River Monsters
Page 9
Then there were the stories of human deaths. A boat captain told me about a man who fell overboard and disappeared in a boil of attacking piranhas. I also heard about a riverboat that capsized while attempting to dock, tipping all its passengers into the water. Their desperate flailing, in an area people constantly chummed with fish guts and leftovers, provoked a fatal piranha frenzy. But these stories never had any names, dates, or precise locations.
And if piranhas really were so dangerous, why did people commonly swim in places where piranhas also swum? (I knew they were there because I’d caught them, often right next to splashing kids.) I partially abandoned my caution and started swimming myself—and it’s hard to describe what bliss it is to have cool water support your body after a long hot day of mud, sweat, and biting insects. But I’d only swim where the locals swim, and I avoided the places they avoided. This seemed a sensible enough rule of thumb even though lots of locals had bits of thumb missing or semicircular scars or bifurcated fingertips or, in one case, a nose-tip that had been bitten off and then regrown. These were either from a millisecond’s loss of concentration when fishing or inflicted when they were gutting fish off the side of a floating house. And as an angler I was all too aware of the piranha’s potential. I caught black piranha (Serrasalmus rhombeus) weighing four pounds that had flanks the size of dinner plates and teeth that made me wince just to look at them. Black piranhas have been recorded close to ten pounds, but fortunately they don’t hang out in hundred-strong packs like the red-bellies. But red-bellies can grow to a very solid three and a half pounds, and I’ve caught them one after another at one pound and sometimes two. So although individually they are far smaller than most other river monsters, collectively they’re in the same league in that the combined biomass of a shoal of attacking piranhas could exceed that of a human being—which isn’t a pleasant thought.
The most voracious piranhas I’ve encountered have been in two distinct situations. One day, trying to cut through thick forest from José’s hut to a big lake beyond Lago Camaleão, I got hopelessly lost. If I headed in the wrong direction, there was uninhabited forest for over a hundred miles, but if I kept going around in circles as I had been for a couple of hours, drinking stagnant water from puddles, I would end up as food for the ants. Starting to panic, I stopped to think. Far under the canopy, I couldn’t see the sun, but I discovered that when I held a stick upright on the ground, one of its multiple faint shadows was slightly stronger than the rest, and getting longer. This meant it was past midday, and this direction was east, which was where I didn’t want to go. Using this improvised compass, I was able to head toward the river, where at least I would know where I was—if I could get around the swamps that were in the way. But before I hit the river, I arrived at the southern shore of the big lake. Confident now of my makeshift compass but spurred on by failing light, I turned back into the forest, this time heading due south, and reached Lago Camaleão at sunset. I arrived back at the hut just as José was starting to get worried.
“But I’d have found you,” he said, with such assurance that I found myself believing him. Whereas other ribeirinhos were totally at home on water, José had a reputation for stalking the forest with his shotgun and dogs, day and night—something almost nobody else did. With a shudder I remembered that he sometimes rigged his shotgun to a tripwire next to a homemade salt-lick. He’d once shown me a cartridge he’d made for this, repacked with a solid lump of lead, for smashing the skull of a tapir at point-blank range.
Having made it clear that he didn’t think much of my jungle navigation, he then mentioned that two people he knew, hunting wild pigs, had gotten lost in the same area the year before. I asked how long they had taken to find their way home. “Twenty-two days,” he answered.
Then I told him about the small lake I’d found, boiling with fish life, before I arrived at the big lake. Surely arapaima fishermen didn’t know about this place. He snorted. “Those guys get everywhere. They carry their canoes on their backs.” But I refused to believe him and, a few days later, having dragged the canoe down the twisting tree-choked creek to the big lake, set out on foot to find the place again.
My bait never had a chance to sink more than a few inches; it was set upon and devoured as soon as it hit the water. In the margins at my feet, a black catfish face appeared and looked at me, as if beseeching, “Please get me out of here!” This was one of those shrunken, hungry, dry-season pools where the piranhas had eaten most of the available food and would set upon any edible newcomer. That I’d not been tempted to take a cooling dip on my first visit was a good thing.
The other type of place to avoid is the outflow from a backwater lake when the water is falling during the dry season. At this time, small fish are getting washed out into the river channels, and the piranhas congregate in ambush. You can hear and see them slashing on the surface, and a small shallow-diving plug cast into some lake mouths will take one-pound red-bellies every cast.
One area of backwaters where the piranhas congregate for this small-fish harvest is a place called the Piranha reserve near Manacapuru, fifty miles west of Manaus. Here I finally found a case of a human fatality that was all too true. Because of the big seasonal changes in water level, the people here mostly live in floating houses. One man I spoke to, Julio, told me how, eight years before, he was looking after his two-year-old grandson when the boy ran from one side of his house to the other and fell in the water. When Julio got there, all he saw was the boiling of the piranhas “devouring” the child. Eventually they retrieved the body with a net, but all that was left was a skeleton.
I also found a newspaper report of a bus crashing into the Rio Urubú, east of Manaus, in 1976, and this reported that piranhas ate the occupants. Thirty-nine passengers died, but I spoke to one man who escaped, Dirceu Araújo. He told me how he climbed through a broken window but had to kick his leg free of a hand that had grabbed onto him. He repeated what the newspaper had said about some bodies being partially eaten. Another passenger managed to get out of the bus, but his clothing got caught. I spoke to this man’s brother, who was given the body wrapped in a sheet. Just by holding it, he knew that all the sheet contained were bones.
But the bus had been in deep water for several hours before it was retrieved. So it’s likely that piranhas did not kill the passengers but rather ate them after they had drowned. What makes this more probable is that the Rio Urubú is a black-water river, poor in nutrients and thin in fish, including piranhas. Red-bellied piranhas, in their dense, potentially homicidal packs, tend to live in muddy, “white water” rivers, such as the main Amazon, the Purus, and the backwaters of the Piranha reserve—not the Urubú.
Recently, however, there have been clear cases of piranhas attacking live humans. In 2007 more than 180 people were bitten when swimming and paddling off a shallow beach at an artificial lake near the city of Palmas. But these were nonfatal single bites. According to Brian Zimmerman, assistant curator of the aquarium at the London Zoo, these piranhas would have been defending their nests, which they construct in exactly the same shallow areas where people like to bathe. This echoes the attacks on swimmers at Schlachtensee near Berlin, except these were not five- or six-foot-long catfish but rather solitary fish measuring just a few inches. Seen in this light, the picture that emerges of these piranhas is of feisty, devoted parents.
Brian also mentioned that some recent research into piranha shoaling behavior indicates that the formation of “packs” is largely a defensive strategy against the animals that eat them. I have seen giant otters and caimans happily chewing on red-bellied piranhas, and pink river dolphins are also a threat to them.
This is not to say that piranhas are harmless and cuddly; their potential is lethal. But if you understand their behavior, you can avoid those situations when they can be a serious risk to human health—unless, of course, your employer is Mr. Blofeld.
CHAPTER 5
ARAPAIMA
After the doctor’s departure Koznyshev e
xpressed the wish to go to the river with his fishing rod. He was fond of angling and was apparently proud of being fond of such a stupid occupation.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1877
A FEW YEARS AGO I went for a routine dive medical examination. As part of this I was partially stripped and shaved and then wired up for an electrocardiogram. The printout should have shown a nice, regular sequence of blips. However, the doctor, after a pause, told me I had irregular “ectopic” heartbeats and sent me to a specialist for further investigation.
The cardiologist looked at me and said he was 99.9 percent sure I was okay, as I had none of the normal risk factors for heart disease (I don’t smoke and I’m not overweight), but nonetheless, he sent me for an MRI scan to make sure. When I came back for the results, I could tell something was wrong. The scan had revealed two patches of scarring, areas of heart muscle that were dead and that would never recover.
In the six weeks before my urgent follow-up test I had plenty of time to ponder my mortality. With time now revealed as something finite, I was struck by how little I’d achieved, in any conventional sense, in my life. The weight of the things I had done was inconsequential when divided into the years. And it struck me now as never before how much this was due to the immense cumulative weight of something else. This was something inside me that was invisible to all instruments and outside observers, something that had eaten away at my minutes and hours and robbed me of irreplaceable years. In a way it was like a heavy unseen fish pulling down, but I couldn’t give the line to anybody else or even expect a word of support as it tried to break my back.
I also questioned why this heart defect should happen to me. Although my diet is mostly good and I’m normally active, I’d had lapses over the years. I had also suffered periods of severe stress, most significantly when a publishing partnership swallowed most of my savings, after which I worked single-handedly for three and a half years simply to get back to where I’d started—this was the period when my hair turned white. I knew that stress can kill invisibly by raising blood pressure, thus causing the walls of the coronary arteries to thicken in response, which further raises blood pressure, and so on—a classic example of runaway positive feedback. Maybe I’d had a small heart attack sometime, a few moments of dizziness and clutching at the nearest surface, before coming round to woozy puzzlement. I racked my brains. Then it hit me. A frantic hour of Internet research confirmed my worst fears. Myocardial contusion is normally the result of a severe blow to the chest, most commonly from the steering column in a road traffic accident. Six years before, I’d suffered just such a severe trauma to the chest. But I was nowhere near a car.
I was in Brazil, helping a scientist friend of mine, Alexandre Honczaryk, and a team of fishermen to net one of Alex’s ponds. Alex is an aquaculturist, working at the National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA) in Manaus, the Brazilian city at the heart of the Amazon. His consuming interest is the arapaima. Specifically, he is trying to breed them in captivity in order to take pressure off the wild population, which, in most of the Amazon, has been decimated by overfishing. What we were trying to do was change the combination of fish in his main pond, to get some fishy love-action going. For female arapaima, size matters—they will kill a male that is too small to satisfy them—so we were trying to make sure that the next date didn’t end badly.
I was in the water, to one side of the semicircle of cork floats that marked the net perimeter, following it in as the two ends were pulled up on land, thus making the trap smaller and smaller. On our previous attempt, a fish had leapt clear at the last minute, so I reached forward with both hands and lifted the net’s top cord in the air so it was slightly higher than my head. Because Alex had warned me about getting too close to the net, I held my body well back from my outstretched arms as I waited to see what we got this time.
I didn’t see it coming at all. From inside the belly of the net, I received a sledgehammer blow to my sternum that sent me flying backward in agony. I struggled to my feet and then doubled over as body fluids squeezed out through my clenched eyelids. I remembered something about a martial arts death blow that sends the heart into arrhythmia, quickly followed by it stopping for good, so I fumbled to find my pulse, and was reassured to find it very strong and regular. But for the rest of the afternoon I kept checking, just to make sure. I now know I should have gone to the hospital for observation and oxygen. But at the time I felt okay, not much different from how I used to feel most winter days as a teenager after an afternoon playing rugby as a punch-drunk prop-forward. And besides, we had a television series to make. So I scarcely gave it a second thought despite the fact that, for six weeks, I couldn’t raise myself into a sitting position in bed. In order to get up, I first had to roll onto my front and then slide my knees onto the floor.
But now as I looked back, something else struck me. During my time in the Amazon, which started nine years before this incident, I’ve heard various tales of fishermen disappearing, leaving only a canoe floating empty on a deserted lake like a miniature Mary Celeste. Nobody ever found out what happened to them, but generally people said that a bicho got them. This is a generic term for “animal” or “beast.” But, if pushed, people would say the most likely suspect was a jacaré-açu, or, as we know it, the black caiman (Melanosuchus niger), a broad-bodied crocodilian that once used to grow to nearly twenty feet. Or they may attribute it to an anaconda (Eunectes murinus). Nobody ever mentioned arapaima, a fact that now struck me as odd. Perhaps this is because arapaima don’t have big teeth (although if you’re a small fish swimming nearby, this is academic, because you’ll be sucked in from a distance and then crushed by a bony tongue). They are also very pretty fish. Their vernacular name, pirarucu, comes from pira (fish) and urucú, the indigenous name of the Bixa orellana tree, from whose seeds, extracted from bright red spiky pods, we get the food dye annatto. So the arapaima is “the red fish,” from the coloration that edges its sculpted scales, getting more and more vivid toward its broad paddle of a tail. Normally the background color is dark green on the back that shades to silver flanks and a cream belly, but sometimes it is smoky black. And sometimes, most rarely of all, it is the deepest black imaginable, like ink distilled from the midnight sky. Surely, the thinking seems to go, something so pretty can’t possibly be a villain.
My involvement with this fish is long and complicated. After I finally caught a goliath tigerfish, I was looking for a new challenge. The arapaima had always occupied a mental backwater where it surfaced infrequently, but after my successful return to the Congo, the arapaima seemed to breach more insistently, sending out ripples that tugged my attention toward the unseen creature at their center.
Something happens when you start going after fish that are potentially bigger than you, and the arapaima, so they say, is the biggest of them all. Anglers traditionally measure themselves by the size of their catches: the bigger the fish, the greater the achievement, or so the thinking goes. As a product of this tradition, I used to weigh carp to the nearest ounce and rank them accordingly. But since then I’d come to realize that it’s also about the things you can’t measure: an element of hardship, sometimes shading into danger—and, for those truly obsessed, a whiff of unattainability.
In 1949, writing about the arapaima, Leander J. McCormick had declared, “Nowhere else in fresh water is there a fish so large and sporting ... and yet this giant fish has hardly been tested on a rod.” Nearly a half-century later, this still appeared to be the case: I could find no records of any contemporary captures. Maybe the arapaima was extinct. But surely this wasn’t possible. I decided to make catching one my new mission. After my nightmare journeys to the Congo, the world’s second-largest rainforest, the world’s largest rainforest was a daunting prospect. But with the Congo behind me and a track record of traveling alone, I considered myself uniquely qualified. All I had to do was get myself to a remote lake with enough energy left to chuck out a bait, and the fish would be mine.
Firs
t I had to decide where in the Amazon to go. Most statistics about the Amazon are meaningless because the figures are too large to comprehend. As I read that the basin covers an area of 2.72 million square miles, my eyes glazed over. I needed that in terms of something that was familiar, and preferably something better than a multiple of Belgium, which for some reason is the normal unit of comparative area. (The Amazon basin is 230 times the size of Belgium.) More meaningfully it covers 40 percent of South America—which means it is twice the area of the Congo and 85 percent of the land area of the United States’ forty-eight contiguous states. For most of this huge, semi-aquatic territory, there are no roads.
I tried to narrow my scope down a bit. I wanted to be away from centers of population, with their fish markets and fishing boats, but not too remote; I needed to be in and out within three months. And I wanted “white water,” which, in the Amazon, means muddy: nutrient-rich and abundant in life. So my choice of the Rio Purus, one of the southern tributaries, wasn’t a completely random stab on the map.
At two thousand miles in length, the Purus is one of the world’s great rivers in its own right, being longer than both the Danube and the Zambezi. To get there I planned to take a boat nine hundred miles up the Amazon to Manaus, the main navigation hub (at the confluence with the longest northern tributary, the Rio Negro), and then find a smaller vessel ascending the Purus. It looked simple on paper, but one thing worried me. I needed to be there in the dry season when arapaima are confined to the floodplain lakes rather than spread through flooded forest. But some sources said the Purus, one of the most winding rivers in the world, isn’t navigable at low water.