River Monsters: True Stories of the Ones that Didn't Get Away Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  CHAPTER 1 - GOONCH

  CHAPTER 2 - WELS

  CHAPTER 3 - GOLIATH TIGERFISH

  CHAPTER 4 - PIRANHA

  CHAPTER 5 - ARAPAIMA

  CHAPTER 6 - PIRAIBA

  CHAPTER 7 - CANDIRU

  CHAPTER 8 - NILE PERCH

  CHAPTER 9 - ALLIGATOR GAR

  CHAPTER 10 - FRESHWATER SHARK

  CHAPTER 11 - RIVER STINGRAY

  CHAPTER 12 - THE LAKE ILIAMNA MONSTER

  CHAPTER 13 - SNAKEHEAD

  CHAPTER 14 - RIVER SHARK REVISITED

  CHAPTER 15 - BOL KATA

  CHAPTER 16 - ELECTRIC EEL

  CHAPTER 17 - SAWFISH

  CHAPTER 18 - CAPTAIN COOK’S MAN-EATER

  EPILOGUE

  REFERENCES & FURTHER READING

  Acknowledgements

  PHOTO CREDITS

  Copyright Page

  To Matthew, Dominic, Joshua, Tamsin, Ivo, and Luca

  INTRODUCTION

  WHY SOME FISHERMEN’S TALES ARE TRUE

  But I will lay aside my Discourse of Rivers, and tell you some things of the Monsters, or Fish, call them what you will, that they breed and feed in them....

  Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler, 1653

  IT’S A DISTURBING EXPERIENCE—seeing something that doesn’t exist.

  In July 1993 I was floating in a leaky wooden canoe on a muddy Amazon lake, known simply as Lago Grande (big lake), looking for arapaima. Unusually for fish, Arapaima gigas are air-breathers. Despite having gills, they have to surface at half-hour intervals to burp stale air from their swim bladder and gulp a fresh mouthful down. It’s a quirk that allows these super-predators to stay active in stagnant water, when other fish are going belly-up. And without doubt it’s one of the reasons they grow so huge. Just how huge is not known for sure, but they are commonly said to be the biggest freshwater fish in the world, with some supposedly reliable sources quoting a maximum length of fifteen feet. So they shouldn’t be too hard to spot, particularly as they’re also not exactly camouflaged, being decorated all over with vivid red markings. So why hadn’t I seen a single one?

  Perhaps they had all been harpooned or netted—the one drawback to being so large and visible. But local fishermen assured me there were still arapaima in the lake, mainly because there’s a very deep hole, over seventy-five feet deep, off the southern end of the central island where their encircling nets can’t reach the bottom. A few days before, José had even pointed some out to me:

  “There! The size of this canoe! ...”

  But the distant ripples looked no different from any of the others that he had pointed out earlier, made by river turtles, caimans at periscope depth, and other fish. Or so he said. As far as I was concerned, he was seeing things that were invisible. I recalled how other fishermen had told me that the lake was encantado—enchanted—how an invisible force sometimes held canoes out in the middle, and how the fishermen had strange dreams when they camped here, dreams about ghost ships from an underwater kingdom whose occupants silently beckoned. No wonder fishermen have such a reputation for invention and exaggeration and for being all-around unreliable witnesses. Perhaps the arapaima wasn’t a real fish at all but rather a spirit living in another dimension, a spirit you can only see once you’ve lost your grip on reality after too much time staring at the water.

  Or maybe I needed to look harder. Back home, beside an English pond I could locate a feeding carp from the tiniest whorl on the surface, spun by its tail as it rooted head-down in the silt. But this water spoke a different language that I couldn’t yet decipher. Where José saw a clear signature I saw a meaningless scribble.

  But foreign languages can be learned. In time I started to recognize the subtly different ripple patterns. My eyes began to enhance detail and eliminate noise, to sharpen edges and slow down time, so that I too could tell not just the species but also the size and direction of travel—even, sometimes, whether or not the ripple-maker knew it was being watched. But back then, my first time in the Amazon, it felt as if the lake’s inhabitants were mocking me. Dejected, I stared at the water and pondered the strange mechanics of perception—the perplexing fact that you can only see something properly if you already know what you’re looking for.

  Such was my state of mind when, thirty yards from the boat, the surface opened and something huge heaved into the air. The size was right for a very big arapaima, but the shape was all wrong. What I’d seen—if the blurred afterimage wasn’t deceiving me—was an arched back, bright pink in color and bearing a row of large triangular points. It was like some huge gear wheel in the lake’s workings, briefly cutting into the air before spinning back into the depths.

  What it was not like was any living creature in the real world.

  Back at the hut that night I described it to José, who knew the lake better than anyone. He regarded me over his ragged moustache and then asked where I was keeping my secret bottle of cachaça—and why I wasn’t sharing it with him.

  “Nothing like that lives here,” he said.

  All the other fishermen I told about it said the same thing.

  So what do you do with an experience like that? Do you keep talking about it in the face of disbelief or even ridicule? Or, like a puzzled spectator at a magic show, do you admit that your eyes must have been tricked—or, rather, your brain has misinterpreted the signals from your eyes? For the sake of my sanity, I allowed the outlandish vision—which had once screamed for attention—to fade from my memory.

  And that’s how things would have stayed if I hadn’t gone back the next year. I was still looking for arapaima, but I also cast lures into the lake margins for smaller species—tucunaré (more widely known as peacock bass), surubim, and aruanã—usually to return to the water but sometimes for the pot. On one particular day, when these fish were proving more elusive than usual, there were several pink river dolphins breaching in the area of the deep hole. These (the scientific name is Inia geoffrensis, but they are known locally as botos) are among the Amazon’s strangest looking animals—hump-backed with a bulging head that contains an echo-location organ and sports a narrow, toothy beak. I decided to pack up fishing for the day and try to photograph dolphins instead.

  With my 135mm medium-telephoto lens, I had to be pointing right at them to get them in the frame. But they appeared through the surface without warning, in random positions, for just a fraction of a second ... and by the time I’d reacted they were gone. However, with the bright sunlight and fast film, I could set both a fast shutter speed, to freeze the action, and a small enough aperture to give a good depth of field so I didn’t have to fiddle with fine focus. I then waited with the camera raised, ready to react to the loud exhaling puff that signaled a breach.

  The next couple of hours saw me almost dislocate my neck several times, as I snapped round and pushed the shutter, as well as nearly tipping myself out of the boat, which was wobbly enough even when I was keeping still. I had an idea that I’d clicked on a dolphin or two, but there was no way to know until I had the slides processed.

  Several weeks later, when I got back to the UK, most of the frames were much as I expected—shots of the sky and skewed horizons, some with anonymous splashes or spreading rings—but I did have a couple showing a dolphin’s humped back.

  Then I held another slide up to the light—and there it was: the shape that had been transient and blurred on my retina, now clear and sharp on film. But what on earth was it? The picture was published in BBC Wildlife magazin
e, sparking speculation that it might even be an unknown new species. I returned to the lake the next year with a video camera provided by the BBC Natural History Unit, and after a sixweek stakeout I captured it on videotape in just three grainy frames—but unmistakable.

  I also looked into the mystery of its identity, and three years later, after talking to countless people, pieced together the shocking story. It’s one that, in some ways, I would rather not know. But even so, there is a happy ending, for both the creature and me. The creature is exuberantly alive, almost flaunting its strangeness, and I am not losing my marbles. My fisherman’s tale was true.

  And in a strange way this discovery gave me a broader validation. Although a few friends saw my shoestring travels as unusual and interesting, in the eyes of most I had lost my way. After attending primary school in southeast England, I had won a full-fees scholarship to an exclusive “public” (meaning private) school, where, at age sixteen, I scored the best exam results in the school’s history. But then my trajectory flattened and nose-dived. I emerged from university with a degree in zoology, vaguely prompted by my interest in fish, but no idea of anything I wanted to do. So instead of crushing knuckles underfoot on the career ladder, here I was, in my late thirties with a trail of abandoned jobs behind me, making less than minimum wage from selling occasional magazine articles.

  Part of the problem was my father, who in his youth had been a farmer but who’d been disinherited after he’d abandoned the family trade to become a priest. As a teenager, predictably, I’d rejected organized religion, but I seemed to have absorbed other, more profound things from him that I couldn’t shake. One of these was an indifference to the trappings of worldly success. Or perhaps I was just saying this because, with my threadbare employment record, and something else that nobody knew about, those things were never going to be mine anyway. And this wasn’t quite true either. On very special occasions, Dad would wear a gold watch on a chain. It had belonged to his father before him, one of the last farmers in England to work the land with heavy horses, and one day, Dad always reminded me, it would be mine, in the unimaginable future when he would no longer be here. Meanwhile, as I squandered time, he did a good job of concealing his disappointment, even when it was compounded by my youngest brother Martin following my erratic footsteps, dropping out of college to become a wandering English teacher in Spain, France, and Italy. Occasionally a letter from a girl in Brazil would turn up at my parents’ house and I’d see the looks next time I talked about my “research trips.” I felt that if I could only magically transport my father to an Amazon lakeside then he would understand. Because this was where, for whatever reason, despite all the blood-sucking insects and mud like a First World War battlefield, I became properly alive. It was hardly the garden of Eden, but it was the gateway to a state of mind that he would recognize. Because, despite our differences, we shared one fundamental belief: that there is more to this world than what’s visible on the surface.

  My sighting of the Lago Grande monster and subsequent proving of its existence is also why I have more time than most for other unlikely tales. Now if somebody tells me they have seen a giant animal lurking in the water, I don’t automatically dismiss it because there is no photograph. Native fishermen don’t carry cameras. Nor do I swallow it without question, however. Such stories need to be subjected to scientific scrutiny. And for all the exaggeration and mutation that can arise in the retelling, some fishermen’s tales do contain nuggets of shocking truth.

  There’s also some hard science on this side of the argument. Unlike land animals, aquatic creatures have their bodies supported by water so they are not subject to gravity as a factor that limits growth. This means that if conditions are right, they can keep on growing throughout their lives—so-called “indeterminate growth.” A land animal, however, that kept growing after reaching maturity would start to have trouble moving from place to place and, hence, finding food. This is gravity putting the brakes on growth. Every terrestrial or airborne body design has its optimum maximum size. But it’s a very different picture for “weightless” fish, which occasionally throw up giant freaks.

  With fish, it’s all about food. If there’s a lot available and it doesn’t cost too much energy to get it—disputing with competitors and watching one’s back against predators—a mature fish will have a big energy surplus. Some of this energy will go toward breeding, the seasonal production of large quantities (normally) of eggs and sperm, but some will go toward further growth, which brings the advantages of fewer predators and a bigger mouth, for feeding on even more food....

  A dramatic example of this principle at work is what has happened to the size of carp in English lakes over the last forty years. In most waters where they were found, the biggest individuals used to grow to about twenty pounds; now they commonly reach thirty pounds or even much more. The rod-caught record has leapt from a longstanding forty-four pounds to nearly seventy pounds, an impossible monster for any level-headed angler of the 1970s. This can largely be attributed to the vast quantities of high-protein bait, similar to bodybuilders’ food supplement, that carp anglers have been shoveling into the water. Compared to tiny grubs and larvae hiding in the gravel or silt, these highly visible balls of food represent a huge energy intake for very little effort, and the carp duly keep growing and growing, with some individuals reaching sizes previously unheard of. So when a freak fish, much larger than those seen normally, is reported from the wild, what appears not to make sense logically might be perfectly possible biologically.

  But then we’re back to the question of proof, which is another matter. Fish can be very hard to find and even harder to examine closely. And what is surprising until you think about it is that this is truer in fresh water than it is in the sea. Rivers and lakes make up a tiny fraction (0.01 percent) of the world’s water, yet we know less about what lives here than in the distant oceans. The reason for this is simple. Seawater is clear: we can see into it. But drop a cameraman into most rivers or lakes, and he won’t see or film a thing. Fresh water is a better place to hide. And in the absence of pictures, our preferred form of hard evidence, we’re back where we started: with fishermen’s tales—which leads to one other way of discovering what’s down there.

  Casting a line into the water is like asking a question. Something could be right underneath you, but you can’t see it—it’s there but not there. And sometimes only a line will make it real, despite the odds against this happening being very long. After hanging limp and lifeless—maybe for hours or days or weeks or years—it will twitch and run, and the cane or carbon-fiber in your hands will bend like a divining rod. Then, if your gear and nerves are sound, you will bring something out into the light, seemingly from nowhere, from another dimension. When this happens, it has an element of magic to it, like pulling a rabbit from a hat.

  This book is a series of such investigations into the murky world of fishermen’s tales. The tales are of river monsters that are frighteningly large or dangerous—or both. Fish that swallow men whole, others that eat them from within, and others that pack a killer punch. And the truth, though elusive and sometimes complex, is often every bit as unbelievable as the myth.

  CHAPTER 1

  GOONCH

  When Atropos who snips the threads of life misses one thread she cuts another, and we who do not know why one thread is missed and another cut, call it Fate, Kismet, or what we will.

  Jim Corbett, Man-Eaters of Kumaon, 1944

  THE RIVER IS A ROAR IN MY EARS as the unseen creature starts to drag me, step by stumbling step, toward the murderous water at the tail of the pool, and the moment when I can go no further on land. This is the fish I have been hunting for three years—and the archetypal monster I have been after all my life. But such is its power, and the weight of monsoon water on top of it, that my desire to capture it with a line now seems like madness.

  I want to stop time, to put off the moment, but the whirlpool in front of me continues to turn relentlessly clo
ckwise between the left-to-right surge along the far bank and the countercurrent at my feet. This wheeling back eddy, spun from the main flow by a bulge in the black rock opposite, was my secret weapon, my means of evening the odds in what would otherwise be an impossible situation. And until a few moments ago, my plan was working. I’d managed to confuse the fish enough to bring it into the narrow strip where the river runs backward, where the weight of the water was working with me, not against me. But now the fish seems to have worked out where I am and what I’m trying to do, and it has turned back into the main flow and is heading exactly where I don’t want it to go. If it reaches the outlet, there will be no holding it. And with this side of the riverbank transforming from a boulder beach into sheer cliff and mountainside rearing hundreds of feet high, there will be no following it either.

  I picture the fish in the boiling depths, shouldering its way through the lightless water—the great broad head filled with teeth and the thick muscular body trailing tentacles from every fin. Such is its appalling momentum through water that would grind a person to pieces that I can already taste the sickness and despair that will flood through me when the line cracks like a rifle shot and the rod springs back lifeless in my hands.

  Then where will my investigation be? This story of a man-eating fish in fresh water, hundreds of miles up a rocky river, will remain just a fishermen’s tale. Although the biology adds up, I need hard proof, otherwise the outside world will continue to dismiss this tale as the colorful fantasy of illiterate peasants. And I’ll be just another poor, credulous soul who swallows anything he’s told. A broken line will convince nobody.

  The fish skirts a small slack at the tail of the pool, just before the exit funnel. This is my last chance. I clamp down on the reel as hard as I dare, trying to heave it in here. The rod creaks in pain, its Kevlar and carbon-fiber sinews surely about to transform into splinters. But I’ve edged the fish off its course. The line sings a high, tinny note as a tail like a black flag breaks the surface: it’s huge with two pointed lobes—definitely a monstrous goonch. And then it’s gone, and the line is being torn away, faster and faster. The moment has come.