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on its dorsal fin and one on each gill cover. The pain, if not quickly
treated, can last for days. A local woman, fishing on a charter boat,
sat on one that someone had landed on the deck and spent six weeks
in a wheelchair. A man I met was unable to move his left hand for six
months. Few people have been killed by weevers, but if you are stung
in a kayak and have no means of treatment, you will not make your
own way back to land. The pain and shock ensure that paddling is
impossible.
I managed, after nearly falling out of the boat, to shake the creature
off the hook. Since then I have always carried a club with me. When-
ever I catch a weever, I draw it against the side of the kayak and hit it
very hard. It has firm white flesh, which makes an excellent bouilla-
baisse or curry. In the Mediterranean the charter boats allow anglers
to take all the fish they catch except the weevers, which the crews
keep for themselves.
On some occasions in the previous season I had caught weevers in
greater numbers than mackerel. I had never been stung on the boat,
but one day, filleting the fish on the shore while my partner made a
fire in the dunes, my hand slipped and I impaled my thumb on a spine.
It felt as if I had put my thumb on a workbench, raised a hammer and
hit it as hard as I could. I went rigid with pain, then felt a panic-inducing
numbness spreading up my arm, across my shoulder and into my
chest. But, even as my brain flooded with red light, the wheels began
to spin. The cure for weever stings is hot water, applied as quickly as
possible. There was no hot water on the beach. But it could not be the
water that cured you, as skin is waterproof. It must be the heat. The
poison must be heat-sensitive. It did not matter what the source of
heat was. Where was heat? I cast around, my eyes flickering, and saw
the smoke rising from the dunes.
I ran up the beach, crouching over my arm, jumped over the dunes
and thrust my thumb into the flames. My partner stared at me as if I
had gone mad. But the effect was remarkable. Within a minute the
pain began to subside. I held my thumb so close to the fire that it
almost scorched; the pain from the flames was less urgent than the
pain from the venom. Soon my screaming nerves fell still. The numb-
ness subsided, and within half an hour I felt as well as I had before I
impaled myself.
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