River Monsters (11 page)

I’d not been expecting this. And I didn’t know what to do with my gift. Although I’m sure that some superstitions work through the placebo effect, I also know that if you
recognise them as such, they lose their power. In the end, I decided it would be impolite not to comply with the prescription. Certainly I needed something to help my focus. I was almost starting
to believe that the mbenga is a spirit and not a real fish at all. Maybe my approach was wrong. Or maybe catching it was just a matter of time. Keep at it and another one will come, and sooner or
later one will stay on the line. But whether it will or not is in the lap of the gods. The trouble was that I had very limited time: just two weeks to fish, which were nearly over.

By now our African Queen-style launch had returned to its owner in Brazzaville, and our transport for everybody plus kit was a large dugout canoe with an unreliable outboard that a young man
called Fred (pronounced Frrred-duh) piloted. Getting around in this was a slow business, and after all this time with no fish, morale was getting lower by the day. We’d not been to the
original
bweta
for a few days, so I decided to give it another try. This time we moored the boat a way upstream and I picked my way over the boulders to a precarious fishing position. The
bait had a large single hook nicked through its back and another through the skin of its tail, with a treble dangling loose under its belly, held in place with a twist of fuse wire. This was a
newly devised rig with a good hooking capability but not too much metalware, and I felt more confident than I had for a while as I swung the bait out fairly close, about ten yards. And I’d
scarcely settled into my uncomfortable perch when the float disappeared.

The next thing I knew I was on my feet wrestling a rod that had come alive. Uppermost in my mind was the knowledge that I mustn’t let this fish take too much line. On a long line the fish
could swing in towards the side, with me powerless to stop it. Because of my position on the point, this would take it around a corner, out of sight, and if the taut, braided line touched a rock,
that would be that. But in front of me was deep, open water: each time the fish changed direction, I tried to counteract it in order to keep it in there. At one point the line cut up towards the
surface and I thought the fish was going to jump, but instead I just saw its dorsal fin and a flash of silver. I could see it was a big fish, and as I clambered down to the water’s edge I
yelled at Fred to bring the landing net. There was a good chance this would be chewed to pieces once its head was inside, but by this time, in theory, we would have grabbed its tail. And between
us, despite me nearly slipping right into the water, we executed this plan perfectly. The fish, a massively deep-bodied monster, was ours!

What’s more, we had landed it alive. As I held it in the flowing shallows, keeping well clear of its business end, its gills were working strongly and rhythmically. But whenever I took my
hands away, it couldn’t hold itself upright, and over time its breathing slowed. If I had let it go, it would have slipped into the main flow and sunk from sight. But I’m certain it
wouldn’t have recovered; it would have suffered a fatal battering on the rocks at the bottom of the
bweta
, possibly being given the
coup de grâce
by another goliath.

I have a theory that some fish can suffer a form of decompression sickness when they are caught, the same disorder that afflicts divers (‘the bends’) if they surface too quickly.
This is caused by dissolved nitrogen in the blood and tissue fluids forming tiny bubbles when the pressure around the body decreases – exactly what we see when we twist open the cap of a
fizzy drink bottle and the dissolved gas (carbon dioxide in this case) forms bubbles. Such bubbles forming in the body’s inner workings can cause skeletal, circulatory, and neurological
disorders, which, if not treated by recompression, can lead to paralysis or death. One human symptom that’s sometimes visible externally is a skin rash, and this is something that also
appears on some fish a little while after capture. I’ve seen it on wels catfish caught from the Rio Ebro, where it is attributed to general ‘stress’ and wisely taken as a sign
that the fish has been out of the water long enough. I have likewise seen it on Thai giant whiprays that have been brought up from thirty feet down, although these fish, recognisable because of
their tags, are often recaptured, so clearly they recover. But goliath is a sight feeder of the surface layers and wouldn’t experience the same pressure drop on capture as a catfish or
stingray from the depths. Besides that, it has a closed swim bladder, which would give it an obviously ‘gassed up’ appearance if it had been brought from deep water – and the
buoyancy of this fish was okay.

I was mystified but, for want of any better idea, eased out into deeper water and held the fish near the bottom, where the water pressure would have been greater. But still its movements became
fainter. At this point I noticed some patches of discoloration on its head, like bruising. As a shoal of tiny fry gambolled around the dying beast, I concluded that, on one of its torpedo-like
runs, it must have swum into a rock. Until now I’d been having a running argument with Fred, who’d been insisting that I take the fish back to the village. Now I reluctantly conceded
that he would have his way.

At the village they were playing football on the sandbar behind our camp. But as I heaved the fish on to my shoulder, the game came to an abrupt end. In moments a cheerful mob, the chief at
their fore, surrounded me. Women held out their babies towards it and then withdrew them, giggling, for a reassuring cuddle, just as the open mouth was about to howl. The scene was incredible and
couldn’t be explained only by the fact that this fish would soon be a meal, a couple of pounds of meat per family. Everybody was reaching out to touch it – at first gentle pats, almost
affectionate, but then, after they’d taken it from me, heavy flat-handed blows. The reality about this fish, I now realised, is that despite the stories of mutilation and death, most people
here never see one. If they don’t regard it as a spirit, it is certainly a myth. They go to the river every day to wash, but their paths never cross; instead, it’s all about being in
the wrong place at the wrong time – or, in my case, the right time.

At that time, the
féticheur
’s charm had been in my breast pocket. And whatever I think, I have no way of knowing what would or wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t
been there. All I know is that, now that I felt I had the fish’s measure, I wanted to be on the water again, trying for an even bigger one. But for the film we needed just one ‘big
enough’ fish. Now we had to catch up with all the other stuff: the crane shots and reconstructions and travelling shots and pieces-to-camera and general landscapes, all of which set the
visual scene for the story. So that was the end of my fishing – and probably the end of my Congo story.

But I still can’t help wondering just how much bigger these fish might grow. Most river giants, sadly, are much thinner on the ground than they used to be even a few decades ago. And with
much-reduced numbers, the chances of those exceptional, wondrous, extra-large individuals of the old fishermen’s tales dwindle away to nothing. So the reality, or otherwise, of these beasts
remains unknowable.

Sometime after our film was broadcast in the United States, I received an e-mail from a man who grew up in the Congo, the son of a missionary doctor. He told me about the head of a goliath that
he once saw in a fisherman’s canoe in the Lubi River in East Kasai province, where the fish is known as
nsonga menu
(‘pointed teeth’), which was also the nickname of a
tribe who at that time were still cannibals and had the custom of filing their front teeth into triangular fangs. The width at the gill plates of the fish he saw was ten inches – one and a
half times the measurement I took from my fish – and would give a total body length of six feet. Using the known weight of my fish, I can calculate the weight of this fish (78 pounds ×
1.5 cubed) at over 200 pounds. It’s an intriguing corroboration of Dr Gillet’s lost six-footer. And the fisherman, of course, said he’d seen bigger.

But what’s even more intriguing is that, uniquely in the Congo – where dams and development, pollution and progress are still held at bay by its troubled human history – the
giants of yesteryear could still be there. Sitting in my comfortable armchair I consider this. Then I consider the reality of travelling in this region, particularly to its least accessible parts,
as well as the fact that I am now a quarter of a century older than I was when I first went there. And I conclude that, maybe, some things are destined to remain a secret.

But then again, a two hundred-pound mbenga . . . that would be something to see.

5

DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS

Far-fetched? But the non-fiction accounts, such as Teddy Roosevelt’s, are scarcely less graphic: ‘The rabid, furious snaps drive the teeth through flesh and bone. The head with its
short muzzle, staring malignant eyes, and gaping, cruelly armed jaws, is the embodiment of evil ferocity.’

Strong stuff indeed. And if you can’t believe a former president of the United States, who can you believe? His account, more than any other, is the one that established the
piranha’s bloody reputation in the outside world.

When I first went to the Amazon in 1993, my main objective was to catch an arapaima. But I was also curious to see the Amazon because the things I was hearing about it just didn’t add up.
One minute I’d be watching a documentary showing the place as an unspoiled Eden, with the cameraman tripping over jaguars and anacondas at every step, and then I’d read a newspaper that
said it was all burning down. Interestingly, the tributary that the twenty-sixth president explored, now renamed the Rio Roosevelt in his honour, was previously the ‘River of Doubt’. In
my mind, this name could describe the whole Amazon system.

I worked on Martin to come along on the three-month trip. Although I told him I wanted him for his stimulating company, I mainly needed the extra baggage allowance and another body to carry
stuff. Three weeks after our arrival in Brazil we dragged ourselves through thigh-deep mud to an open-sided, palm-thatched hut near a lake in the floodplain of the Rio Purus, one of the
Amazon’s big southern tributaries. The hut’s owner, Jose´, was a stocky fifty-something
ribeirinho
(mixed-race river dweller) with a ragged moustache whose semi-wild jungle
garden provided an erratic harvest of manioc, cashews, pineapples, and cupuaçu (similar to sweet furry potatoes hanging from trees), which he sold in the nearby town, a day’s travel
away in his ancient covered boat. Every day he walked for half an hour along a nearly invisible forest path to the lake, where he netted the day’s lunch, with leftovers for supper. His
existence was literally hand to mouth, and the deal we struck with him was that we would be tolerated for as long as we earned our keep. So Martin set to hoeing the manioc patch, plagued by clouds
of blood-sucking pium flies, and hefting sixty-pound loads of pineapples to the boat in hand-woven baskets hanging from a cord round his forehead, while I went fishing.