River Monsters

by Jeremy Wade

  Over the following days, as nothing else took, my mood plummeted. How could it be true that this fish attacked people when it wouldn’t go for a free offering? At this rate, we wouldn’t have a film. What a crazy idea we had had to bring a crew and all their kit here, to a place where my first catch had taken six years.

  But fishermen told us that people had been bitten recently. And we heard there had been a fatality near here, upriver at Kwamouth. A young girl had almost been bitten in half. Apparently she’d been wearing a cord around her waist, from which dangled a number of shiny bottle tops, and these flashing in the sunlight likely lured the fish in. Ironically, this cord had been given to her as a lucky charm to ward off evil spirits.

  For some here, the mbenga is a spirit. This is a culture in which nothing is seen as an accident. It’s like looking for someone to sue after a twisted ankle on a footpath, except that in this case the culprit is not the city council but a sorcerer. Thus, if a goliath attacks you, it happened because a sorcerer, paid by your enemy, has taken possession of it. But there is also good magic, and the practitioners of this are féticheurs. There was one at the next village, and a fisherman took me to see him.

  A boy with a soot-blackened face and a man wearing a dress emerged from his hut door. From inside came sounds like cries of surprise. A small man came out and spread some skins on the ground. Sitting cross-legged, he took pinches of fibrous matter from inside leaf wraps and started kneading them.

  “Do you want snake protection too?” whispered Hector our boat mechanic, pointing to a small scar on his upper wrist. He explained that this was a two-for-one offer: I’d have a substance that would protect me from snake bites rubbed into a cut. “Or do you want just the fish?”

  I decided on the latter option and, acting on Hector’s instruction, put some CFA francs under the skins and then took the ends of two thin leaves that the féticheur was proffering. On a mimed signal I pulled these leaves and dropped the broken ends behind me. The man then gave me a small pouch made from folded, floral-pattern rag, as Hector translated: “You must take this with you when you go fishing, and sleep with it under your pillow. It will protect you from the mbenga, and it will help you to catch him.”

  I’d not been expecting this. And I didn’t know what to do with my gift. Although I’m sure that some superstitions work through the placebo effect, I also know that if you recognize them as such, they lose their power. In the end, I decided it would be impolite not to comply with the prescription. Certainly I needed something to help my focus. I myself was almost starting to believe that the mbenga is a spirit and not a real fish at all. Maybe my approach was wrong. Or maybe catching it was just a matter of time. Keep at it and another one will come, and sooner or later one will stay on the line. But whether it will or not is in the lap of the gods. The trouble was that I had very limited time: just two weeks to fish, which were nearly over.

  By now our African Queen–style launch had returned to its owner in Brazzaville, and our transport for everybody plus kit was a large dugout canoe with an unreliable outboard that a young man called Fred (pronounced Frrred-duh) piloted. Getting around in this was a slow business, and after all this time with no fish, morale was getting lower by the day. We’d not been to the original bweta for a few days, so I decided to give it another try. This time we moored the boat a way upstream and I picked my way over the boulders to a precarious fishing position. The bait had a large single hook nicked through its back and another through the skin of its tail, with a treble dangling loose under its belly, held in place with a twist of fuse wire. This was a newly devised rig with a good hooking capability but not too much metalware, and I felt more confident than I had for a while as I swung the bait out fairly close, about ten yards. And I’d scarcely settled into my uncomfortable perch when the float disappeared.

  The next thing I knew I was on my feet wrestling a rod that had come alive. Uppermost in my mind was the knowledge that I mustn’t let this fish take too much line. On a long line the fish could swing in toward the side, with me powerless to stop it. Because of my position on the point, this would take it around a corner, out of sight, and if the taut, braided line touched a rock, that would be that. But in front of me was deep, open water: each time the fish changed direction, I tried to counteract it in order to keep it in there. At one point the line cut up toward the surface and I thought the fish was going to jump, but instead I just saw its dorsal fin and a flash of silver. I could see it was a big fish, and as I clambered down to the water’s edge I yelled at Fred to bring the landing net. There was a good chance this would be chewed to pieces once its head was inside, but by this time, in theory, we would have grabbed its tail. And between us, despite me nearly slipping right into the water, we executed this plan perfectly. The fish, a massively deep-bodied monster, was ours!

  What’s more, we had landed it alive. As I held it in the flowing shallows, keeping well clear of its business end, its gills were working strongly and rhythmically. But whenever I took my hands away, it couldn’t hold itself upright, and over time its breathing slowed. If I had let it go, it would have slipped into the main flow and sunk from sight. But I’m certain it wouldn’t have recovered; it would have suffered a fatal battering on the rocks at the bottom of the bweta, possibly being given the coup de grâce by another goliath.

  I have a theory that some fish can suffer a form of decompression sickness when they are caught, the same disorder that afflicts divers (“the bends”) if they surface too quickly. This is caused by dissolved nitrogen in the blood and tissue fluids forming tiny bubbles when the pressure around the body decreases—exactly what we see when we twist open the cap of a soda water bottle and the dissolved gas (carbon dioxide in this case) forms bubbles. Such bubbles forming in the body’s inner workings can cause skeletal, circulatory, and neurological disorders, which, if not treated by recompression, can lead to paralysis or death. One human symptom that’s sometimes visible externally is a skin rash, and this is something that also appears on some fish a little while after capture. I’ve seen it on wels catfish caught from the Rio Ebro, where it is attributed to general “stress” and wisely taken as a sign that the fish has been out of the water long enough. I have likewise seen it on Thai giant whiprays that have been brought up from thirty feet down, although these fish, recognizable because of their tags, are often recaptured, so clearly they recover. But goliath is a sight feeder of the surface layers and wouldn’t experience the same pressure drop on capture as a catfish or stingray from the depths. Besides that, it has a closed swim bladder, which would give an obviously “gassed up” appearance if it had been brought from deep water—and the buoyancy of this fish was okay.

  I was mystified but, for want of any better idea, eased out into deeper water and held the fish near the bottom, where the water pressure would have been greater. But still its movements became fainter. At this point I noticed some patches of discoloration on its head, like bruising. As a shoal of tiny fry gamboled around the dying beast, I concluded that, on one of its torpedo-like runs, it must have swum into a rock. Until now I’d been having a running argument with Fred, who’d been insisting that I take the fish back to the village. Now I reluctantly conceded that he would have his way.

  At the village they were playing football on the sandbar behind our camp. But as I hefted the fish onto my shoulder, the game came to an abrupt end. In moments a cheerful mob, the chief at their fore, surrounded me. Women held out their babies toward it and then withdrew them, giggling, for a reassuring cuddle, just as the open mouth was about to howl. The scene was incredible and couldn’t be explained only by the fact that this fish would soon be a meal, a couple of pounds of meat per family. Everybody was reaching out to touch it—at first gentle pats, almost affectionate, but then, after they’d taken it from me, heavy flat-handed blows. The reality about this fish, I now realized, is that despite the stories of mutilation and death, most people here never see one. If they don’t regard it as a spirit, it is certai
nly a myth. They go to the river every day to wash, but their paths never cross; instead, it’s all about being in the wrong place at the wrong time—or, in my case, the right time.

  At that time, the féticheur’s charm had been in my breast pocket. And whatever I think, I have no way of knowing what would or wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been there. All I know is that, now that I felt I had the fish’s measure, I wanted to be on the water again, trying for an even bigger one. But for the film we needed just one “big enough” fish. Now we had to catch up with all the other stuff: the crane shots and reconstructions and traveling shots and pieces-to-camera and general landscapes, all of which set the visual scene for the story. So that was the end of my fishing—and probably the end of my Congo story.

  But I still can’t help wondering just how much bigger these fish might grow. Most river giants, sadly, are much thinner on the ground than they used to be even a few decades ago. And with much-reduced numbers, the chances of those exceptional, wondrous, extra-large individuals of the old fishermen’s tales dwindle away to nothing. So the reality, or otherwise, of these beasts remains unknowable.

  Sometime after our film was broadcast in the United States, I received an e-mail from a man who grew up in the Congo, the son of a missionary doctor. He told me about the head of a goliath that he once saw in a fisherman’s canoe in the Lubi River in East Kasai province, where the fish is known as nsonga menu (“pointed teeth”), which was also the nickname of a tribe who at that time were still cannibals and had the custom of filing their front teeth into triangular fangs. The width at the gill plates of the fish he saw was ten inches—one and a half times the measurement I took from my fish—and would give a total body length of six feet. Using the known weight of my fish, I can calculate the weight of this fish (78 pounds × 1.5 cubed) at over 200 pounds. It’s an intriguing corroboration of Dr. Gillet’s lost six-footer. And the fisherman, of course, said he’d seen bigger.

  But what’s even more intriguing is that, uniquely in the Congo—where dams and development, pollution and progress are still held at bay by its troubled human history—the giants of yesteryear could still be there. Sitting in my comfortable armchair I consider this. Then I consider the reality of traveling in this region, particularly to its least accessible parts, as well as the fact that I am now a quarter-century older than I was when I first went there. And I conclude that, maybe, some things are destined to remain a secret.

  But then again, a two hundred–pound mbenga ... that would be something to see.

  CHAPTER 4

  PIRANHA

  They are the most ferocious fish in the world.

  Even the most formidable fish, the sharks or barracudas, usually attack things smaller than themselves. But piranhas habitually attack things much larger than themselves.... They will rend and devour alive any wounded man or beast; for blood in the water excites them to madness....

  Theodore Roosevelt, Through the Brazilian Wilderness, 1914

  WE ALL KNOW WHAT PIRANHAS ARE CAPABLE OF. We’ve seen it, or we think we remember seeing it, or maybe somebody just told us about it. I’m referring to the scene in You Only Live Twice, when Blofeld’s henchwoman Helga Brandt has just informed her boss that she has failed in her mission to kill James Bond. As she turns and steps onto a bridge above an indoor pool, Blofeld, stroking his white cat (so you know that something bad is about to happen), presses a button with his foot, and the walkway opens underneath her like a trapdoor. As soon as she hits the water, it starts to seethe and boil all around her, and in moments her screams are silenced and the surface is still again. Having thus demonstrated his new staff incentive scheme, Blofeld hisses to his remaining sidekicks, “Kill Bond. Now!”

  Far-fetched? But the nonfiction accounts, such as Teddy Roosevelt’s, are scarcely less graphic: “The rabid, furious snaps drive the teeth through flesh and bone. The head with its short muzzle, staring malignant eyes, and gaping, cruelly armed jaws, is the embodiment of evil ferocity.”

  Strong stuff indeed. And if you can’t believe a former president of the United States, who can you believe? His account, more than any other, is the one that established the piranha’s bloody reputation in the outside world.

  When I first went to the Amazon in 1993, my main objective was to catch an arapaima. But I was also curious to see the Amazon because the things I was hearing about it just didn’t add up. One minute I’d be watching a documentary showing the place as an unspoiled Eden, with the cameraman tripping over jaguars and anacondas at every step, and then I’d read a newspaper that said it was all burning down. Interestingly, the tributary that the twenty-sixth president explored, now renamed the Rio Roosevelt in his honor, was previously the “River of Doubt.” In my mind, this name could describe the whole Amazon system.

  I worked on Martin to come along on the three-month trip. Although I told him I wanted him for his stimulating company, I mainly needed the extra baggage allowance and another body to carry stuff. Three weeks after our arrival in Brazil we dragged ourselves through thigh-deep mud to an open-sided, palm-thatched hut near a lake in the floodplain of the Rio Purus, one of the Amazon’s big southern tributaries. The hut’s owner, José, was a stocky fifty-something ribeirinho (mixed-race river dweller) with a ragged moustache whose semiwild jungle garden provided an erratic harvest of manioc, cashews, pineapples, and cupuaçu (similar to sweet furry potatoes hanging from trees), which he sold in the nearby town, a day’s travel away in his ancient covered boat. Every day he walked for half an hour along a nearly invisible forest path to the lake, where he netted the day’s lunch, with leftovers for supper. His existence was literally hand to mouth, and the deal we struck with him was that we would be tolerated for as long as we earned our keep. So Martin set to hoeing the manioc patch, plagued by clouds of blood-sucking pium flies, and hefting sixty-pound loads of pineapples to the boat in hand-woven baskets hanging from a cord round his forehead, while I went fishing.

  The lake, known as Lago Camaleão (“Lizard Lake”), was roughly circular, two hundred yards in diameter, and shelved to about eight feet deep in the middle. But before I tried my lures and fancy rods, José showed me how they did it. In an area of semisubmerged bushes at the lake margin, he picked up a thin bamboo pole from the bottom of his tiny dugout, unwound the eight feet of thick nylon line twirled around it, and put a chunk of fish flesh on the large single hook. The hook, I noticed, had an extra long shank, formed by wrapping the final two or three inches of line inside a thin, flattened cylinder of metal—cut from the case of an old battery, he said. Then, as I held my breath, this renowned, fish-whispering survival expert, from whom I’d hoped to learn the secrets of ninjalike jungle stealth, whirled the line out over-hand and brought it down on the surface with a resounding thwack. Feeling embarrassed for him, I watched the old duffer make repeated recasts, each one louder and more inept than the last. Somehow, on the last cast he ended up with the rod tip in the water, sploshing it around in a way that was sure to send every fish heading for the horizon. Next thing I knew, however, a flash of red and silver was swinging through the air and then flapping in the boat, where José deftly stilled it with the point of a machete blade behind its clicking jaws.

  “Piranha caju,” he said. “Same color as cashew fruit.” I realized I was looking at my first real live (okay, real dead) piranha—and not just any old piranha, but the notorious red-belly (Pygocentrus nattereri). Far from being scared off by the splashing, this half-pounder had homed in on it.

  Observing this legendary creature for the first time, I could see that the indigenous Amazonians hadn’t minced their words when they named it. Combine the Tupi-Guarani words pira (fish) and ranha (tooth) and you’ve got “tooth fish”—and this is exactly what it says on the linguistic tin. Also, just saying the word with their pronunciation, pir-anyah , makes you bare your teeth as if you’re about to go into a feeding frenzy yourself. That nyah! sound. Whereas the Anglicization, pira-nah (which is, incidentally, quite acceptable, as we al
so say Paris instead of Paree), has lost that edge of menace and sounds a little more friendly.

  I took the other rod and—after missing a few sharp pulls, each time bringing in a cleaned hook—swung one of these fish in myself. Its broad, protruding lower jaw gave it a pugnacious expression, and the solidity of its head indicated powerful jaw muscles. Bending forward to look at its teeth—sharp, triangular points that meshed together like scissor blades—I asked José if they really were as sharp as people said. He thought for a moment and then produced a surubim catfish from behind him, which he’d netted earlier. Taking my piranha, he touched its snout to the catfish’s thick, gristly tail, and immediately the jaws started working, like some diabolical trimming machine, as José moved the fish from side to side, artistically reshaping the tail until it was no more than a stump.

  But the novelty of fishing piranha-infested waters quickly wore off. They would devour the deadbaits I put out for arapaima, frustrating my efforts to tempt one of these bigger predators. They would hit the lures I cast for tucunaré (peacock bass), and on occasion, when they didn’t hit the lure, they’d eat half the fish that did while it was on its way to the boat. If I caught nothing else, though, we would eat piranha. They are better fried than boiled, and I have been known to reduce one to a pile of bones in seconds. But they are not a species that people relish, even though a soup made from their flesh is said to be an aphrodisiac. I was surprised once, though, by a piranha I was served by a fisherman called Manoel, who had grown up with the Karajá Indians on the Araguaia River. He cut thin fillets from the back of a small white piranha, marinated the pale flesh in a squeeze of lime juice and red urucú (annatto) powder, and served it sashimi style. It was delicious, and I asked him if it was something he’d learned from the Indians, a jungle survival tactic for when you can’t stop to cook. “No,” he said. “It’s just something we picked up from the Japanese.” But Manoel was unique. Most fishermen who catch piranhas hack their jaws off and throw them onto the bank to die because of the damage they do to their nets.