Read Online Aunt Effie and the Island That Sank by Jack Lasenby - Free Book Online

too.”
    When we wanted to swim, she just said, “I wouldn’t,” and we thought of the cannibal eels. We didn’t even like to dangle our feet over the side.
    At Paeroa, Aunt Effie said it was Thursday and not worth going ashore. We reached Te Aroha a few weeks later, but it was still Thursday, so we kept on.
    Below the Gordon, men were blasting snags out of the river so Mr Josiah Clifton Firth could run his steamer, the Kotuku, as far up as Stanley Landing behind Matamata, Aunt Effie said. We saw them blow a log on to the bank, and something else, shiny black, thicker than the log, and nearly as long.
    “It moved!” Jane shrieked.
    “I think it’s a …” Jazz’s voice dried up.
    The men tried to raise it over a branch, but the rope broke. They brought a chain, but the branch broke. They brought horses, dragged the thing to a big kahikatea and got the chain over its lower branch. As they pulled, a huge black head with curved ivory tusks lifted off the ground.
    The cannibal eel had been knocked unconscious, but it woke up, bellowed, pulled up the kahikatea by its roots, and started dragging it towards the river. It stopped and looked back.
    “It knows kike’s a sinker,” said Aunt Effie. “If it drags the tree into the river, it’ll drown itself. You watch.”
    Sure enough, the intelligent beast sliced through the chainwith its tusks. Now it didn’t have to drag the kike around, it bellowed, chased the men up a willow, and slid back into the river. Water surged across the paddocks as the cannibal eel rushed downstream. Despite her beam, the Margery Daw rocked from side to side.
    “I hope we don’t find Wicked Nancy’s Island up here,” said Lizzie. “I’m not diving with cannibal eels.”
    “A cannibal only eats members of its own species,” Daisy told her. “You’d be perfectly safe!”
    “Aunt Effie said they eat farmers!” said Jessie.
    Daisy smiled and corrected her. “What she actually said was that some farmers disappeared.”
    “All the same …”
    The Margery Daw skimmed upstream over the snags and rocks. The men cheered, and Aunt Effie bowed. She leaned over the bulwarks and said to them: “Sixty-six feet nine inches by eighteen feet six inches – she’s the amazing scow!
    “She’ll lift in less water than it takes to float a mangrove berry. Centre-board up, she’ll skim across a pipi bank on a heavy dew. She’ll sail on the froth and scum on top of the mud before the tide comes in. She’ll slide up a mangrove creek where you’d never get a boat with a keel. And she’ll sail all the way to Sydney fully loaded with only a foot of freeboard, and a thousand fathoms of blue water beneath her centre-board!”
    The men threw their hats in the air and cheered again.
    “And you can tell J.C. Firth, if he’s got any sense, he’ll build himself a scow instead of that steel steamer. It’s going to cost him thousands of pounds, to clear the river.”
    A white bearded man stood on the bank holding a red-wrapped stick of dynamite.
    “Who’s that?” asked Ann.
    “J.C. Firth,” said Aunt Effie.
    “Why don’t you tell him yourself?”
    “He wouldn’t take any notice of a mere woman.”
    “You’re no mere woman!” we told Aunt Effie, but she said, “Just look at that man, will you? He’s been handling dynamite, and now he’s rubbing his forehead!”
    The old gentleman put his head in his hands and groaned.
    “He’s gone and given himself a dynamite headache. He’s going to have some other headaches, too. Big ideas – big headaches!”
    Further upstream, Aunt Effie asked if we’d like a swim, but Alwyn ground his teeth like tusks. We shook our heads carefully as if we had dynamite headaches, and Daisy said she felt a cold coming on.
    From up the masts we could see for miles. “Everything you’re looking at is the Firth Estate,” Aunt Effie called up to us. “Some say old J.C. Firth leased it off Wiremu Tamihana and the Ngati-Haua about 1866. Some say he pinched