River Monsters (2 page)

My sighting of the Lago Grande monster and subsequent proving of its existence is also why I have more time than most for other unlikely tales. Now if somebody tells me they have seen a giant
animal lurking in the water, I don’t automatically dismiss it because there is no photograph. Native fishermen don’t carry cameras. Nor do I swallow it without question, however. Such
stories need to be subjected to scientific scrutiny. And for all the exaggeration and mutation that can arise in the retelling, some fishermen’s tales do contain nuggets of shocking
truth.

There’s also some hard science on this side of the argument. Unlike land animals, aquatic creatures have their bodies supported by water so they are not subject to gravity as a factor that
limits growth. This means that if conditions are right, they can keep on growing throughout their lives – so-called ‘indeterminate growth’. A land animal, however, that kept
growing after reaching maturity would start to have trouble moving from place to place and, hence, finding food. This is gravity putting the brakes on growth. Every terrestrial or airborne body
design has its optimum maximum size. But it’s a very different picture for ‘weightless’ fish, which occasionally throw up giant freaks.

With fish, it’s all about food. If there’s a lot available and it doesn’t cost too much energy to get it – disputing with competitors and watching one’s back
against predators – a mature fish will have a big energy surplus. Some of this energy will go towards breeding, the production of large quantities (normally) of eggs and sperm, but some will
go towards further growth, which brings the advantages of fewer predators and a bigger mouth, for feeding on even more food. . . .

A dramatic example of this principle at work is what has happened to the size of carp in English lakes over the last forty years. In most waters where they were found, the biggest individuals
used to grow to about twenty pounds; now they commonly reach thirty pounds or even much more. The rod-caught record has leapt from a longstanding forty-four pounds to nearly seventy pounds, an
impossible monster for any level-headed angler of the 1970s. This can largely be attributed to the vast quantities of high-protein bait, similar to bodybuilders’ food supplement, that carp
anglers have been shovelling into the water. Compared to tiny grubs and larvae hiding in the gravel or silt, these highly visible balls of food represent a huge energy intake for very little
effort, and the carp duly keep growing and growing, with some individuals reaching sizes previously unheard of. So when a freak fish, much larger than those seen normally, is reported from the
wild, what appears not to make sense logically might be perfectly possible biologically.

But then we’re back to the question of proof, which is another matter. Fish can be very hard to find and even harder to examine closely. And what is surprising until you think about it is
that this is truer in fresh water than it is in the sea. Rivers and lakes make up a tiny fraction (0.01 per cent) of the world’s water, yet we know less about what lives here than in the
distant oceans. The reason for this is simple. Seawater is clear: we can see into it. But drop a cameraman into most rivers or lakes, and he won’t see or film a thing. Fresh water is a better
place to hide. And in the absence of pictures, our preferred form of hard evidence, we’re back where we started: with fishermen’s tales – which leads to one other way of
discovering what’s down there.

Casting a line into the water is like asking a question. Something could be right underneath you, but you can’t see it – it’s there but not there. And sometimes only a line
will make it real, despite the odds against this happening being very long. After hanging limp and lifeless – maybe for hours or days or weeks or years – it will twitch and run, and the
cane or carbon-fibre in your hands will bend like a divining rod. Then, if your gear and nerves are sound, you will bring something out into the light, seemingly from nowhere, from another
dimension. When this happens, it has an element of magic to it, like pulling a rabbit from a hat.

This book is a series of such investigations into the murky world of fishermen’s tales. The tales are of river monsters that are frighteningly large or dangerous – or both. Fish that
swallow men whole, others that eat them from within, and others that pack a killer punch. And the truth, though elusive and sometimes complex, is often every bit as unbelievable as the myth.

2

KALI’S ACCOMPLICE

The river is a roar in my ears as the unseen creature starts to drag me, step by stumbling step, towards the murderous water at the tail of the pool, and the moment when I can
go no further on land. This is the fish I have been hunting for three years – and the archetypal monster I have been after all my life. But such is its power, and the weight of monsoon water
on top of it, that my desire to capture it with a line now seems like madness.

I want to stop time, to put off the moment, but the whirlpool in front of me continues to turn relentlessly clockwise between the left-to-right surge along the far bank and the countercurrent at
my feet. This wheeling back eddy, spun from the main flow by a bulge in the black rock opposite, was my secret weapon, my means of evening the odds in what would otherwise be an impossible
situation. And until a few moments ago, my plan was working. I’d managed to confuse the fish enough to bring it into the narrow strip where the river runs backwards, where the weight of the
water was working with me, not against me. But now the fish seems to have worked out where I am and what I’m trying to do, and it has turned back into the main flow and is heading exactly
where I don’t want it to go. If it reaches the outlet, there will be no holding it. And with this side of the riverbank transforming from a boulder beach into sheer cliff and mountainside
rearing hundreds of feet high, there will be no following it either.

I picture the fish in the boiling depths, shouldering its way through the lightless water – the great broad head filled with teeth and the thick muscular body trailing tentacles from every
fin. Such is its appalling momentum through water that would grind a person to pieces that I can already taste the sickness and despair that will flood through me when the line cracks like a rifle
shot and the rod springs back lifeless in my hands.

Then where will my investigation be? This story of a man-eating fish in fresh water, hundreds of miles up a rocky river, will remain just a fishermen’s tale. Although the biology adds up,
I need hard proof, otherwise the outside world will continue to dismiss this tale as the colourful fantasy of illiterate peasants. And I’ll be just another poor, credulous soul who swallows
anything he’s told. A broken line will convince nobody.

The fish skirts a small slack at the tail of the pool, just before the exit funnel. This is my last chance. I clamp down on the reel as hard as I dare, trying to heave it in here. The rod creaks
in pain, its Kevlar and carbon-fibre sinews surely about to transform into splinters. But I’ve edged the fish off its course. The line sings a high, tinny note as a tail like a black flag
breaks the surface: it’s huge with two pointed lobes – definitely a monstrous goonch. And then it’s gone, and the line is being torn away, faster and faster. The moment has
come.

As I rip off my radio-microphone, a voice behind the camera yells at me not to do it, but James keeps filming. My privileged role as world-travelling TV presenter is a Faustian pact. In moments
like these, my soul is not my own but instead laid bare for millions to see. I can’t just shrug and later mourn in private the one that got away. I’ve got to do whatever it takes.

Even in the knee-high margins, the water almost knocks me over. With the rod held high, I launch myself, pulling with my other arm and kicking with both legs. Immediately I regret my decision.
The river seems to have accelerated, turning the far bank into a blur. But I can’t turn back because there’s now sheer rock behind me. With a start of horror I realise I’m now in
the strip of water that falling boulders, dislodged from the cliff above, regularly bomb. Even the small buzzing fragments hit with the impact of high-velocity shrapnel. An irrational voice tells
me that my struggles might call down a fatal rain on top of me.

Then I remember the fish. From this perspective, the accounts of people dragged under take on a reality more vivid than ever. I mustn’t be swept down over its position – wherever
that now is. But I’m tiring with every breath. The water clutches at me, like a malevolent living thing, and a black fear supplants my original motivation for this act of folly, driving my
leaden limbs towards the distant shore.

Pinpointing exactly where this story starts is difficult, but with hindsight I see a slow inevitability reaching right back to the moment I caught my first fish, aged eight or
nine, from the River Stour in southeast England. The river ran through the village where I grew up, and beyond its mirrored surface I discovered a secret world, populated with mysterious
inhabitants that few people saw. Over the years its winding course led me ever further over the fields, always wanting to see what was around the next bend.

In my above-surface life I was drawn to study zoology, and later to teach it, but I found the emphasis on theory suffocating and, as a result, wandered lost for several years, supporting myself
with a variety of odd jobs, from building-site labourer to farmhand to motorbike dispatch rider in London. Meanwhile my interest in fishing was waning. Britain has lots of people and not much
water, and by my mid-twenties that water had become crowded with other enthusiasts. Fishing no longer satisfied my craving for mystery and the unknown, so I hung up my rods.

But the chance discovery of a magazine article about a fish in India (the mahseer, a giant golden-scaled carp that lives in thunderous rocky rivers) changed all that. In March 1982, at the age
of twenty-five, I dusted down a couple of rods, packed them inside a length of drainpipe, and boarded an Ariana Afghan DC10 to Delhi. I had just £200 concealed under my clothes and scarcely a
clue as to how I was going to survive the next three months. But not having the means to spend my way out of trouble made me learn quickly. It was the start of a new addiction: to the amplified and
compressed ups and downs of travelling alone through an unfamiliar landscape, which energises to the same extent as it drains. Then there were the fish, mahseer and others, which in this context
appeared hyper-real, even more wondrous than the shiny creatures of my childhood.

On my return home, having studied some instructional books about journalistic writing, I wrote a couple of articles about my experiences and sold them to a fishing magazine. That was a
revelation. Despite later rejections, I realised that here was a possible way to make some kind of living from my interest.

So I started digging for information about other exotic river fish. Over the next ten years I made five more expeditions, each between two and five months: to Thailand, where my hunt for the
Mekong giant catfish (
Pangasianodon gigas
) got me arrested for spying; to India again, where I caught a monstrous southern mahseer (
Hypselobarbus mussullah
) of ninety-two pounds; and
three times to the Congo rainforest in search of the goliath tigerfish.

Then, after co-writing and self-publishing
Somewhere Down the Crazy River
about travels in India and Central Africa, I made my first expedition to the Amazon in 1993, on the trail of the
arapaima, the mythic fifteen-foot air-breather. After my experiences in the Congo, which included partial blinding from malaria, I thought this would be a breeze, but the difficulty of this new
mission exceeded all expectations. For six years the course of my investigation twisted and turned through the many layers, both real and mythological, of this bewildering region before delivering
me at the centre of the maze, where the armour-plated giant revealed itself.