River Monsters

by Jeremy Wade

  Time was short. We had just one more day, and although we already had the first underwater footage of goonch, it wasn’t the blow-away stuff we were after. We piled our stuff into the jeep and took it for a long walk to a smaller pool. Here, again, the current pushed against a wall of rock as it turned a corner, thereby excavating a deep hole. I’d fished this place a couple of years ago, and I knew there were some serious snags down there, with at least a few lines and trailing hooks. The pool water had a soupy look to it, thanks to the turbulent rapid feeding it, and the sun had already gone off the surface. Once in the water, the looming cliff, which curved around us and formed a rocky cove, gave the place the feel of an amphitheater. I made my way across to the rock, tried to breathe away my apprehension, and went under. The smooth water-worn rock plunged vertically downward. I kept expecting to see the bottom, but instead the pressure kept increasing and darkness closed in above me. I couldn’t understand how this was so much deeper than Temple Pool, and I thought of trailing lines. Just as I was thinking of kicking for the surface, I saw something directly underneath me: a dark shape against a lighter background. As I got closer it flexed into a curve, swam a slow tight circle, and was gone. I surfaced with my lungs bursting and told Rick, who hadn’t seen anything. Continuing here was pointless anyway, he said, because the visibility was too bad for filming. We had it all to do the next day.

  Back at Temple Pool, we decided to start at the tail of the pool and work upstream. To minimize disturbance, Rick went in with the camera while I watched from the other side. Every few minutes he disappeared from sight and then surfaced several feet along, puffing water from his snorkel and then breathing quietly to get oxygen back into his bloodstream. At one point a gully cut into the rock, and when he surfaced from here, after a longer than normal delay, it was with an explosion of water and profanity.

  “Holy shit!” he gurgled. “There’s one down there the size of a horse!” He kicked across and explained to me that this was our chance for a two-shot: me and monster goonch in the same picture in an underwater cave where four or five others surrounded it. He would dive first and take up position on the bottom and I would follow after a few moments and come in over the top of him. And we needed to go now because the fish had become agitated and might not stay there long—even though it meant I would be diving cold, having had no warm-up dives to build up my underwater time and check the lay of the land.

  As Rick disappeared straight down I tried to still my hammering heart before taking my one lungful and following. I saw his dim shape on the bottom and arched my back to look where the camera was pointing. Too late I realized that I should have weighted myself a bit heavier for this, as my body, deprived of its downward momentum, started to drift back up. I kicked a couple of times and managed to get a slippery grip on a boulder, holding myself in a head-down slant. Craning my neck backward, I saw the water congeal into gloom underneath an angular arch. Something in there was moving.

  Gray against black, I could make out three or four—or maybe five—vertical against the rock wall, with their downward ends swaying like a pod of hideous aliens. I reached forward and saw my fingers barely span the tail root of the biggest fish. They were getting disturbed, possibly feeling cornered, and my air was getting short. But those few moments burned into my memory with an uncommon intensity—not so much a detailed picture but instead the feeling, like a fragment of a dream, whose residue remains after you’ve burst back into the light.

  We had the footage we came for, the first shots of goonch in the wild. But in order to pass judgment on its capability as a man-eater, we really needed a close look at one out of the water. From previous experience, I knew this was not a fish one can catch to order. So when the ROV found a goonch tail poking out of a dark cleft, Rick suggested I go and “noodle” it. But unlike the flathead catfish pulled from their holes in Oklahoma, goonch have serious teeth, so there was no way I was going to grab it by the mouth. Also, on the screen, there was no telling its size.

  With Rick watching the screen and the tape deck rolling, I followed the ROV’s yellow umbilical until I spotted its headlights eight feet down. A deep breath, a tuck, and a kick, and I was seeing the fish myself. With no time to waste, I reached forward and grabbed the root of its tail.

  The next thing I knew, my arm was possessed, shaking my entire body. I hung on and kicked for the surface as the fish’s body came clear and the thrashing became wilder. Then there were too many things in my head: the fish, the water, my twisting-back fingers, and the aching air in my lungs. I couldn’t hold them all, and the fish was gone. Back on the shore, I cursed. Rick was right: I should have grabbed with two hands. Fear had made me keep one free, for hanging on—to what? With both hands immobilizing its tail, I could have finned its thrashing body to the surface then across to the shallows. But a plan is no good after the event, and I wouldn’t get a chance like that again.

  Later, as I fully expected, I would curse my mistake with even more fury as I watched my motionless lines around the clock, struggling to keep myself awake with just a sleep-deprived cameraman, James Bickersteth, for company, the rest of the crew having gone home to England. I remember the insane joy we felt on the sixth day, when I finally landed a goonch. Then reality returned: the realization that, at ten pounds, this could be bait for the fish I was after. But at least getting one any smaller was impossible. The next day I caught a nine-pounder.

  We moved pools, and I caught a twenty-seven-pounder. With some creative camera work it looked quite big, but who were we kidding? The next day, fishing in a thunderstorm, I got my line stuck and deployed an “otter” to free it: a half-full water bottle attached to a snapswivel, which I clipped round the line and lobbed into the current. Once it had floated downstream of the snag, I yanked hard on the line and felt it come free. But suddenly there was a force, much stronger than the current, ripping the line out. Hanging on for dear life, I stopped the fish’s run, and after a period of stalemate, I brought it back toward me, thanks to a countercurrent on the bottom where the rapid at the pool’s top end rolls over a lip into deep water. But I couldn’t bring it any closer. Before I’d started fishing, I had planned for this eventuality: I would launch myself into the water and pull for the beach on the other side. But a day’s rain had made the river wider, faster, and higher. As I kicked off my shoes, James yelled at me not to do it, and, wisely, I listened to him. But in the chaos, the fish slipped off the hook.

  Back in England we faced the cold reality of a film about a monster fish but without a monster fish. Harry Marshall, boss of Icon Films, decided, against everyone’s advice except mine, to send us out again. But the monsoon had arrived early. From Europe, finding out if the river was even accessible was impossible. Satellite images showed a dark mass spreading over the region. On our arrival, the river was raging and brown, but a carefully placed bait would still hold bottom. Because of the water color, I ripened my fish baits in the sun to create more of a scent trail underwater. And on the third day I hooked something immense, which hung on the line like a great boulder, not running at all but slowly inching through the dark depths until the line went vertically down into the water at my feet, where a great mass of bubbles now erupted followed by a dark back that was a yard wide. For a moment I thought I’d hooked the biggest goonch in the world, but then I realized it was a huge soft-shelled turtle (Aspideretes gangeticus). My guide Alam wanted to cut the line, but I heaved it toward some shallows, thrust the rod at James, and grabbed the turtle by the shoulders. The thing was like a tank and almost carried me into the river while shooting its prehensile neck, fully two feet long, and bolt-cutter jaws toward Alam. With great difficulty we blocked its escape with a rock and then turned it onto its back. This two hundred–pound animal hadn’t been anywhere near my suspects list, but if, for any reason, it locked onto a swimmer’s foot, there would be no resisting it.

  Five days later, at the bottom of the pool, with a heavy fish gaining momentum in the current, James yelled at
me again. But this time I ignored him. I had a clear plan and knew what I had to do. Half an hour later, having scaled a steep, muddy hillside, crossed a bridge, sprinted down a riverside road, and stumbled exhausted across a field of boulders, James arrived at the precise moment I yelled at Alam, “Now!”

  The camera frame wobbles then holds position. In the foreground Alam reaches through the surface and grabs something, and in the frame’s opposite corner a great head rears out of the water. This was the image that launched the series—and probably remains the iconic moment of all the episodes so far.

  To the end of its tail, the fish was six feet long. It weighed 161 pounds. I also measured the width of its mouth (nearly thirteen inches), its maximum girth (forty-one inches) and the “wingspan” of its pectoral fins (forty-four inches). Armed with this data, I was now in a position to make some conclusions about the identity of the Kali “man-eater.”

  That people have disappeared in the Kali is fact, but there’s no direct evidence so far that goonch have taken and eaten them. Certainly this six-foot goonch could pull somebody under if it grabbed a leg. But it would have to be even bigger to be capable of swallowing someone. The question is: how much bigger? If this fish were scaled up one and a half times, to nine feet, it would have a mouth nineteen inches wide and a mouth cavity two feet deep, extending to nearly twice that when the throat is open. That would comfortably take me head-first until just above my knees, and it would leave many of the local men with just their feet protruding. Given the authenticated existence of nearnine-foot Mekong giant catfish, the existence of goonch big enough to swallow a man cannot be ruled out. Going by the proportions of my fish, such an animal would weigh some 550 pounds.

  Such a fish deliberately targeting a human is a frightening thought, partly because this would require a degree of intelligence not normally associated with fish. More likely, perhaps, a goonch made a reflex grab at some movement or splash. The victim then took a lungful of water and sank. And the fact that no corpse ever floated back up points to it having been eaten by something. If that something was the goonch and if it wasn’t big enough to swallow the corpse whole, it could have ripped off pieces of flesh or possibly removed limbs by crocodile-style spin-feeding. It’s then conceivable, however, that the next time a leg was grabbed, it wasn’t a simple reflex, particularly because the large tasty biped was so surprisingly easy to overpower. Indeed Man Singh’s description of his buffalo’s disappearance definitely sounded like deliberate behavior. With no goonch alive being big enough to swallow such a large animal whole, this story points to a strategy of drowning and then dismembering. If that is case, the Kali man-eater could be a goonch even seven or eight feet long, weighing between 250 and 375 pounds, or maybe more than one such animal.

  Part of the problem with fish stories, though, is that we fill in the blanks with assumptions, ascribing will or intent where none exists. A couple of years ago I met a Tibetan man who used to train the Indian army in mountain survival and who had long been puzzled by something that once happened to him. He was rafting a Himalayan river with a group of young men when a wave flipped the raft at the head of a pool. As the water pummeled him against a rock cliff, he felt bodies underneath him in the water and called out the men’s names. But when he dragged himself ashore, all the men were there, having remained close to the raft. Before I told him my answer, based on my dives with Rick along similar rock walls, he asked, “So who were those people in the water who saved me?”

  CHAPTER 2

  WELS

  Swimming fish leave wakes containing hydrodynamic and chemical traces.

  These traces mark their swim paths and could guide predators.

  We now show that nocturnal European catfish (Silurus glanis) locate a piscine prey ... by accurately tracking its three-dimensional swim path before an attack in the absence of visible light.

  Pohlmann, Grasso, and Breithaupt, Tracking Wakes:

  The Nocturnal Predatory Strategy of Piscivorous Catfish, 2001

  IN THE SUMMER OF 2008 newspapers in Germany carried front-page reports of something attacking swimmers in Schlachtensee, a lake on the outskirts of Berlin. Over the course of just a few days several people emerged with bleeding wounds on their legs and a newfound terror of the water. One victim spoke of feeling something “like a snake” touch her before she was bitten.

  Typically there was one long wound, broad and slightly curved, on each side of the leg. Close observation revealed multiple tiny punctures. Hospital staff had never seen injuries like this before and had no idea what caused them. From the shape of the wounds, some fisheries scientists identified the perpetrator as the Danubian catfish (Silurus glanis), more commonly known as the wels.

  Before I stopped fishing in England in my mid-twenties, I was one of very few English anglers who had caught, or even seen, a wels catfish. It was very much a creature of mystery—an alien that the Duke of Bedford had introduced in 1880 when he put about seventy into the Shoulder of Mutton lake at Woburn Abbey, where they successfully bred and started snacking on His Grace’s water birds. A century later their offspring had been stocked into a handful of other waters and were rumored to be elsewhere as well. (Like carp, wels sometimes travel by car, wrapped in a damp sack in the trunk, a means of relocation that the Environment Agency is keen to stop.) Very few were caught, and nobody knew exactly where they were or how big they grew. For me, disillusioned by the increasing predictability of carp fishing, this was precisely their appeal. I approached them with all the obsession I had once applied to carp—camping by the water for two or three days at a time and fishing day and night in a mental state in which I was never properly awake or asleep. So the wels is a fish that has always seemed rather unreal to me—and one that has come to signify an altered perception of time.

  I think it was the morning after only my second night at a place called Tiddenfoot Pit when, against the odds, I found myself attached to a strong, deep-pulling fish that had picked up a dead perch. But twenty seconds later I was shaking for another reason, contemplating the end of the line where it had been rasped through. I kept coming back until I got one ... and then a few more: seven fish over the course of the summer, the biggest a yard long.

  For a mystery predator that had existed until then only in the imagination, its appearance didn’t disappoint. It was hardly like a fish at all, or at least none that I was familiar with. With its scaleless, elongated body, long tentacles, and cavernous mouth, it was more like the work of some mad geneticist, a cross between slug and snake. At eleven pounds, my biggest one was still tiny: they don’t grow well in England, with its long cold winters. But a big one, if you encountered it in the water, would be terrifying.

  And wels can reach sizes that are truly immense. European folklore is full of tales of huge fish, and when weights and measures are given, these are truly staggering. The most widely quoted capture, from the River Dnieper in Russia (where they are called ssum) in the 1800s, weighed 673 pounds and measured over sixteen feet. Another fish, said to be a wels and caught in 1761 from the River Oder, weighed 825 pounds without the viscera. To drag such brutes from the water, fishermen would tie the rope line to a team of horses or oxen. Based on such reports, the maximum size for wels is widely quoted as 1,000 pounds. However, the heaviest wels for which we have reliable weights, recorded in the last half-century, are just a quarter of this. Thanks to intensive catch-and-consume fishing, numbers of wels are now way down on historical levels, so fewer fish reach old age and their full potential size.

  Together with those reports of huge sizes in the past were stories of a correspondingly large appetite. In the 1500s the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner, in his Historia animalium, told of a human head found in the stomach of a wels, along with a hand wearing gold rings. Other reports talk of entire human corpses, mostly small children. Although there is no physical evidence to support any of these stories, the attacks in Germany seemed to lend them credence and revive speculation that there might be a freshwater man-
eater in the heart of Europe. I ventured to Schlachtensee to investigate.

  Being back in Berlin was strange. I had been here once before in 1989, just before the wall came down. I remembered crossing on the U-Bahn, underground, to East Berlin, when movement in the other direction was still prohibited, and surfacing into a world of cobblestones and two-stroke Trabant fumes. After dark I ducked down an alley behind a gray residential block and pulled myself up to look at the death strip between the two parallel walls. As I fiddled with my camera I heard a voice—very quiet and very near. My blood froze as I realized it came from a tower right in front of me. Very slowly I lowered my head back down behind the concrete (out of the cross-hairs?) and dropped to the ground. What’s more, in West Berlin there had also been a unique atmosphere, a relentless pursuit of modernity that seemed like a collective denial of its encirclement. Later, when I went to the Amazon and visited Manaus, the industrial city at its center, I recognized a similar feeling. Now, two decades later, Berlin seemed sanitized, much the same as any other modern city. This time the unreality came from our filming schedule: traveling at dawn from hotel to lake, then back at dusk, so I experienced the city center as a place of perpetual darkness.

  Schlachtensee lies hidden behind trees at the edge of the Grunewald forest, approached by shaded paths through still air. It is a narrow, winding ribbon of water over a mile long, but it is mostly less than two hundred yards across. People jog, walk, and cycle around its banks, enjoying the clean air. Others, I was surprised to see, were swimming, just weeks after the attacks and a warning to stay out of the water. Most were bathing near the banks, including a few “naturists,” and a few hardy souls were doing lengths. There had been no more attacks since the newspaper story, even though the culprit—or culprits—hadn’t been apprehended and removed, but the water was still a lot less busy than usual.