River Monsters (28 page)

Both Lake Iliamna and Lake Clark are connected to the sea, so one possibility is a marine animal that has wandered inland. To check this out, we flew over the shallowest part of the Kvichak
(pronounced Kwee-jack) River, an area known as the braids, where the river splits into numerous small channels. In many of these channels we could see the bottom, but others appeared to be six or
eight feet deep, which could potentially be enough water for an animal like a beluga whale.

Belugas are toothed whales, like orcas and sperm whales, and look rather like oversized Amazon pink dolphins, with a bulbous forehead and flexible neck but without the long beak. They grow more
than fifteen feet long with a weight of over three thousand pounds, which fits the bill almost perfectly in terms of size. What’s more, there is a well-known population nearby in Cook Inlet,
and they are known to move into estuaries in summer. Being air-breathing mammals, there’s no reason why they couldn’t swim into fresh water if they wanted. In fact, in 2006 a dead
eight-foot beluga was found nearly one thousand miles from the sea beside the Tanana River, a tributary of the Yukon River, near Fairbanks in central Alaska. As the biologist who identified it
said, nobody in their right mind would want to drive this far with a decomposing carcass in order to perpetrate a hoax. Instead, there’s speculation that it could have simply been following
its food: the salmon that run upriver to spawn. So seventy-five miles up the Kvichak to Lake Iliamna would be a breeze. But the idea that the Iliamna monster might be a beluga comes crashing down
as soon as we apply more scrutiny. Being an air-breather, the beluga would have to surface at regular intervals, and being brilliant white, it would be easily visible in the clear water – not
to mention its habit of making loud squeaks and whistles. Its colour is also at odds with witness statements, which also maintain that the tail movement is side to side, not up and down. So this
white whale is not the Moby Dick of this tale.

If bull sharks were this far north, they could easily get into the lake and remain hidden there. But the coastal seas here are too cold for them; the nearest bull sharks are off Baja California.
However, there is one shark species up here. Salmon sharks (
Lamna ditropis
), as the name implies, follow runs of salmon, sometimes very close inshore. This abundant food source enables them
to pack on the pounds, reaching over ten feet in length and weights over five hundred pounds. This fast-swimming, stocky-bodied shark is able to keep active in these subarctic waters by virtue of a
remarkable adaptation, which it shares with the related great white shark. Unlike most fish, it can keep its body temperature higher than that of the surrounding water. However, it lacks the bull
shark’s special ability to enter fresh water. So it has a cast-iron alibi. Another potential suspect is ruled out.

Flying over the lake one day, Glen pointed out a group of large animals below. Without anything to give a sense of scale, estimating their size was difficult, but I can confidently say the
bigger ones were around six feet long and close to three hundred pounds. Lake Iliamna is one of just a handful of freshwater lakes in the world with breeding colonies of seals (the best known is
Lake Baikal in Russia). The animals we saw were hauled out on a tiny island, and the total population is estimated at over two hundred, but it’s hard to imagine these giving rise to the
monster myth.

Running out of likely suspects, I decided to take a more indirect approach. A large animal needs an abundant food source to sustain it. Without this, any idea of a mythical monster is a
nonstarter. The Kvichak’s run of sockeye salmon (
Oncorhynchus nerka
) is reputedly the largest salmon run anywhere in the world, with over ten million fish returning every year to spawn
and die. Apart from anything else, this gave me the opportunity to catch my first salmon, the ‘king of fish’, after almost fifty years of chasing everything else in fresh water –
and this was something I was quite excited about. My background as an angler is decidedly ‘coarse’ rather than ‘game’. That is to say I am a maggot drowner, a plunker of
worms, a dirty-fingered mixer of stinky concoctions that I lob into the path of unsuspecting fish that stand no chance when presented with real food, if the most vocal adherents of fly-fishing are
to be believed. Conversely, fly-fishing is said to take extreme levels of skill because you are trying to deceive the fish with something that is inedible. This distinction takes us right to the
essence of ‘Fysshynge with an Angle’, as it used to be called in the fifteenth century before that special bent piece of metal became known as a hook. All angling is about putting
something with minimal food value into the water and pulling out a potential meal, a conversion that seems all the more miraculous when the bait has no food value at all – a trick that would
seem to require the highest levels of human guile to make it work. But, as with most things in life, other factors are seldom equal. ‘Game’ fish have the misfortune of being tasty to
eat so they don’t get the chance to wise up to the extent that non-tasty species do, which are returned to scrutinise a hook another day. At any rate, until now I had only heard and read
about the sublime difficulty of deceiving and landing salmon. Now was my opportunity to evaluate this for myself.

Flying over a hummocky landscape, we spotted a straw-coloured grizzly bear beside the river below, a good sign that the salmon were there, although we couldn’t see the fish themselves,
which can turn the water black at the peak of the run. We landed on a small windswept lake nearby and took a winding path to the river. The bear had gone when we arrived, but fresh paw prints were
a reminder to stay on our guard. We were only sixty-five miles from where, six years before, bears had killed and partially eaten the self-styled bear conservationist Timothy Treadwell, the subject
of Werner Herzog’s documentary
Grizzly Man
. So before we started fishing, Glen gave me and the crew a safety briefing. If a bear confronted us, we were to face it and hold our ground,
presenting the broad mass of our combined five bodies – in other words acting much like a rival bear would do: avoiding conflict by showing that we were bigger. If this didn’t work, we
were to back off slowly. But it seemed to be academic. There were no salmon-scooping bears anywhere to be seen, which was quite disappointing. There was only the river and patches of low shrubs
alongside.

The received wisdom about salmon is that they don’t feed in rivers. But the truth isn’t quite this clear-cut because anglers (of the ‘nonsporting’ variety, notably in
Ireland and Wales) catch them on prawns and worms. And they will of course take flies, although most salmon ‘flies’ resemble small tropical fish more than insects. Curiosity is often
given as the reason: what the heck is that shiny red and yellow thing? But the only reason most fish will check something out is to see if it is edible, so why would a nonfeeding fish be curious?
With salmon, a fly or spinner or spoon, if presented close enough, must trigger the remnants of a feeding reflex. But this is not so with the sockeye, which is unique among the eight species of
salmon (seven Pacific and one Atlantic) in not taking flies. This is put down to the fact that, when at sea, it is less predatory than other salmon, sucking up crustaceans rather than striking
small fish. So what was I doing setting up a fly rod? Glen explained that there is a way around this difficulty, and the key lies in the sheer number of fish.

We had waded out to a small gravel patch at the head of an island, and every few minutes a pod of dark shapes pushed upstream alongside us, about two rod-lengths out in a couple of feet of
water. Glen gave me a small streamer fly to tie on and then a piece of split-shot. ‘Put that about four feet up your line, then cast upstream,’ he instructed.

I took some time to get the hang of it. Fly-casting with a piece of lead on the line is not very effective or elegant, especially with a stiff downriver wind. I settled on shooting the line out
with a backhand flip, watching the lead plop into the water just a few feet out. But that was all the distance I needed. After a bit of practice and adjusting the weight, I would see the fly and
lead hit the water four feet apart and then feel the lead ticking along the gravel bottom. The idea is for the line between fly and lead to sweep downstream a few inches off the bottom and
intercept the fish coming up. A salmon, opening its mouth to breathe, feels the line and bolts, thereby sliding itself down the line to the hook. Mostly the fish will be hooked near the angle of
the jaw, but the point will have penetrated from the outside, although sometimes it will catch inside the mouth, giving the impression, probably incorrect, that the salmon actually took the
fly.

A bear had appeared a little way upstream from where we had crossed. Peeping out from the low bushes, it peered down into the undercut margins, moving with the utmost stealth. No bait on his
fish hooks, I reflected, but deadly all the same, impaling the flank of his surprised prey. Shortly another bear materialised, further upriver. This one was using different tactics, charging into
shallows and flailing the water with his hooks. After a couple of attempts, a fish was kicking in his jaws. Then another bear appeared, working the opposite bank adjacent to us. This one was moving
upstream with its snout and eyes scoping underwater, but, despite making a few lunges, it didn’t catch anything.

Eventually the time came to try my method. After casting ahead of a couple of pods without making any contact, I finally felt the line check and lifted the rod, but the fish rolled to flash its
flank and the fly skittered up to the surface. One more fish managed to bump off the hook, but the next time there was a satisfying weight on the line as a red shape tore off down-current. On the
light eight-pound leader I was worried I wouldn’t be able to bring it back upstream, and the water cut too deeply alongside the island for me to follow. But at length I managed to bring the
fish up the quieter water at the side into a small slack at the head of the island.

This was a momentous catch for me – and on camera too! But a camera lens, for all that it can magnify and sharpen physical detail, diminishes the emotional dimension and renders it flat in
every sense. All that the viewers see, in the words of the first director I worked with, Gavin Searle, is ‘just a bloke stood there with a bent rod’. Even the appearance of a large
fish, stripped of its significance, will leave the viewer cold – mere ‘fish porn’ as it has been called. To retain the emotional component, you must open a window to the
angler’s soul, and the only way to do this, within the limits of technology, is through words: narration in the heat of the moment. But fishing is experienced and performed through the
brain’s right hemisphere, a domain of patterns and colours and abstract feelings where words don’t exist. Finding and ordering words in retrospect is one thing, but if you can find and
compose anything at the time, what comes out is a chaotic, impressionistic, abstract tumble – which actually serves the purpose perfectly.

These are the moments when the world shrinks to a single frail thread stretched between two opposing wills. So the thing that appeared next to the fish, a pole-camera that James or maybe Alex
wielded, was an unwelcome intrusion but one that I have learned to live with. Duncan the cameraman was also next to me in the water, pointing the main camera down at the fish to show it from my
point of view. And what a shocking sight it was: no bright bar of silver but instead a green-headed, hump-backed apparition whose deep red flanks told the story of its improbable life. The pigment
first acquired from gobbling down crustaceans in the distant ocean and then concentrated in its fatty tissues was now surfacing in the leathery skin as those fat deposits burned. Some say that this
breeding livery intimidates rivals, along with the hooked lower jaw and curved not-for-feeding teeth of this aquatic Quasimodo. Behind the angle of the jaw, a pugnacious eye stared back at me. The
sockeye’s name has nothing to do with this but rather is an anglicisation of
suk-kegh
, its name in the Native American Salish language, which means red fish. And its redness is truly
startling, even more so than that other ‘red fish’, the Amazon arapaima.

A movement in my peripheral vision to my left made me reflexively turn my head. A brown shape had come out of the bushes on the island and was lumbering down the bank towards us. It was just ten
feet away. The others heard my squawk and we splashed out of the water and regrouped to face it. But the bear wasn’t concerned about us. This fish, displaying itself at the surface so
tantalisingly, so unlike its furtive fellows, had captivated its attention as well. Not wanting a bear on my line, I pointed the rod at the fish, wound down tight, and took a couple of steps back
to snap the line. But this had run the fish aground, and it didn’t have time to right itself and swim away before the bear was upon it.

Apparently satisfied, the bear disappeared back into the bushes. But almost immediately it was back. This time we had no protection payment to give it, and it kept coming.

‘You guys plug your ears,’ said Glen, as he put a .50-calibre round in the water beside it. That did the trick, but it was time to go. The bear was young and it needed to learn that
not being wary of humans was not going to be a good idea in the long run. Nonetheless, I’d seen enough. The presence of the bears and their monstrous size – up to 1,400 pounds for a
mature male – was evidence enough of the fecundity of this water. The food chain here stretches out to the far Pacific, a conveyor belt of nutrients that fertilises these otherwise barren
mountains: not only the seasonal glut of adult salmon and their corpses, but their eggs and the young that swarm in these waters before descending to the sea. On another occasion I went by boat to
a river mouth at the eastern end of Lake Iliamna, and the sonar screen was so solid with fish that the beam couldn’t see through them to find the bottom. Seeing this, I thought about the
solid, muscular tambaqui fish of the Amazon, which gorge on rubber seeds during the annual flood and then eat nothing for half the year. Although it’s an alien concept to modern humans,
alternating feast and famine is common in nature and some animals do very well on this regime. With the bears here demonstrating this point so visibly, it’s hard to rule out a large creature
doing the same invisibly, under the waters of Lake Iliamna.