to wake the dead, retrieved a stick, hauled itself back up the bank and shed a gallon or two of river with a shake that started at the muzzle and travelled like a radio wave to the tip of the tail.
We sat and sipped our beer and watched the boards. Whitebait, like all fish, look dark from above, making them hard to pick out against the riverbed. Hence the white boards.
And then there they were, a shoal of perhaps two dozen whitebait crossing the first of the boards, staying close to the bank out of the main current and driving on with surprising speed, like vigorous pubic hairs.
Tiny they might have been but here was quarry. Here was prey. The hunter-gatherer in me yelped.
The net was already in the water. Mike seized the handle and prepared to gather in the little fishes as they crossed the last of the white boards.
But they didn’t arrive. Did they see the looming net? Did they feel the disturbance of the water? Did they sense our Brobdingnagian presence on the bank?
I cannot say, but I saw them hesitate and then swim out towards the middle of the stream and they were gone.
We sat back again. We sipped at our beers. We said good afternoon to a woman walking two plump labradors. We talked of sports and yesterdays as men do.
Another shoal of pubic wrigglers and this time, as Mike positioned the net, they kept on coming, crossing the second board, the third, and the net went slowly through the water then curved up and Mike lifted the thing out and shook it to dislodge any caught in the mesh, and then he held the terminal jam jar over a bucket and unscrewed the base and let the booty fall.
In the bottom of bucket that could have held a hundred thousand of them lay perhaps 20 tiny fish, strips of near transparency, still frantically wriggling but with nowhere to go.
Whitebait are the young of five native species. Four of them are now endangered. It’s hard to feel surprised.
Each fish in that bucket had started as an egg upstream from here, a egg that had been laid some months ago among the bankside vegetation.
After hatching it was swept out to sea in the high tides of autumn and there it lived the winter through, gaining strength and evading the countless predators that lurk.
Then spring arrived and some atavistic instinct sent it back upstream to repeat the cycle.
Peril loomed at every turn: flounders, herring and kahawai in the estuary, the stabbing beaks of herons and gulls in the shallows, the diving raids of terns and kingfishers.
And then all along the bank the regiments of us, the monstrous whitebaiters, with thousands of dollars worth of gear in pursuit of the tiniest of fish. Fish that have a price on their heads.
The whitebaiting on one river near here, Mike told me, is controlled by a motorbike gang.
There’s something laughable about all this. And something tragic. And something indicative.
We opened another beer.
• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
