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

  As I rip off my radio-microphone, a voice behind the camera yells at me not to do it, but James keeps filming. My privileged role as worldtraveling TV presenter is a Faustian pact. In moments like these, my soul is not my own but instead laid bare for millions to see. I can’t just shrug and later mourn in private the one that got away. I’ve got to do whatever it takes.

  Even in the knee-high margins, the water almost knocks me over. With the rod held high, I launch myself, pulling with my other arm and kicking with both legs. Immediately I regret my decision. The river seems to have accelerated, turning the far bank into a blur. But I can’t turn back because there’s now sheer rock behind me. With a start of horror I realize I’m now in the strip of water that falling boulders, dislodged from the cliff above, regularly bomb. Even the small buzzing fragments hit with the impact of high-velocity shrapnel. An irrational voice tells me that my struggles might call down a fatal rain on top of me.

  Then I remember the fish. From this perspective, the accounts of people dragged under take on a reality more vivid than ever. I mustn’t be swept down over its position—wherever that now is. But I’m tiring with every breath. The water clutches at me, like a malevolent living thing, and a black fear supplants my original motivation for this act of folly, driving my leaden limbs toward the distant shore.

  PINPOINTING EXACTLY WHERE THIS STORY STARTS is difficult, but with hindsight I see a slow inevitability reaching right back to the moment I caught my first fish, aged eight or nine, from the River Stour in southeast England. The river ran through the village where I grew up, and beyond its mirrored surface was a secret world, populated with mysterious inhabitants that few people saw. Over the years its winding course led me ever further over the fields, always wanting to see what was around the next bend.

  In my above-surface life I was drawn to study zoology, and later to teach it, but I found the emphasis on theory suffocating and, as a result, wandered lost for several years, supporting myself with a variety of odd jobs, from building-site laborer to farmhand to motorbike dispatch rider in London. Meanwhile my interest in fishing was waning. Britain has lots of people and not much water, and by my mid-twenties that water had become crowded with other enthusiasts. Fishing no longer satisfied my craving for mystery and the unknown, so I hung up my rods.

  But the chance discovery of a magazine article about a fish in India (the mahseer, a giant golden-scaled carp that lives in thunderous rocky rivers) changed all that. With my dusted-down rods packed inside a length of drainpipe, I boarded an Ariana Afghan DC10 to Delhi. I had only £200 concealed under my clothes and scarcely a clue how I was going to survive the next three months. But I learned quickly—and caught some fish. On my return, having studied some instructional books about journalistic writing, I wrote a couple of articles about my experiences and sold them to a fishing magazine. That was a revelation. Despite later rejections, I realized that here was a possible way to make some kind of living from my interest in fish.

  So I started digging for information about other exotic river fish. Over the next ten years I made five more expeditions, each between two and five months: to Thailand, where my hunt for the Mekong giant catfish (Pangasianodon gigas) got me arrested for spying; to India again, where I caught a monstrous southern mahseer (Hypselobarbus mussullah ) of ninety-two pounds; and three times to the Congo rainforest in search of the goliath tigerfish.

  Then, after cowriting and self-publishing Somewhere Down the Crazy River about travels in India and Central Africa, I made my first expedition to the Amazon on the trail of the arapaima, the mythic fifteen-foot air-breather. After my experiences in the Congo, which included partial blinding from malaria, I thought this would be a breeze, but the difficulty of this new mission exceeded all expectations. For six years the course of my investigation twisted and turned through the many layers, both real and mythological, of this bewildering region before delivering me at the center of the maze, where the armor-plated giant revealed itself.

  My picture of that fish made the British national newspapers, where a television producer in London saw it, and for over two years he touted the idea of a documentary about the fish before finally getting it commissioned. Jungle Hooks, filmed and screened in 2002, has since gone down in history for showing the first capture on TV of a giant (two hundred–pound) arapaima—and the unscripted crashing of a singleengine plane into the Amazon forest.

  But television is a fickle business. Our proposals for a follow-up series (one of them about alligator gar in the US Deep South) were rejected. I tried to be philosophical about this, knowing that the decision often comes down to budget and is not necessarily a judgment on the merit of the idea. In fact, without my own self-funded research and helpful friends in the Amazon, Jungle Hooks would never have been made.

  Then in 2005 I received a phone call. My friend Gavin Searle, who had filmed and directed me in the Amazon, was having another existential crisis. As usual he was questioning why somebody with a master’s degree in anthropology had just crawled out of yet another reality TV show. “I need a break, Jezzer,” he said. “Why don’t we go to India? You take your rods and I’ll take a camera. Maybe we can cut something together when we get back and sell it to cover our costs.”

  I was at a loose end myself, scratching around for odd bits of proofreading and copy editing, but this was something we could do on a shoestring. Even so, the idea of selling a program made on spec relied heavily on wishful thinking. So we phoned the commissioning editor of Jungle Hooks at Discovery Europe for some guidance. The response was not what we expected: an immediate summons to London and a commission to make a five-part series—not because they particularly wanted a series about India but because it was time for another Jungle Hooks.

  But this stroke of good fortune also made life more complicated. We had to form our own production company and get an official filming permit. This was straightforward in theory, but six weeks later we had no reply to our application. Fishing in India is very seasonal, and the Himalayan snow melt was fast approaching, followed by the monsoon, which would wash away all our plans. But our paperwork had vanished into a bureaucratic black hole. Finally, in desperation, we handed a large sum to a “fixer” based in Delhi, and submitted a new application. Our permission returned after a week. At the time of writing, our original submission remains buried in somebody’s in-tray. It has been there for more than five years and counting....

  We arrived at the Kali River, a gray snow-fed tributary of the Ganges, where it briefly forms the border between India and Nepal, two months later than we’d intended. Our target was the golden Himalayan mahseer (Tor putitora), a fish said to grow to two hundred pounds, although these days a fifty-pounder is a rarity. Traditionally they are targeted during their annual breeding run on their way up to the headwaters as the monsoon waters rise, and then on their hungry return, with river junctions being the most productive spots. But intercepting the migration is a hit-and-miss affair and can cause offense to some local people, who consider river confluences to be sacred.

  From Delhi we took the overnight train north to where the flat Gangetic plain abruptly ends and the mountains begin. Then we spent a day in a jeep on twisting roads cut into rock, contemplating the sickening drops just feet from our wheels and the crumpled skeletons of buses far below. When the road ended, we hefted our bags and set off downriver on foot along a path scratched into the mountainside. Soon I was in a lather of sweat, cursing the straps that cut into my shoulders and the long unwieldy rod container that is my constant burden. But the views of the river were breathtaking. I lost myself in the slow rhythm of my footsteps until eventually the path dropped down and approached a pool. The next thing I knew, after emerging breathless from some shrubs, I was looking up at a Mayan pyramid—huge stone steps climbing high into the air. It took a moment to work out what this was: a low-angle view of terraced fields, with only their stone-built retaining walls visible.

  After dumping our kit in a stone hut, I clambered
over a field of boulders to the river, anxious to fish before dark. At the tail of the pool the water funneled into a fast chute alongside the far bank, which drove a large, slow back eddy on the near side. Approaching low and quiet, so as not to disturb anything lying close in, I selected a six-inch wooden plug, painted in a lifelike fish-scale pattern, and cast upriver (but down the countercurrent) to the wedge of slack at the edge of the pool’s outflow. Engaging the reel, I started to retrieve, with the lure’s vibrations making the rod-tip bounce as its diving vane took it under. The next casts were progressively closer to the far bank, falling just short of the ridge of spiky waves where fast and slow water met, which in some indefinable way was beckoning me. Drawing a deep breath, I loaded up the back-cast, flinging the lure with all my might, and landed it in the target area. After just a couple of turns, the line caught on something solid, which then moved: a gleaming eight-pound mahseer—long, rubbery-mouthed, with scales like golden pennies. Maybe we weren’t too late after all.

  But nothing else followed. It was as if the river had been emptied of fish. As fishless day followed fishless day, we started to despair of getting enough material to make even one half-hour program, never mind five. If this had been merely the personal jaunt we had originally planned, we could have just shrugged our shoulders. But the stakes were now much higher. The total absence of anything on my line forced us to dig ever deeper for other, peripheral material. We filmed inch-long snow trout fry in a rock pool. I discoursed on the gentleman anglers from the days when India was part of the British Empire. Gavin made me grab a snake that was lying on riverside boulders on the pretext that it could have been a fish-eating species. So when our guide Vinay said something about the “Dharma Ghat man-eater,” our ears pricked up.

  Somebody had been pulled under the water, he told us, a couple of miles downstream from our camp. People said it was the work of the soos. Downstream, in the Indian plains, a soos is a Ganges river dolphin (Platanista gangetica), a creature very similar to the Amazon pink dolphin, apart from its color, which is gray-brown. From my travels I knew that river dolphins aren’t always the cuddly creatures of popular imagination. In the Amazon they bite paddles smacked against the surface to shoo them away from nets and grab the keels of canoes, which they then rock furiously in a gesture of defiance. Carnivorous hunters, they locate prey by sonar and then clamp it in a multitoothed beak. Larger prey is given a fatal ramming first. But their normal diet is fish, either swallowed whole or torn apart. A human would not normally be on the menu, although at eight feet long and three hundred pounds, a Gangetic dolphin would be more than capable of grabbing a swimmer’s leg and pulling him under if it wanted to. But dolphins aren’t found this far upriver. Because they are air breathers, you would see them if they were here. So this soos is not a dolphin.

  But they said it makes a sound like a dolphin. When it opens its mouth, the inrush of water sucks its victim down. This, though, could just be a description of the river. Moving water can exert its own fatal suction. Rocks create back eddies, which accelerate into whirlpools. Current lines move in unpredictable directions and at variable speeds. Halfway down our camp pool was a large rock, and sometimes the water flowed past it smoothly and quietly; but then, seemingly at random, it would start to rip and spin. This rock has a ledge just under the surface, where it’s possible to stand with the water halfway to your knees. It looks an obvious place to wash dishes or bathe. But take one step further, and you’re in thirty feet of water. A little further out the river looks as if it’s boiling, with huge up-wellings rolling the surface layers—a reminder that water spins in three dimensions: not just round and round, but up and down too. In this depth of water, a person caught in one of the down-currents would stay on the bottom, with eardrums ruptured and lungs full of water. Perhaps it’s no accident that the Kali River is named after the Hindu goddess of death and destruction. Perhaps the perpetrator was the water itself, with no intermediary in the form of an underwater creature.

  The only problem with this reasoning is that the Dharma Ghat victim was taken in shallow, slack water at the edge of the pool. The same went for a young man who disappeared at the Roll Ghat ferry crossing a couple of miles upriver. If this was elsewhere in India, a likely culprit would be a mugger crocodile (Crocodylus palustris). But the river here is at an elevation of nearly 1,400 feet and the water is too cold for them. And again, if they were here you’d see them hauled up on land warming their cold blood. India’s other crocodile, the narrow-jawed, fish-eating gharial (Gavialis gangeticus), is likewise not found at this elevation. And the same goes for pythons.

  Casting the net wider, could the killer be a bull shark? Unknown to most people, this species, which normally lurks in warm and temperate coastal seas, has the disturbing habit of entering rivers and sometimes wandering a long way up them, something most sea fish are unable to do. Dharma Ghat is a thousand miles from the sea, but bull sharks have been reported in the Mississippi above St. Louis and more than two thousand miles up the Amazon. And the species is known to swim the Ganges. If it were simply a matter of distance, we would have to consider a bull shark a possible suspect. But this is another animal that doesn’t venture into the mountains, being restricted to warm water. And although bull sharks are known to navigate small rapids in the Rio San Juan in Nicaragua, the rapids it would have to scale to get here are far bigger, not to mention the man-made barrier at Tanakpur, a hydro-electric and irrigation dam, which effectively puts an end to this line of speculation.

  Faced with events that seem to have no natural cause, it would perhaps be understandable if some people invoked the supernatural. Maybe the forces at work are not simply the product of gravity acting on water but also the earthly manifestations of a divine will. In the Ganges, known to Hindus as “mother Ganga,” there is a custom of ritual bathing, to wash away sins and hasten the end of the mortal cycle of death and earthly rebirth. But on this stretch of the Kali, it is noticeable that nobody bathes in the river. This fact might just be due to the cold water, which comes from glaciers in the high Himalayas, but it might be something else. Even the buffaloes, which people keep to plough their terraced fields and that normally need no persuasion to wallow in water, have to be driven into the pools’ shallower margins with blows to their thick hides.

  Then we met Man Singh. One day, two years before, he had heard his young granddaughter screaming from the head of the pool. When he got there, he saw a huge underwater creature dragging his prize buffalo into the water. But he’d seen this animal before and knew what it was. He said it was a goonch.

  When I heard this word, a twenty-year-old memory surfaced. It was my first visit to India, and I was on the West Ramganga River in the Himalayan foothills. I was fishing with a bright silver spoon in a rapid, and my lure had just splashed down near the far bank when something took it with a sickening lunge and carried it away downstream. Then, just as suddenly, the line was dead. Either it had swum round a sunken snag or it wasn’t playing by the rules and had just decided to sink to the bottom where my eleven-pound line would make no impression on it. So, abandoning the rules myself, I heaved a rock a little upstream of the point where the line entered the water. On the fourth or fifth throw, it was on the move again, and I stumbled downstream after it, trying to draw level and apply pressure from the side. Then it went to ground again, and this time it felt different. Here there were large branches washed up on the banks, and I visualized others on the riverbed, with my line wrapped around one of them. This time the boulders didn’t work, so in desperation I laid the rod down and kicked off my shoes in preparation for following the line down, although there was no way I’d keep my footing once the water was past my knees. It was more of a gesture than a realistic plan.

  A scraping sound caught my attention, and I saw my rod moving toward the water. Thinking it was only the current, I picked it up and immediately felt the fish, which was coming toward me now. The memory is then a bit blurred. I know for sure that I didn’t land it by g
rabbing the jaw, as the teeth were unlike anything I’d ever seen. Then there were the tentacles festooning its scaleless body, and its tiny eyes. At four feet, eight inches long (including tail tentacles) and weighing about thirty pounds, it was the largest fish I’d ever caught. But there was something repellent about it, even though it would be another twenty-three years before I’d hear this species (Bagarius yarellii) stand accused of being a man-eater.

  Since then I’d seen pictures of goonch in the water that could have weighed two hundred pounds. But do they grow big enough to take a person? This seemed to be the ultimate tall tale—until I thought about it. When somebody is in the water, with nothing to hold on to, it’s possible to pull them under using very little force. As for a fish eating someone, it’s not as far-fetched as it first sounds because some fish can swallow whole prey almost the same size as themselves. Going by the relative size of its mouth, I reckoned a goonch would need to be nine or ten feet long to swallow a small adult human. But some freshwater fish can grow this big. Earlier that same year, an eight foot, ten inch Mekong giant catfish, weighing 646 pounds, had been netted in Thailand—the largest freshwater fish to be fully authenticated.

  To reach such a size, a goonch would need an abundant food supply. But mahseer populations have plummeted in the last half-century. Then Vinay speculated what the food supply might be. It was something we’d seen ourselves at the pool where we were camping. One morning a procession of people wound down to the river, carrying a bundle wrapped in cloth. At the riverbank they made a platform from the logs they’d also been carrying, set the bundle on top of it, then set the logs alight. After the flames had been going for a while, there was a dull liquid pop, the sound of a skull cracking, believed to be the moment when the soul leaves the body. The mourners then scooped water onto the flames, sending steam billowing into the air, and pushed the fire’s remnants into the river with poles. Downstream we saw spreading rings from a rolling fish.