River Monsters (16 page)

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 grey 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 is made up of countless close-packed short points and has 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 non-biting
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.

So how big do piraiba really grow? I met up with Julio Cavalcante, the former owner of a fishing tackle shop in Manaus, who landed a 211-pounder after a two-hour battle in the Rio Madeira. But
he reckons there are bigger ones in the famous ‘meeting of the waters’, where the tea-black Rio Negro meets the brown water of the Amazon and they run alongside each other, scarcely
mixing for four miles. He told me he nearly died here once when his line, with a hooked fish on the end, wrapped around him and started to pull him in. He avoided going overboard by cutting the
line with his knife. In fact he had vowed never to fish the place again – until we persuaded him to take us there.

He greeted me with a conspiratorial smile and a sealed metal paint tin. His special bait, he said. Julio is a firm believer that catfish find their food by smell, and he works on that principle
to make sure they find his bait. What this meant, when I opened the tin and the layers of plastic bags inside, was that, on encountering his special formula, I could hardly breathe. He’d
wrapped each hook in the guts of eight chickens and then left this to bake in the equatorial sun for three days. I fished these baits thirty feet down, suspended under a five-gallon drum, in
possibly two hundred feet of water, into and through the night, as riverboats criss-crossed the mile-wide river and storm-clouds piled up over the far bank. But nothing took.

From conversations with other fishermen, it emerges that piraiba of any size have become very scarce in recent years. They used to catch them with drifting juglines (baits set under a large
float), but that doesn’t get results any longer. Now they tend to be caught, infrequently, on multihook longlines, stretched between the bank and a rock on the bottom. I recall something I
saw when travelling on a small boat up the Rio Purus at the end of my first Amazon trip. Ona beach up ahead, a man looking like an Indian
sadhu
– straggling hair, sun-blackened skin,
something like a loincloth around his middle – was doing a strange dance. Again and again he staggered forward then shuffled unsteadily backwards in a rhythm that had a certain familiarity.
Then, as we passed – one hundred yards wide of him so as not to ground on the shallows – a grey fish a yard and a half long slid kicking onto the sand. As this tableau shrank to a speck
behind us, I saw a flash as a machete blade reflected the early morning sun. But since then I’ve not seen any piraiba caught from the Purus, which tallies with the fact that it’s one of
the most heavily fished Amazon tributaries. But I have seen a couple jump there, which piraiba are known to do occasionally, although the reason is not known. This is probably what the
‘lunging’ fish that Roosevelt reported was doing. The fishermen who responded to this perceived attack with their machetes just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The picture on the Rio Araguaia is slightly better, and this is where I finally achieved my ambition of hooking one of these rare predators. But I made a mistake. As the fish tore off, I skinned
my thumb in my efforts to bring it to a halt. When we’d drifted down on top of it, something didn’t feel right. The fish would pull out a few yards, and I’d wrestle some back, but
the line stayed in the same position, and my connection to the fish didn’t feel direct. The line had gone round something, but it didn’t feel like a tree branch.
‘
Espinhel
,’ said Wilson, my boatman. The fish had gone under the main rope of a longline, which shouldn’t have been there. So I lost the fish, which Wilson, who once caught
a seven-foot monster, estimated at over two hundred pounds. I later learned that you don’t have to hang on quite so hard on the first run as long as you’ve got plenty of line and a
quick-release knot to your anchor buoy or mooring tree. Piraiba are renowned for their great strength, but they mainly pull down and try to keep in the main river channel. They will not make for
bank-side snags, even though they could easily reach them if they tried. Some would call this stupid; others say it’s fighting clean. Even staying in open water, there are stories of anglers
giving up and cutting the line after a fish has exhausted all three or four boat occupants over the course of several hours. With my tactics perfected, I’ve since caught a couple of piraiba
with Wilson, weighing close to a hundred pounds, but I can’t say that’s compensated for the lost fish . . .

To try to catch a piraiba for television, I went to the Rio Teles Pires. A decade before, a fish had been caught here that needed four people to lift it. To get to the river, I had the
second-scariest light-plane flight of my life with cameraman James Bickersteth as the weather closed in around us and obscured the jungle airstrip. Twice the pilot circled away while frowning at
his watch, the fuel gauges, and the fading daylight. I told him that if we had to go back that was okay, although there were storms behind us now too. On our fourth pass, the weather ahead looked
unchanged, but I heard a voice mutter, ‘Right, let’s try and get this thing down.’ As we banked to start our descent towards the rocky pinnacles below, the wind landed a punch
that almost turned my stomach inside out. A couple of minutes later, as we bumped and yawed, the trees rose up on either side and we slid into contact with a blur of red mud. No sooner had we come
to a stop than the pilot jumped out and lit a cigarette. Later I asked James what was going through his head. He looked at me and said quietly, ‘I had made my peace.’

But such isolation has its benefits. Commercial fishermen can’t get in by land or water thanks to hostile terrain and unnavigable rapids. At a deep roiling pool below a fall, with the bait
on the edge of the main current, something almost tore the rod out of the holder in the boat’s gunwale. Once I’d managed to transfer the rod to the padded rest between my thighs and
clip the shoulder harness to the reel, I felt more in control. However, even though I was now putting my back into it with over-the-top one hundred–pound monofilament, the fish refused to
come off the bottom. From its behaviour, I judged it was clearly a big piraiba, so I told myself to stay calm and not rush things but instead maintain a constant pressure without wearing myself
out. As the fight wore on, I sensed the fish starting to tire, and, after a while, it was underneath the boat. As it rose a bit more I strained for my first glimpse, and what I saw when it broke
the surface was a shock. This was not a piraiba at all. The fish before me was a pirarara, which roughly translates as ‘parrot fish’ because it incorporates the word arara, the
indigenous name for the vividly coloured macaw. In English it’s the red-tailed catfish (
Phractocephalus hemiliopterus
), and it’s every bit as unmistakable as its avian
counterpart. Besides its tail, its main feature is its great head, which makes up nearly one-third of its body. Its body markings are also very distinct, with a sharp delineation between its dark
back, the colour of an old leather jacket, and its bright off-white belly. They are also very vocal, making a rhythmic bellowing sound when lifted from the water, the result of air being expelled
through the gill-flaps. But what shocked me about this fish was its size. I’d caught many red-tails before, most of them around twenty pounds, several around thirty, and the biggest between
fifty and sixty. But this dwarfed them all, so we put it in the sling and watched the needle on the scales swing round to eighty pounds, ample compensation for catching the ‘wrong’
species.

I also caught a few jaú, to sixty pounds, similar in shape to pirarara but dark greeny-brown all over, smoother skinned, and with a liking for rocks – so much so that I caught a
forty-pounder in some crazy rapids where nothing had any right to survive.

But piraiba are not so straightforward. Typically, you’ve got to position your bait at long range in strong flow on heavy tackle but in a sensitive manner. This is not always easy. Then
it’s about being in the right place at the right time. More often than not, nothing comes along. But the fishing gods saw fit to smile on me. In two weeks I intercepted four. The biggest
turned out to be the first, hooked in a wide, deep stretch near a small Indian settlement. Immediately it headed for the middle of the river, announcing its identity as clearly as could be. I was
fishing a 150-pound braided line with several yards of thick 100-pound monofilament on the business end before the wire leader to give a combination of easy fishability with some abrasion
resistance, because there were unseen boulders scattered on the bottom here. Getting the fish off the bottom took a long time, and then it resisted every inch of the way until I finally saw its
streamlined body about to break the surface. Then it was alongside the boat, rolling on to its side, and I was able to grab it by its thick pectoral spines and haul it into the boat. As I did so,
it appeared to growl at me, but in fact it was belching air from its expanded swim bladder. Weighing in at 72 pounds and measuring five feet long, it was a big, powerful fish, certainly big enough
for our film. But as piraiba go, this was a tiny one. And looking at this fish, with that in mind, I found I couldn’t write off as fantasy or hallucination those stories of big piraiba taking
people down.