River Monsters (10 page)

We set up at the downstream end of a sandbar, where the channel swept from one side of the river to the other. Despite heavy weights, the current carried our baits far downstream and deposited
them on the shoulder of deep water. Although the spot looked ‘fishy’, I wasn’t really expecting anything, so I was taken by surprise when my reel screamed into life. I engaged the
drag and, mindful that there was a lot of stretchy line out, sprinted up the scorching sand while sweeping the rod over my head. Moments later a snarling head shattered the surface, cloaked in
spray, while I kept running to straighten the belly in the line. Then the fish was dragging me back, pulling in the current like a kite in a gale as I fought to get line back on the reel. By some
miracle, despite further jaw-clacking jumps, the enraged animal stayed attached, right up to the point when Paul slipped the gaff into its chin and pulled it on to the sand.

Lying before us, the fish was a bright bar of engraved silver, terminating in a splash of crimson on the lower lobe of its flaglike tail. Its other fins, all standing proud and curved at the
leading edge, were like scythes. Everything about it told of slicing through water – and through flesh. After all, there was just no ignoring those teeth, so diabolical and machinelike. It
almost didn’t seem real – a creature too impossible even to make up. But here it was, the words of Dr Gillet made flesh. And if I’d ever been in any doubt about the words of
Leander J. McCormick, Gillet’s awe struck translator and editor, then I wasn’t any longer. McCormick had declared, on the basis of what he’d read, ‘that a large Goliath is
by all odds the most difficult fresh water fish to hook and land’. This 38½-pounder had taken three expeditions and six years to catch.

We returned to England and spent the next year writing a book about it, through which this incredible fish captured the imagination of a whole new generation of anglers. But I was left with a
niggle of dissatisfaction, a feeling of unfinished business. My goliath, although impressive, was only medium-sized. Part of me never wanted to set foot in the Congo again, but another part knew I
had to. Meanwhile, the person in the mirror was getting older, and I knew a time would come when I would be physically and mentally past it. Maybe life was too short for this particular dream.

The opportunity to return to the Congo came with the second series of
River Monsters
. There’s only a short list of candidate species out there, so it was inevitable that goliath
would come up for consideration. To show a big one on TV would be an incredible coup, but set against that was the high likelihood of failure. Whereas I can survive next to a river at almost zero
cost and stay as long as I like, the daily cost of putting a film crew in the field, plus kit, is very high. To make it possible at all, we had to introduce some economies of scale by shooting a
second film in the Congo about its catfish. But we’d still at most only have three weeks, including travelling and all background filming, to catch a goliath.

We arrived in Brazzaville in August 2009, planning to get provisions and head straight upriver. I’d done my best to keep up with developments in central Africa in the two decades since
I’d last been here, but all of it seemed overwhelming, even by this region’s excessive standards. In the mid-1990s the Rwandan conflict spilled over into eastern Zaire, along with the
armies of seven African countries, all helping themselves, on the side, to a slice of Zaire’s mineral wealth. This ultimately led to the downfall of Mobutu, who was ousted in 1997 and died in
exile shortly thereafter. But the country, now rechristened the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), remains in conflict, with the death toll from this recent civil war standing at over four
million.

Civil war had also flared in Congo-Brazzaville with the appearance of the ‘ninja’ rebels in 1997. Now the city was even more decayed than I remembered it. Returning with a film crew,
I wondered if we’d be staying in the Mbamou Palace hotel, where visiting businessmen used to hole up, but this was now a shot-up shell that was in a state of stalled reconstruction. Elsewhere
the mood seemed less easygoing and more desperate. On top of that, despite having secured over a period of months the necessary paperwork for an immediate start, we now needed more permits. Day
after day our series producer camped in a succession of offices, constantly being told ‘tomorrow’ while the rest of us lost the will to live. Getting a boat was also proving to be
nearly impossible. By the time we were on the river we’d lost a whole week, one-fifth of our total time for two films.

We arrived at the sand beach in front of the village after travelling half the night. On the way, we had negotiated treacherous rocky whirlpools in the dark, all the while cursing the final
delay that had kept us, plus food and gear, waiting at the riverside for half a day. But to be away from the city was a huge relief, and we now had only the river and fish to contend with.
We’d selected the narrow
couloir
(corridor) region of the river to fish, although ‘narrow’ in the context of the Congo means three-quarters of a mile wide. This runs
between hilly banks for about 150 miles above Brazzaville, and because the river above, which braids around countless islands, is up to 11 miles across, it acts like a funnel, its flow fast and
powerful. At intervals along its banks are rocky bluffs, and as the flow rips past these, it creates diagonal furls of turbulence, enclosing wedges of countercurrent. The name for such a place is a
bweta
, and these are said to be the home of sirens and spirits. Fishermen also say they are where you’ll find mbenga, on the shifting shear-line between slack and current, ready to hit
anything that is struggling in the tumbling water. Few locals fish for goliath, but the preferred technique used to be a short line under a large float, held in place by thin cord running to the
bank, which would snap when the bait was hit, after which the fisherman would pursue the float in his canoe. There were three or four such back eddies in striking distance of our camp. But the
problem, as usual, was getting bait. The village’s few fishermen caught very little in their nets, so we ended up buying fish, in ones and twos, from fishermen from across the river in the
DRC.

I’d been told the best bait was a live kamba or machoiron catfish of about a pound, fished a few feet under the surface. Dead, unmoving fish are much less effective, although I have caught
arapaima in the Amazon on dead fish suspended underneath a float when surface waves sometimes give the bait some movement. Back home, where there’s a more sentimental attitude towards fish
– apart from the bluefin tuna, monkfish, and Chilean sea bass that we happily exterminate to tickle our palates, along with the fish of all species that our waste products poison – the
use of live fish as bait can be a contentious subject. The practice is one that I don’t feel totally comfortable with, but sometimes it’s possible to do it in a way that allows the
baitfish to be released if it isn’t taken, little the worse for wear – especially if it’s a hardy species like a catfish.

On my first fishing day I started in the turning water at the mouth of a sidestream, but the place didn’t live up to its promise. We continued down to a
bweta
, where we manoeuvred
the boat underneath towering rock. Once we’d settled on our mooring rope, I nicked a treble hook just under a machoiron’s dorsal fin and swung it underarm into the water at my feet,
into the slow edge of the countercurrent. Scarcely breathing, I watched my orange-tipped float sidle upriver towards the apex of the slack, a textbook holt for an ambush predator. As it approached,
the float started to dance and spin in the tongues of current and then it shot off towards mid-river as the main flow caught it. Holding the rod high and alternately checking and loosing the line,
I was able to guide it, after a fashion, along the line of the diagonal furl, at times getting it to pause in a temporary slack before it got swept further out. Finally, with perhaps eighty yards
of line out, the float, by now a distant dot, swung back towards me, entering the gyre that would bring it back to my feet. Searching such an area of good water in this way was greatly satisfying,
but with each revolution – following a subtly different path, a different radius, a different depth – I could feel my belief uncoil. By experimenting with rod position and length of
line, I found I could also hold the bait static in a small area, usually one of the chain of whorls along the outer edge of the slack. But there was still no interest. I drew it in once more, into
the current-line that would take it again to the apex, and this time the float trotted closer to the bank, curving out of sight behind a large boulder. I let it go for a few feet, but the braided
line was now too close to the rock, so I engaged the reel and raised the rod to bring the float back into view. As I did so, I felt a wrench on the line, which slammed the rod down. Five seconds
later the line fell slack.

The last two inches of wire, above the dead, tooth-punctured catfish, came back twisted like curly hair, and for a foot above that the line was filmed with thick slime. My last time here, nearly
two decades before, I’d fished with forty-pound monofilament, which has a degree of elasticity. Now I was using the latest zero-stretch braid, virtually unbreakable at two hundred pounds
breaking strain (unless it rubs a rock edge) to transmit all the strike force to the bony jaw, but the fish had treated even that with utter contempt. When I showed the evidence of this briefest
encounter to the villagers, they shook their heads. ‘You should put three of those hooks in the fish,’ they said. ‘And others below it, and above it. Maybe ten of them.’ In
other words, if the hook wasn’t going to hold in the mouth, they were suggesting that I snag it, either in the back with the trebles above the bait, which would trail behind its head as it
ran, or in the gill plate with the loose trebles below, which might wrap around it when it jumped. They couldn’t understand when I said I didn’t want to do this. Catching the fish
fairly was important to me, and I wanted to return it unharmed. I was also dubious about festooning the bait with too many hooks. Doing so would affect the liveliness of the bait, and it would also
mean that the force of the strike was divided between several hook points – the bed of nails effect. I wondered if there was any rig that would increase my chances or whether results would
always be random.

The next day we went to a
tourbillon
upstream. We had to fiddle with the anchor a lot before the boat settled into a good position, from which I managed to float the bait out to a good
spot: sixty yards away and just off the diagonal line of turbulence. To think of rivers as unidirectional is common, but in the big picture there are always these pockets where something else is
happening. Usually the surface gives a clue to underwater forces combining and cancelling. Here a shifting furl of spiky waves was bordered, along its downstream edge, by areas of smooth upwelling.
I was fishing a two-pound machoiron with one treble hook nicked through the back and another two suspended from cable ties, one under the belly and the other under the tail, like a lure.

At around midday, simultaneously the float vanished and the ratchet screamed. I pushed the drag lever to the strike position and lurched forward as the rod folded over, but there was no
reduction in the fish’s velocity. I pushed the lever nearly to its limit, and as my back doubled over and my legs tensed against the gunwales, the rod was almost torn from my grip. At least
there was no way the hooks could fail to set, given this amount of force. So when the line suddenly went slack, I assumed the fish was running towards me, and wound frantically to regain contact.
But after a few seconds I knew. All I brought back was half a bait, torn and punctured. The score was two-nil, to the fish.

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 probably 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.’