River Monsters

by Jeremy Wade

  I remember during one summer school holiday going to visit my Uncle Mike, a history teacher who lived in a tiny village near Loch Ness. I have a hazy memory of the loch: the same view as the postcards, with Urquhart Castle in the foreground and the water behind. The biggest fish I’d caught at that time was a four-pound pike, and I was far more interested in stories about this predator, which is said to grow huge in the loch, than in the mythical beast that fed the local tourist industry. But even so, the power of the legend still held me and I lingered for a long time half-expecting something to break the surface. Then it was up into the mountains, hiking to forgotten lochans and narrow burns where the trout fishing was open to all and where I waved a borrowed fly rod ineptly and unsuccessfully. The biggest fish I caught was a five-inch salmon parr, but it beat Nessie watching, which didn’t really interest me because it wasn’t a fish and because I knew it was something I would never see.

  So what were my chances on Lake Iliamna? I reminded myself that I had something of a track record for seeing and filming things that other people hadn’t, such as the Amazon saw-backed lake monster and goonch underwater in their natural habitat. But here there was very little to go on—no grainy images on film or video to computer-enhance. There was, however, an extensive oral history, and the obvious first step was to tap into this.

  The normal way to get around Alaska is by float plane; they use planes like other people drive cars. Waiting to take off from Anchorage, I was not totally relaxed about this given my previous experience with light aircraft, and a preflight chat with a regular passenger was only partially reassuring. “You go in through Lake Clark Pass,” she said. “It could be sunny this side, but you go in and it’s snowing. You’ve got to turn an L-shaped corner in total white-out. But you can’t turn round either, because it’s so narrow. So now they’ve got these webcams there, so they can check the weather before they fly.”

  We approached the mountains over tidal mudflats and wandering creeks, passing three oil platforms in Cook Inlet. I was facing backward, toward our strapped-in kit, and for the sake of my neck, I had to content myself with looking mostly out to the side. But already I could sense that the snow-covered peaks ahead were higher than our 2,500-foot altitude, as the valley we were following closed in on either side. Soon there was sheer rock alongside, slipping by in an eerie slow motion that belied our roaring speed. All around were graphic reminders of gravity: glaciers sliding down from the peaks way above and vertical chutes of born-again water.

  We landed in Port Alsworth, halfway down Lake Clark, which is linked to Lake Iliamna by thirty miles of river. This small settlement is situated beside a sheltered inlet, where float planes can land on calm water regardless of the wind’s direction, so it’s the perfect base for Lake Clark Air, which covers the Iliamna area.

  Legendary bush pilot Leon “Babe” Alsworth, who gave up logging his flying hours after 48,000, founded the original air-taxi service here. He also saw the Iliamna monster in the 1940s. His son, Glen Alsworth Sr., a soft-spoken man with a white beard and twinkling eyes, now runs the company, and I buttonholed him in between flights to get more details of that sighting. “This day it was absolutely glassy water calm,” he told me. “And my father was flying across the lake in his float plane. And he noticed two large fish near a reef in shallow water.... So he circled them to try to get an idea of how big they were, and he judged them to be the same size as the floats on his aircraft—probably more than fifteen feet long.”

  But there was more: “As the fish began to move from the shallow water ... he looked down into the deep water, and there was a school of perhaps a hundred fish. To him they looked small, but when these fish joined them from the reef, they were all the same size.... It was a shoal of huge, huge fish.”

  Glen Sr. has never seen such a sight himself, but in 2008 he saw an animal that he reckoned was between eight and ten feet long. The wind was blowing offshore, and it was swimming in the shore’s calm wind shadow in about fifteen feet of water at the edge of the drop-off. At first he thought it was a seal, but its tail was moving side to side. Glen Sr. is highly experienced at spotting fish from the air for sport-fishermen, but this was none of the normal species, and it was much bigger. As the plane turned for another pass, the fish moved into deeper water.

  But on the same flat-calm day when Glen Sr.’s father spotted the giant fish he also saw something even stranger. Approaching the shallower southwest end of the lake and flying into the sun, “He could see on the surface of the water what looked like huge octopus. He could see these large, round kind of animals, or something that was underwater but lying at the surface. And as they would fly over them, they would sink, they would go down, they would start descending in the water. And initially he passed it off as some type of illusion ... but he saw a lot of them.” His passenger also saw them, a schoolteacher he was taking to the town of Levelock. Babe Alsworth estimated that the arms of these creatures had a spread of nearly one hundred feet. “Whatever they were, they were very large, and there were many of them,” said Glen Sr.

  Then came another surprise: the stories aren’t restricted to Iliamna. Back in the same era, one of their aircraft technicians hooked something very large in Lake Clark. The man was in the habit of fishing a set line for lake trout and had suffered some break-offs. He kept upping the strength of his line, but the same thing happened. Eventually he forged a giant steel hook in the workshop, baited it with half a salmon, and attached it to a length of aircraft control cable. He then secured this to a heavy tree stump washed up on the lake shore. The next day a neighbor, looking out at the lake, spotted a tree stump moving in the water, against the wind. At first he worried about his sanity—that is, until he heard the explanation from the equally incredulous mechanic.

  Hearing this, although it happened more than a half-century ago, I couldn’t resist putting out a large bait myself. Wedging my rod upright on the shore, I took a fillet of salmon out by inflatable kayak and released it beyond the drop-off in thirty feet of water. It was my first Alaskan night outdoors, but in the Arctic summer, just six degrees south of the Arctic Circle, it never really gets dark, something that contributed to the unreality of what I was doing. I flattened the seats in the beached kayak and lay down inside it, but the wind and lapping waves that rocked it didn’t allow me to sink into the near-sleep state in which I’m oblivious to everything except the urgent scream of the ratchet. I kept having to check that I hadn’t drifted out—with mist obscuring all around, and a thousand feet of water underneath me. When morning came, the line still hung slack.

  The next story I heard was from Bill Trefon, a native Alaskan of the Dena’ina tribe who lives on the shore of Lake Clark. One day in 1957 his parents were out on the lake when there was an impact and their motor stopped. Bill’s father pulled up the motor to inspect it, and while he was doing this, his wife saw a large tail break the surface behind the boat. But this wasn’t the most extraordinary thing. “There were teeth marks on the propeller,” said Bill.

  His mother said that, based on the size of the tail, the fish must have been ten or twelve feet long. The largest known predator in the lake is the northern pike (Esox lucius). Perhaps the prop had acted like a fishing lure and a pike had reflex-hit because of its flash and vibration. If so, this would be highly unusual behavior: you’d expect the mass and movement of the boat to deter it. But a wake actually attracts certain aggressive predators such as marlin (expecting to find propeller-minced small fish?), which will hit skittering teasers right up against the transom.

  I’d heard there are big pike in Lake Clark, but I wanted to put this to the test. The weather had turned exceptionally sunny, so my guide, Glen Alsworth Jr., took me fish spotting in the air. In summer, pike move into shallows, so we circled a weedy creek across the lake where we saw some loglike shadows. The next day we went there in the boat, and I missed a take right in the weed stems on a surface-fished rubber frog and then caught a two-pounder on a buck tail jig, a weighted threein
ch strip of white fur that kicks just like a small fish if you twitch it along the bottom. But I hooked nothing big. So we came out into deeper water, a bay that a ten-foot cliff topped with bushes partially bounds. Underneath this, right against the rock, was a classic ambush position, not just for picking off small fish but also bonus items, such as nestling birds falling in from above. From fifteen yards out I dropped a spinnerbait repeatedly into this zone, without result. We’d now drifted past the most promising area, so I sent a last-chance cast back along the rock face, and halfway in there was a sharp wrench. In the clear water I soon saw that it was a pike, which we beached on a small patch of waterlogged bank and measured at forty inches. Weighing maybe twenty pounds, this was a very respectable pike. A thirty-five-pounder would be the fish of a lifetime. But even the largest pike in the most uncertain historical reports, such as the ninety-pounder netted in Ireland in the late 1800s, wouldn’t measure more than six feet. So the fish in Bill’s story was not likely a pike. But what could possibly bite a moving propeller and survive?

  Both Lake Iliamna and Lake Clark are connected to the sea, so one possibility is a marine animal that has wandered inland. To check this out, we flew over the shallowest part of the Kvichak (pronounced Kwee-jack) River, an area known as the braids, where the river splits into numerous small channels. In many of these channels we could see the bottom, but others appeared to be six or eight feet deep, which could potentially be enough water for an animal like a beluga whale.

  Belugas are toothed whales, like orcas and sperm whales, and look rather like oversized Amazon pink dolphins, with a bulbous forehead and flexible neck but without the long beak. They grow more than fifteen feet long with a weight of over three thousand pounds, which fits the bill almost perfectly in terms of size. What’s more, there is a well-known population nearby in Cook Inlet, and they are known to move into estuaries in summer. Being air-breathing mammals, there’s no reason why they couldn’t swim into fresh water if they wanted. In fact, in 2006 a dead eight-foot beluga was found nearly one thousand miles from the sea beside the Tanana River, a tributary of the Yukon River, near Fairbanks in central Alaska. As the biologist who identified it said, nobody in their right mind would want to drive this far with a decomposing carcass in order to perpetrate a hoax. Instead, there’s speculation that it could have simply been following its food: the salmon that run upriver to spawn. So seventy-five miles up the Kvichak to Lake Iliamna would be a breeze. But the idea that the Iliamna monster might be a beluga comes crashing down as soon as we apply more scrutiny. Being an air-breather, the beluga would have to surface at regular intervals, and being brilliant white, it would be easily visible in the clear water—not to mention its habit of making loud squeaks and whistles. Its color is also at odds with witness statements, which also maintain that the tail movement is side to side, not up and down. So this white whale is not the Moby Dick of this tale.

  If bull sharks were this far north, they could easily get into the lake and remain hidden there. But the coastal seas here are too cold for them; the nearest bull sharks are off Baja California. However, there is one shark species up here. Salmon sharks (Lamna ditropis), as the name implies, follow runs of salmon, sometimes very close inshore. This abundant food source enables them to pack on the pounds, reaching over ten feet in length and weights over five hundred pounds. This fastswimming, stocky-bodied shark is able to keep active in these subarctic waters by virtue of a remarkable adaptation, which it shares with the related great white shark. Unlike most fish, it can keep its body temperature higher than that of the surrounding water. However, it lacks the bull shark’s special ability to enter fresh water. So it has a cast-iron alibi. Another potential suspect is ruled out.

  Flying over the lake one day, Glen pointed out a group of large animals below. Without anything to give a sense of scale, estimating their size was difficult, but I can confidently say the bigger ones were around six feet long and close to three hundred pounds. Lake Iliamna is one of just a handful of freshwater lakes in the world with breeding colonies of seals (the best known is Lake Baikal in Russia). The animals we saw were hauled out on a tiny island, and the total population is estimated at over two hundred, but it’s hard to imagine these giving rise to the monster myth.

  Running out of likely suspects, I decided to take a more indirect approach. A large animal needs an abundant food source to sustain it. Without this, any idea of a mythical monster is a nonstarter. The Kvichak’s run of sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) is reputedly the largest salmon run anywhere in the world, with over ten million fish returning every year to spawn and die. Apart from anything else, this gave me the opportunity to catch my first salmon, the “king of fish,” after almost fifty years chasing everything else in fresh water—and this was something I was quite excited about. My background as an angler is decidedly “coarse” rather than “game.” That is to say I am a maggot drowner, a plunker of worms, a dirty-fingered mixer of stinky concoctions that I lob into the path of unsuspecting fish that stand no chance when presented with real food, if the most vocal adherents of fly-fishing are to be believed. Conversely, fly-fishing is said to take extreme levels of skill because you are trying to deceive the fish with something that is inedible. This distinction takes us right to the essence of “Fysshynge with an Angle,” as it used to be called in the fifteenth century before that special bent piece of metal became known as a hook. All angling is about putting something with minimal food value into the water and pulling out a potential meal, a conversion that seems all the more miraculous when the bait has no food value at all—a trick that would seem to require the highest levels of human guile to make it work. But, as with most things in life, other factors are seldom equal. “Game” fish have the misfortune of being tasty to eat so they don’t get the chance to wise up to the extent that nontasty species do, which are returned to scrutinize a hook another day. At any rate, until now I had only heard and read about the sublime difficulty of deceiving and landing salmon. Now was my opportunity to evaluate this for myself.

  Flying over a hummocky landscape, we spotted a straw-colored grizzly bear beside the river below, a good sign that the salmon were there, although we couldn’t see the fish themselves, which can turn the water black at the peak of the run. We landed on a small windswept lake nearby and took a winding path to the river. The bear had gone when we arrived, but fresh paw prints were a reminder to stay on our guard. We were only sixty-five miles from where, six years before, bears had killed and partially eaten the self-styled bear conservationist Timothy Treadwell, the subject of Werner Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man. So before we started fishing, Glen gave me and the crew a safety briefing. If a bear confronted us, we were to face it and hold our ground, presenting the broad mass of our combined five bodies—in other words acting much like a rival bear would do: avoiding conflict by showing that we were bigger. If this didn’t work, we were to back off slowly. But it seemed to be academic. There were no salmon-scooping bears anywhere to be seen, which was quite disappointing. There was only the river and patches of low shrubs alongside.

  The received wisdom about salmon is that they don’t feed in rivers. But the truth isn’t quite this clear-cut because anglers (of the “nonsporting” variety, notably in Ireland and Wales) catch them on prawns and worms. And they will of course take flies, although most salmon “flies” resemble small tropical fish more than insects. Curiosity is often given as the reason: what the heck is that shiny red and yellow thing? But the only reason most fish will check something out is to see if it is edible, so why would a nonfeeding fish be curious? With salmon, a fly or spinner or spoon, if presented close enough, must trigger the remnants of a feeding reflex. But this is not so with the sockeye, which is unique among the eight species of salmon (seven Pacific and one Atlantic) in not taking flies. This is put down to the fact that, when at sea, it is less predatory than other salmon, sucking up crustaceans rather than striking small fish. So what was I doing setting up a fly rod? Glen explaine
d that there is a way around this difficulty, and the key lies in the sheer number of fish.

  We had waded out to a small gravel patch at the head of an island, and every few minutes a pod of dark shapes pushed upstream alongside us, about two rod-lengths out in a couple of feet of water. Glen gave me a small streamer fly to tie on and then a piece of split-shot. “Put that about four feet up your line, then cast upstream,” he instructed.

  I took some time to get the hang of it. Fly-casting with a piece of lead on the line is not very effective or elegant, especially with a stiff downriver wind. I settled on shooting the line out with a backhand flip, watching the lead plop into the water just a few feet out. But that was all the distance I needed. After a bit of practice and adjusting the weight, I would see the fly and lead hit the water four feet apart and then feel the lead ticking along the gravel bottom. The idea is for the line between fly and lead to sweep downstream a few inches off the bottom and intercept the fish coming up. A salmon, opening its mouth to breathe, feels the line and bolts, thereby sliding itself down the line to the hook. Mostly the fish will be hooked near the angle of the jaw, but the point will have penetrated from the outside, although sometimes it will catch inside the mouth, giving the impression, probably incorrect, that the salmon actually took the fly.