River Monsters

by Jeremy Wade

  Actually the “crew” at this point was one person, director/cameraman Gavin Searle. Our multitasking sound recordist Fernando Setta would join us on arrival. Just three days later they would be filming my blow from the arapaima and commenting how lucky I was to be hit in an area of protective bone rather than in the face or lower down the body.

  The day after that, we boarded a five-seater plane and flew up the Purus. We had been delayed in Manaus, so straight after off-loading our stuff we took the rear door off, strapped in, and took off to shoot our aerials. My job, sitting next to the pilot, was to relay instructions from behind, shouted above the roar of the wind and the engine. Having circled some backwaters, we were following the river back upstream, flying low, when I heard Gavin and Fernando shout, “More lakes!” I had a shouted conversation with our local boatman, Louro, seated behind me, then asked the pilot to climb. As we did so, a ribbon of silver opened up in the green wedge between the Purus and an entering subtributary. I instructed the pilot to line up on it and then come in low.

  We were at five hundred feet or less when we heard a loud pop and then the plane started shaking. In front of me I saw the blades of the single prop becoming visible, and in my peripheral vision I was aware of treetops rising to meet us. From inside a vortex of wordless fear, I heard the gentle flicking sound of something brushing our underbelly. Then again, more heavily, and then there was a second pause, doubly filled with both certainty and unknowing. Then everything went dark and a giant hand was shaking us, the g-forces coming from all directions at once, before slamming us sideways and down with the sound of tearing metal. For a millisecond my thought was one thing only: it was over and I was unhurt. Then my lungs filled with an unmistakable sharp taste, as liquid poured onto my shoulders from above: fuel. I clawed at my harness buckle but found it jammed, as the liquid rose up my body to my chest. Not understanding how there could possibly be this much fuel, I reached for my knife, but the pilot had freed me, and I swam out the copilot’s door supported by the stinking liquid, which for some reason now extended in all directions under trees.

  As I swam underneath the plane’s tail, I saw four figures standing on the water’s surface. Moments later they had pulled me up onto the port wing. Sunlight poured through the hole we’d torn in the canopy, illuminating the wrecked plane and shredded trees, and five men without a single scratch between them. Two of our cameras were destroyed, but one had kept recording throughout. Back in town that night, having waded and walked to the river, where a flotilla of boats picked us up, we watched the footage back. Before playing it, we all agreed that the time between the explosion and the plane hitting the trees had been three or four minutes. On the tape it was fourteen seconds.

  We also remembered no human sounds, but on the tape there was pandemonium: shouts, obscenities, and then breathless prayers.

  Over the days and weeks that followed, I tried to scalpel apart the pages of my memory to find what was locked there. The sheer improbability of our escape haunted me. Establishing the precise sequence of events—and contemplating all the what-ifs—became my obsession. Returning to the wreck, I saw that we’d stalled in the crown of a rubber tree, which had bent and then cracked, dumping us side-on into a much larger tree, which would have crumpled us like a tin can if we’d hit it head-on, depositing the engine in my lap. Afterward, everybody asked us the same thing. Did we think we were going to die? It happened too quickly, we said. Now, however, as I belatedly worked through the mental in-tray, I sensed there was something there that I had to deal with.

  It was just a flash, but it was there: a moment of certainty that I was going to burn. And for this to happen, after I’d escaped dismemberment, was just so unfair. That was the feeling: primal and childlike. Then to be spared this fate only to be extinguished by water was just too much, a good-news-bad-news joke without a funny side.

  About three weeks later a realization hit me with such force that it woke me up. The swamp we’d landed in got steadily deeper as it neared the lake. If we’d come down just one second later, the water that rose while I struggled to free my harness wouldn’t have stopped at my chest.

  Cynics have since told me that we could have all retired on the insurance payouts if we’d played the permanent mental damage card. But that never crossed our minds, nor has it since. The best payout is being alive. Besides, we had a film to make. An Amazon beauty contest, a tussle with a ten-foot caiman, and campfire songs from our strange friend Cabra Bom (“the good goat”) awaited us. And, just when we’d given up on the main event, after a day of piranha fishing with Manoel Karajá, he looked at us and said, “I’ve heard of a place where they’ve seen a big pirarucu. You can come there with me, but you’ve got to catch it our way.”

  After chugging downriver on the last of our fuel, with no rod in the boat, we followed him to a reed-fringed lagoon where patches of the surface intermittently flicked and distorted. After watching the movements of this baby arapaima shoal for nearly an hour, along with the occasional bulging displacements made by its watching parents, we cut a dead three-pound traira in half and whirled the tail end through the air on a 150-pound handline. As soon as the line settled on the water, it started to move, but so slowly that I had to ask Manoel before I heaved back in response. The next thing I knew, a huge eruption shattered the lake’s surface and the line was running hot through my hands, cutting my palms. To keep it out of the weeds and away from a stump, I had to stumble first one way along the muddy bank and then the other as the line sliced the surface with a hiss, and the displacements caused by its sudden changes of direction were like detonations of high explosive. The struggle was over in only a few minutes, but the intensity of such direct contact with a fish that was longer and heavier than me was unlike anything felt with a rod and reel. Dragged onto the bank, the fish jackknifed its body, punching its head four feet in the air, into the space where my head had been only a moment before. This was a fitting finale to our Jungle Hooks series, a tale of danger and back-to-basics fishing, with the unspoken message that sometimes you can’t get where you want to go by means of a straight line. With a nod from Manoel, I slid the fish back into the water, supported it while it took a gulp of air, and let it go.

  The sight of this fish, all 200 pounds of it, from this shallow pond left me shaking. But the claims for arapaima growing to fifteen feet are certainly wrong. This figure can be traced back to the German explorer Schomburgk, who visited South America in 1836 and who gave a corresponding weight of 410 pounds. As Leander J. McCormick wrote, “These figures have been adhered to for more than a hundred years without anyone stopping to consider what kind of shape such a fish would have; but any angler with experience of large fish would be sure to notice the disproportion between length and weight.” My fish scaled up to that length would weigh in the region of 2,000 pounds, similar to a real-live sturgeon. So fifteen feet can be ruled out as unreliable. The modern consensus is around eleven feet and 500 pounds.

  My only regret was that Martin didn’t see my fish. Since getting a job as a stonemason (he worked on St Paul’s Cathedral and the Albert Memorial) and then a family, he hasn’t had time for any more trips with me. Although he has now given up the regular job, he does have two boys to look after, in between collecting dead animals for his uniquely haunting still-life photographs shot on an old-style, blanket-over-thehead five-by-four-inch plate camera in hyper-surreal black and white. But he did put me up in his spare room for a year before I upgraded to two rooms in a friend’s house, where I am now, and he always gets a faraway look when I talk about the Amazon. He’s the one person I bring back presents for—usually fish scales or animal bones—which he keeps in his garden shed, now well known as the place where we film the introductory segment for each River Monsters episode.

  When I finally went for my coronary angiogram, the doctor inserted a tube into my right wrist and pushed it up my brachial artery to my heart, where it injected radio-opaque dye. At the edge of my vision I could see a moving X-ray
image, a cluster of dark vessels against a light background, near the window behind which the cath lab staff and cardiologist sat. After I’d been wheeled out, the registrar told me I have a very slight thickening of the coronary artery walls, but it’s nothing more than anyone else might have at my age. Confused, I asked about the dead muscle. There was no sign of it: an artifact, a trick of the light. But, from time to time, the missed beats are still there. In itself this is nothing to worry about. It’s just a dull thump in the chest, like a distant echo of a flying arapaima.

  Sometimes, too, the vision of an empty canoe floats into my mind: a body knocked into the water, with the piranhas, candirus and caimans finishing the job. On one of my last visits to Manaus I ran into José’s cousin, buying supplies and ammunition prior to heading back upriver. Arnaldo had introduced me to the dubious delights of small-town nightlife, but I had also seen him with his head and upper body down a wild pig’s burrow, digging his way to the tusk-rattling beast with his bare hands while José waited behind him with the shotgun. “We had another tourist up the Purus this year,” he said. “He had his own big canoe with a motor, and he was staying with people along the river. When he arrived in the town, he started waving money around and somebody robbed him. They took 5,000 reais.”

  I felt a surge of envy. With that kind of money (nearly £2,000) and kit, I would have surely found the arapaima far more quickly and comfortably without being taken on such a crazy, exhausting, indirect route: the back-breaking weeks weeding José’s manioc patch and lugging loads to his boat, to earn my right to stay in the forest; the whole month waiting for a message from the fat man; the tropical ulcers and bonedeep machete wound; all that paddling and dragging of leaking borrowed canoes....

  I re-tuned to the story. Apparently, before the man came to the town, he had stayed with some of Arnaldo’s friends, an extended family of fishermen scraping a living from the river. “When they heard he had been robbed in the town, they were outraged,” he said.

  Despite my bitterness, I found I was cheered by this concern.

  “If they’d known he was carrying that much money, they would have killed him,” he said. “Somebody would have just found his boat.”

  CHAPTER 6

  PIRAIBA

  The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about: all thy billows and thy waves passed over me.

  Jonah 2:5

  THERE’S A STORY I’VE HEARD SEVERAL TIMES, from different people in different places: a group of Amazon fishermen, operating from wooden canoes, got one of their nets snagged. So one of them dove down to try to free it. But after several minutes, the man hadn’t reappeared, and eventually his companions gave him up for dead. Finally, when they retrieved the net, there was a huge catfish inside, and protruding from its mouth were the legs of their former colleague. Fearful that nobody would believe them, they put the fish, still containing the corpse, inside the ice-filled hold of their mother vessel and took it to the nearest police station.

  But nobody was clear about exactly where or when this happened until I met Valmi Pereira. He said he witnessed the incident himself at the mouth of Rio Canumã, one of the subtributaries of the Rio Madeira, in June 2000. This time of year, in the southern sector of the Amazon basin, is the beginning of the vazante, the “emptying” of the flooded forest, when the flood waters of the rainy season, which can raise water levels by as much as fifty feet in places, start to recede. At this time multitudes of small fish, which have hatched and feasted in the flooded forest, pour back into the main waterways, and every year predators, including fishermen, intercept them. On this day, there were several fishing teams working the confluence, and all of them joined forces to retrieve the net and the body of the fisherman. But in Valmi’s story, the net, a small-mesh seine for encircling shoals of small fish, was empty: no fish and no corpse. Not until four hours later did the fish appear on the surface, in a state of some distress itself, choking on its meal. The men clubbed it to death and carefully slit its stomach to reveal the face of the fisherman, although they knew he was past hope.

  The fish was a piraiba (Brachyplatystoma filamentosum), measuring nearly eight feet, and weighing 286 pounds. Its mouth was 16 inches wide, easily big enough to engulf a human head and the shoulders of a small man, which most Amazon ribeirinhos tend to be, so the facts added up. But I first heard versions of this story well before 2000, and some of these said the fish was a pacamão, also known as the jaú (Zungaro zungaro), which is not quite as big as the piraiba but is said to be more aggressive. So I left this interview not entirely convinced, wanting some supporting evidence. Perhaps there has been more than one such incident.

  What’s certain is that the piraiba’s reputation for size and aggression goes back a long way. Its maximum length is commonly given as ten feet, making it the biggest fish, by far, of running water in the Amazon. The FishBase website quotes eleven feet, nine inches with a weight of 440 pounds. Theodore Roosevelt, during his journey to the Amazon, heard about a ten-footer that two men killed with their machetes “when it lunged over the edge of the canoe at them.” He also reported that people feared piraiba even more than caimans. In the lower Madeira they wouldn’t swim in open water but instead bathed in stockaded enclosures at the riverside. There’s also a clue in the fish’s name. According to some linguists piraiba means “‘mother of all the fishes”; others say it means “evil fish.” In the modern vernacular we could combine the two, and call it an evil mutha’.

  Being an inhabitant of moving water, the piraiba is a streamlined fish with a gray back and white belly, which makes it look somewhat sharklike. But unlike a shark, it has a pair of long whiskers, growing from each side of the upper jaw, and smaller ones on its chin. Its way of feeding is also very different from a shark’s. Instead of cutting teeth, it has a broad, curving band just inside each jaw that are made up of countless close-packed short points and have the feel of coarse sandpaper. With these, it grips any prey that can’t be sucked straight into the mouth cavity, before swallowing it whole. In other words, its table manners are less refined than those of a shark. But is it really capable of swallowing a man whole?

  Although fish don’t make a habit of swallowing extra-large food items, they do sometimes bite off more than they can chew. A recent story on the Internet referred to a North American flathead catfish (Pylodictis olivaris) that was found swimming on the surface with a basketball stuck in its mouth. It was exhausted from being unable to submerge, but its rescuer was unable to pull the ball free—testimony to the grip of those small teeth. Finally he deflated the ball with a knife. There are conflicting reports as to where this happened, but there are convincing photographs, which can be found by anyone who enters “catfish basketball” into a search engine. But do these authenticate the story? Anyone who has ever tried to bite a floating apple will immediately scratch their head and wonder how the ball got there in the first place and possibly suspect a cruel hoax—until someone reminds them that nonbiting predatory fish can exert incredible suction when they open their jaws. I was also told about a similar phenomenon on the top lake above the dam on the Rio Ebro in Spain where wels catfish were found dead with their mouths clamped to water-skiing buoys. Why catfish would go for floating lumps of plastic is something of a mystery, but they are known to be attracted to slapping sounds on the surface, which a wind-chop on the water could have created.

  The capacity of fish to swallow edible items can also beggar belief. I remember as a child seeing a series of photographs showing two fingerling pike, no more than four inches long, swim up to each other in a tank. When they were nose-to-nose, the pike on the left opened its mouth and engulfed the head of the other. The next frames show the second pike slowly disappearing until just its tail is sticking out. And I remember looking back to the first frame, and seeing that the pike that opened its mouth first was actually a bit smaller than its victim.

  Many years later, fishing the Rio Teles Pires in the south of the Amazon basin, I
spotted a large payara (Hydrolycus scomberoides) floating on the surface. I agreed with my boatman Flávio that the thing looked dead, but when we went to investigate, we found it still kicking feebly. On half-pulling it from the water, the reason for its stupor was apparent—another payara’s tail was poking out of its throat. Flávio grabbed this with some pliers (to avoid getting his hands near the fish’s vampire-like fangs) and, with difficulty, managed to pull the partially digested fish out. It was just a few inches shorter than the fish that had eaten it. Put in human terms, that’s the equivalent of me swallowing an eight-year-old child. I guessed that a build-up of gases in the stomach, with their way out blocked, had been the cause of the fish’s distress on the surface. When we put the undigested fish back, it swam off fairly happily.

  But to swallow a person, a piraiba would need to be phenomenally big. And there are other suspects in the frame to account for the many less specific stories of people going to wash in the river at nightfall and never returning. A man once showed me two curved scars on his upper left arm where an anaconda had grabbed him while he was paddling through flooded forest. As the snake then hauled itself into the boat and started to throw coils round the man’s body, he had the presence of mind to push the point of his knife against the inside of a coil, which prevented it from tightening around him. Black caimans are also big enough to easily take a human down.