River Monsters

by Jeremy Wade

  But although the eels were numerous and voracious, they were still a long way from man-eating. In order to devour a human in the way that a giant piraiba or jaú catfish could, by swallowing whole or partswallowing, an eel would need jaws wider than a person’s shoulders, and this would mean a very large animal indeed—a good deal longer than eight feet. A more likely scenario would be a number of eels acting en masse. Having heard now of them attacking live sheep and humans as well as having filmed them spin-feeding, crocodile-fashion, on a deer carcass, imagining them killing and eating a human wasn’t such a huge step.

  To demonstrate this visually, we needed to find a place where the eels are both bold and hungry: a place with no commercial fishing and no feeding by people. Having selected a likely locality in the southwestern Fiordland, we were helicoptered in to a remote river, where the only stipulation was no eel fishing with hooks. For once, we were blessed with fine weather, and as we flew up the valley with our kit slung underneath us in a net, I alternated between gawping at the stunning mountainsides and the river below. From this vantage point I could see through the water to a clean, sandy bottom that appeared devoid of life. Despite our five hundred–foot altitude, the water clarity was so exceptional that if there had been any dark squiggles, I felt sure I would have seen them. Although the scenery was breathtaking, I suspected we might have come to the wrong place.

  Nevertheless, we proceeded as planned. The idea was to duplicate, as closely as possible, the situation in which a deer hunter, carrying a bloody carcass on his back, comes to the banks of the river. He’s hot, tired, and dirty, and the sandflies are biting. What could be more natural than to dump his burden on the grassy banks and plunge fully clothed into the river?

  On the grassy riverbank I set about turning myself into human bait. In the absence of a deer carcass, I soiled my shirt by smearing shellfish guts over it. Underneath I wore a thin wetsuit because we were past summertime and the water was cold. This also meant that any eels would not be at their most active. But even so, I was not keen to have any bare flesh exposed. For this reason, I also wore protective cut-proof gloves. Stitched to these were finger-sized bobs made from mackerel strips to give my hands some flavor.

  I get in at a small scoop in the bank, with no other signs of life visible. Just a few steps out, the water is up to my waist and washing a cloud of scent into the eddy around me, with a thin trail peeling off downstream. Inside just five minutes, I feel something bump my leg, but I can’t see it because the bottom sediment is now stirred up. Five minutes later I can see perhaps half a dozen eels, each three or four feet long. Other long shapes are arriving from downstream, but the original ones came seemingly from nowhere. They must have been hiding under the trailing grass of the bank. I feel a nip on the inside of my right ankle and then a sharp twisting for a few seconds—good thing I’m wearing neoprene dive boots.

  Steve, the director, tells me he has just counted more than thirty eels around me. Keeping an eye on them all is becoming difficult. A few are closing in on my crotch, and from time to time I reach down and push them away, my hand on the bulbous muscle of their heads, to which some react by rearing their heads back with open mouths. I start to touch others. They don’t mind a hand gently on their backs, pushing them down onto the bottom, but they’re sensitive about any contact on their undersides. I beckon some with my fingers and they close in, coming close to the surface, even pushing their horned snouts into the air to catch the dribbles running off my shirtsleeves. They appear to sniff my hands, and a few allow me to lift their heads out of the water. Two fish are very different in color from the rest, being brownish instead of dark gray. Both are thick bodied. There’s one other of similar size, and it’s closing in on my hand. Now it has gripped the wrapped mackerel strip and is working it back into its mouth. I move my hand and it clamps down to stop its prey from getting away. Only when I heave its twisting body fully clear of the water does it finally let go and crash back down, but this added commotion does not perturb the other eels. The animal that hung from my hand was about four feet long and, I’m guessing, about fifteen pounds in weight. A quick calculation tells me there’s about twice my body mass writhing around me now. If just a few decided to latch on at once, I couldn’t do much about it. I reckon I’ve done enough to prove the capabilities of these animals and the best thing now is to get out.

  Safely on land, I start to wonder whether I could catch one of these big fish on a bob. But the rain is now tipping down, and even with the rain cover, we can’t risk the camera being out in this. The rain falls constantly during the night, something I’m aware of because, for the first time here, I’m unable to sleep, a delayed effect of my dislocation perhaps. In the morning the river has risen seven feet. The small scoop in the bank is now a long, narrow inlet. I chum the water with the pungent liquid squeezed from abalone guts, being careful not to let any bits into the water because doing so might start to satisfy the eels’ hunger.

  When the rain eases, and with half an hour to spare before we have to pack, I pick up a six-foot pole from the end of which hangs a bob tied to three feet of 150-pound cord, and I creep toward the inlet. I’m looking for one of the brown-bodied fish, but another big one is in a perfect position: just a couple of feet out, pointing straight toward the inlet’s gently shelving apex. If I can get it to take without alarming it, I should be able to drag it up here before it realizes what’s going on.

  I lower the bob into the cloudy water just in front of where I judge the eel’s head to be, and the line instantly twitches and starts to inch out as the now-flexing body reverses away. I give a little line and then take up the slack and pull back in a long sweeping motion. The resistance I encounter almost dislocates my shoulder as I remember what Vic said about the impossibility of getting a big one in. Then, with a great eruption, the gray body is on land, still heavy but with no water now to grip. Several seconds pass before it releases its meal, then it writhes on the damp grass, sliding back toward the river. Throwing the pole down, I put myself in the eel’s way, and with bent arms I scoop it up the bank. Only now do I try to pick it up. The thing is the size of my leg and has the strength of a constrictor. Under its smooth, moist, oddly sweetsmelling skin, its muscles are hard and I can’t hold it. I try rolling it onto its back to induce tonic immobility, a tactic that worked on some smaller eels (and works on sharks), but this one isn’t having any of it. So I do the counter-intuitive thing and stop trying to fight it.

  As if sensing that something has changed, she stills and allows me to lift her. After all I’ve heard and seen, I feel certain I’m holding the monster described in Cook’s journal. Eight feet long? Maybe that is a slight exaggeration, but who knows? And a shoal of eels even this size would have no trouble overpowering a weak or injured human in the water and then devouring the corpse.

  However, more than two centuries later this serpent in paradise is still a creature of mystery. Patrolling river and sea, daylight and darkness, reality and imagination, it slips through our hands and escapes to regions where we can’t follow. I wonder what Cook would make of its underwater navigation. Where are its charts? What instruments does it use?

  A vibration of the air, getting closer and louder, is the signal that my time has come to leave this land. The chopper pushes through rain and drops us by our vehicles, and we drive to Queenstown airport where, after one aborted take-off, the 737 takes us back to Auckland. Then two nights between clouds and stars, homing in on a distant destination while the clear mountain streams retreat into memory.

  EPILOGUE

  WHAT ELSE IS DOWN THERE?

  The wonderful mystery that there are fish at all is the angler’s first meditation.

  Ted Leeson, The Habit of Rivers, 1994

  SEPTEMBER 2000, ANOTHER AMAZON LAKE, small and crowded in by weeds—I was lying in a hammock, back from the water, resting after an exhausting day. Getting here from the river had taken us an hour and forty minutes along an uncertain bearing, wading through two sw
amps. Zé Carlos was one of just two people who knew the way, and he said no one had been here for years. On arrival we’d found the remains of a small dugout, which we’d patched with rags and mud. But the baits I’d cast to swirls on the weed margins had been scoffed by two-foot arowhana rather than the giant arapaima I had hoped for.

  Our camp was in a small clearing, next to a fallen tree with its head in the lake. Above us an irregular window opened onto clear, still sky. The only sound was the whine of mosquitoes, crowding the gauze of my net. Then Zé Carlos spoke: “Jeremy, do you think that after all that black up there, if you go right to the very end, it’s light again?” From someone whose normal topics of conversation were turtles and village girls, this was a strange question, and I wasn’t sure how to reply. I said I didn’t know, that some things are beyond the capacity of the human mind to understand.

  After a silence he spoke again: “Jeremy, is it possible that somebody where you come from, one of your family perhaps, is thinking about you now, right at this moment?” I looked at my watch and then tried to explain about time zones, the fact that it would be 1 a.m. in England and that everybody would be asleep.

  In the morning we set off early. I estimated we would be back at the river by 8 a.m. “Impossible,” said Zé Carlos. “More like nine.” He looked at my watch and told me it was wrong. Back at the village I discovered that, at some point during the night, it had stopped for exactly one hour.

  Five nights later I arrived back at the town to find two figures on the waterfront: my friend Louro, who had been with me in the plane crash, and his wife. Louro told me that someone had been trying to reach me, on the town’s radio-phone. Only Martin had this number, so I stayed up until 2 a.m. in order to call him before he went to work. Out of the speaker came the echo of a familiar voice. While I had been with Zé Carlos at the lake, our father had died.

  TICK TOCK. Ten years later all that squelching in Amazon mud has at last borne fruit. Some people say I have the best job in the world. But with this come new challenges. A few people have accused River Monsters of stirring up hatred and fear of wild animals, even though these critics are anxious to make clear that they of course don’t respond in that way, and anyone looking through my mail would find little evidence of it there. Part of the problem, for a few people, appears to be the title, and they can’t see beyond this. “Monster” is a powerful word, with multiple facets and layers of meaning, and a charge that depends very much on the angle from which it is viewed. Children are intrigued and want to see what’s behind the word, and they understand instinctively that it is a hook to snag the attention, but a few adults are so convinced of everyone else’s simplemindedness and suggestibility and scarcely contained blood lust that it rouses them to a protective fury, and I have found myself the target of this strange, mutated attack reflex. Unlike snakeheads circling a fry ball or a wels catfish grabbing a leg, the motivation behind some human behavior is not so straightforward to unravel. And although human psychology is not my area of expertise, perhaps it was inevitable that making these programs was going to make me a coat hanger for a few people’s preconceptions and the butt of their selfrighteousness.

  Then there are some nice things. Recently I was offered an eye-popping sum, about equal to what I make for a whole year’s filming, to go into a studio for a day. It was my invitation to join the army of grinning sports people, actors, and the like who brandish stuff at the public in the commercial breaks. I turned it down, honestly wondering what these people spend it on and even more agog (now knowing what it pays to be a mouth for hire) at the depths of human insecurity. So although some others might disagree, I think I’ve managed, at least partially, to hang on to my soul.

  Meanwhile, the other thing that has been trying to pull me down is still there—which makes it thirty-five years now. But although it hasn’t surrendered, its weight has diminished to a point at which I scarcely notice it. I owe this in large part to the flesh-and-blood monsters in these pages. I think we’ve worn the fucker out. It feels like a victory of sorts.

  There’s one thing that bothers me though. In one respect the River Monsters television programs give a false impression. Many viewers tell me they would now think twice before getting in a river or lake—and so they should. But this is only part of the reality.

  In north India, on the River Saryu, a mountain tributary of the Kali, there’s a deep, swirling pool that has been excavated over the ages by monsoon floods colliding with a cliff. In my mind’s eye I could see the leathery, sluglike shapes of huge goonch, wedged in holes between tumbled boulders and in the trench at the base of the rock. But for hours my lines hung limp and my anticipation drained away. Something was wrong.

  Because this is a spring-fed river, the water, when not in flood, is clear. So I put on my dive mask and, having floated over the remains of a funeral shroud in the shallows, drifted through with the current. The water was much deeper than I expected; even a little way out I couldn’t dive to the bottom. Then I had an idea. This being a film trip, I had a waterproof camera with me: a metal cylinder on the end of a cable that is plugged into a tape deck with a screen. I paddled across to the cliff in our miniature rubber dinghy and dangled this down, watching the aerial view it revealed of the underwater landscape. As I now suspected, there were no fish down there. The pool was dead apart from some cavorting tiddlers, only six inches long. So much for the Hindu belief that rivers are sacred, the way to new life. Those cremated remains had not been consigned to a living river but rather to a degraded ecosystem where the predominant life forms are mats of algae.

  Meanwhile, in the Congo, at the village of Bonga, fishermen each put out one hundred baited hooks every night and pull them up in the morning empty. And in much of the Amazon, you’d be lucky to bring up anything other than tiny scavenging catfish. In fact, if you go to most rivers in the world, however remote, you won’t find big fish. But if we made a TV program about fish in which we didn’t actually show any, we wouldn’t have any viewers. So we search out the few places where monsters still exist.

  The reason for this sorry state, for the most part, is overfishing. In parts of India they fish with dynamite that has been acquired from road-maintenance teams. Fish concentrate in pools where only a couple of sticks, in a small river, can kill everything. Then there’s the electro-fishing, using wires hooked up to power lines and run down to the water—an insanely dangerous method and indicative of a level of desperation that I, for one, can scarcely comprehend. Four thousand miles away in the Congo, catfish have been removed beyond immediate needs to be kept alive on ropes through their jaws and shipped downriver to buyers in Brazzaville. And in the Amazon, fishing boats will ditch the fish in their holds to make space for a catch of a more valuable species.

  Add to this the effects of pollution, water removal, and damming, which blocks migration routes and alters age-old flow patterns, and river fish populations worldwide are in a very bad way—far worse than in the sea, if such a thing is possible, where some estimate we’ll have no wild seafood by 2048.

  The trouble is, though, that a river can look much the same whether it’s alive or dead. Only by looking below the surface can you tell the difference. Casting a line, therefore, is like taking a sample of the planet’s bloodstream—and the prognosis is not good.

  In the Yangtze River they say there’s a fish the length of four men that weighs over a thousand pounds, with a mouth that could easily engulf a human. Spending no part of its life in the sea, it could be the world’s largest freshwater fish. But although monstrous in size, the Chinese paddlefish (Psephurus gladius) is not dangerous to people because it’s a filter-feeder. The other reason we have no need to fear it is because it appears to be extinct. No adults have been seen since 2003, and no young since 1995.

  The trajectory for other monsters is going steeply in the same direction. Alligator gar—wiped out from most of their ancestral range; freshwater sawfish—listed by the IUCN as critically endangered, next stop extinct in the
wild; Mekong giant catfish—also critically endangered; freshwater whipray—“vulnerable.” Recent research even suggests that Arapaima gigas may be extinct—all arapaima caught today appear to belong to closely related species. And the goonch, which Major A. St. J. Macdonald described in 1948 as “the vermin of the water,” has become an underwater yeti.

  When I finally caught a giant goonch for the cameras, some viewers asked why I put a potential man-eater back alive. But the river people see things a different way. Man Singh, who saw a goonch drag his buffalo into the Kali, told me, “If it’s your time it’s your time, and if it’s not your time it’s not your time.” Killing what you fear will achieve nothing. In fact, this can even rebound on us—as it undoubtedly will if they ever try to wipe out the Breede River bull sharks. And the same goes for the casual killing of our fellow creatures that we are doing all the time through our now-untenable belief that our security is assured through ever-increasing consumption. Now, more than at any time in the past, the challenge facing every one of us is to learn to coexist with other life. Because the day the last monster dies is the day the river dies too.