River Monsters (3 page)

My photograph of that fish, draped over my shoulder with its mouth threatening to engulf the camera, appeared in a British national newspaper, where it was seen by a TV producer in London. He
immediately set about pitching the idea of a documentary about this spectacular species, and after two years, during which I returned to the Amazon at my own expense to shoot DIY footage for a demo
tape, we were commissioned to make a five-part series.
Jungle Hooks
, filmed and first screened in 2002, has since gone down in history for showing the first capture on TV of a giant (two
hundred – pound) arapaima – and the unscripted crashing of a single-engined plane into the Amazon forest.

But television is a fickle business. Our proposals for a follow-up series (one of them about alligator gar in the US Deep South) were rejected. I tried to be philosophical about this, knowing
that the decision often comes down to budget and is not necessarily a judgement on the merit of the idea. In fact, without my own self-funded research and helpful friends in the Amazon,
Jungle
Hooks
would never have been made.

Then in 2005 I received a phone call. My friend Gavin Searle, who had filmed and directed me in the Amazon, was having another existential crisis. As usual he was questioning why somebody with a
master’s degree in anthropology had just crawled out of yet another reality TV show. ‘I need a break, Jezzer,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we go to India? You take your rods
and I’ll take a camera. Maybe we can cut something together when we get back and sell it to cover our costs.’

I was at a loose end myself, scratching around for odd bits of proofreading and copy-editing, but this was something we could do on a shoestring. Even so, the idea of selling a programme made on
spec relied heavily on wishful thinking. So we phoned the commissioning editor of
Jungle Hooks
at Discovery Europe for some guidance. The response was not what we expected: an immediate
summons to London and a commission to make a five-part series – not because they particularly wanted a series about India but because it was time for another
Jungle Hooks
.

But this stroke of good fortune also made life more complicated. We had to form our own production company and get an official filming permit. This was straightforward in theory, but six weeks
later we had no reply to our application. Fishing in India is very seasonal, and the Himalayan snow melt was fast approaching, followed by the monsoon, which would wash away all of our plans. But
our paperwork had vanished into a bureaucratic black hole. Finally, in desperation, we handed a large sum to a ‘fixer’ based in Delhi, and submitted a new application. Our permission
returned after a week. At the time of writing, our original submission remains buried in somebody’s in-tray. It has been there for more than five years and counting . . .

We arrived at the Kali River, a grey snow-fed tributary of the Ganges, where it briefly forms the border between India and Nepal, two months later than we’d intended. Our target was the
golden Himalayan mahseer (
Tor putitora
), a fish said to grow to two hundred pounds, although these days a fifty-pounder is a rarity. Traditionally they are targeted during their annual
breeding run on their way up to the headwaters as the monsoon waters rise, and then on their hungry return, with river junctions being the most productive spots. But intercepting the migration is a
hit-and-miss affair and can cause offence to some local people, who consider river confluences to be sacred.

From Delhi we took the overnight train north to where the flat Gangetic plain abruptly ends and the mountains begin. Then we spent a day in a jeep on twisting roads cut into rock, contemplating
the sickening drops just feet from our wheels and the crumpled skeletons of buses far below. When the road ended, we shouldered our bags and set off downriver on foot along a path scratched into
the mountainside. Soon I was in a lather of sweat, cursing the straps that cut into my shoulders and the long unwieldy rod container that is my constant burden. But the views of the river were
breathtaking. I lost myself in the slow rhythm of my footsteps until eventually the path dropped down and approached a pool. The next thing I knew, after emerging breathless from some shrubs, I was
looking up at a Mayan pyramid – huge stone steps climbing high into the air. It took a moment to work out what this was: a low-angle view of terraced fields, with only their stone-built
retaining walls visible.

After dumping our kit in a stone hut, I clambered over a field of boulders to the river, anxious to fish before dark. At the tail of the pool the water funnelled into a fast chute alongside the
far bank, which drove a large, slow back eddy on the near side. Approaching low and quiet, so as not to disturb anything lying close in, I selected a six-inch wooden plug, painted in a lifelike
fish-scale pattern, and cast upriver (but down the countercurrent) to the wedge of slack at the edge of the pool’s outflow. Engaging the reel, I started to retrieve, with the lure’s
vibrations making the rod-tip bounce as its diving vane took it under. The next casts were progressively closer to the far bank, falling just short of the ridge of spiky waves where fast and slow
water met, which in some indefinable way was beckoning me. Drawing a deep breath, I loaded up the back-cast, flinging the lure with all my might, and landed it in the target area. After just a
couple of turns, the line caught on something solid, which then moved: a gleaming eight-pound mahseer – long, rubbery-mouthed, with scales like golden pennies. Maybe we weren’t too late
after all.

But nothing else followed. It was as if the river had been emptied of fish. As fishless day followed fishless day, we started to despair of getting enough material to make even one half-hour
programme, never mind five. If this had been merely the personal jaunt we had originally planned, we could have just shrugged our shoulders. But the stakes were now much higher. The total absence
of anything on my line forced us to dig ever deeper for other, peripheral material. We filmed inch-long snow trout fry in a rock pool. I discoursed on the gentleman anglers from the days when India
was part of the British Empire. Gavin made me grab a snake that was lying on riverside boulders on the pretext that it could have been a fish-eating species. So when our guide Vinay said something
about the ‘Dharma Ghat man-eater’, our ears pricked up.

Somebody had been pulled under the water, he told us, a couple of miles downstream from our camp. People said it was the work of the
soos
. Downstream, in the Indian plains, a
soos
is a Ganges river dolphin (
Platanista gangetica
), a creature very similar to the Amazon pink dolphin, apart from its colour, which is grey-brown. From my travels I knew that river dolphins
aren’t always the cuddly creatures of popular imagination. In the Amazon they bite paddles smacked against the surface to shoo them away from nets and grab the keels of canoes, which they
then rock furiously in a gesture of defiance. Carnivorous hunters, they locate prey by sonar and then clamp it in a multi-toothed beak. Larger prey is given a fatal ramming first. But their normal
diet is fish, either swallowed whole or torn apart. A human would not normally be on the menu, although at eight feet long and three hundred pounds, a Gangetic dolphin would be more than capable of
grabbing a swimmer’s leg and pulling him under if it wanted to. But dolphins aren’t found this far upriver. Because they are air-breathers, you would see them if they were here. So this
soos
is not a dolphin.

But they said it makes a sound like a dolphin. When it opens its mouth, the inrush of water sucks its victim down. This, though, could just be a description of the river. Moving water can exert
its own fatal suction. Rocks create back eddies, which accelerate into whirlpools. Current lines move in unpredictable directions and at variable speeds. Halfway down our camp pool was a large
rock, and sometimes the water flowed past it smoothly and quietly; but then, seemingly at random, it would start to rip and spin. This rock has a ledge just under the surface, where it’s
possible to stand with the water halfway to your knees. It looks an obvious place to wash dishes or bathe. But take one step further, and you’re in thirty feet of water. A little further out
the river looks as if it’s boiling, with huge upwellings rolling the surface layers – a reminder that water spins in three dimensions: not just round and round, but up and down too. In
this depth of water, a person caught in one of the down-currents would stay on the bottom, with eardrums ruptured and lungs full of water. Perhaps it’s no accident that the Kali River is
named after the Hindu goddess of death and destruction. Perhaps the perpetrator was the water itself, with no intermediary in the form of an underwater creature.

The only problem with this reasoning is that the Dharma Ghat victim was taken in shallow, slack water at the edge of the pool. The same went for a young man who disappeared at the Roll Ghat
ferry crossing a couple of miles upriver. If this was elsewhere in India, a likely culprit would be a mugger crocodile (
Crocodylus palustris
). But the river here is at an elevation of nearly
1,400 feet and the water is too cold for them. And again, if they were here you’d see them hauled up on land warming their cold blood. India’s other crocodile, the narrow-jawed,
fish-eating gharial (
Gavialis gangeticus
), is likewise not found at this elevation. And the same goes for pythons.

Casting the net wider, could the killer be a bull shark? Unknown to most people, this species, which normally lurks in warm and temperate coastal seas, has the disturbing habit of entering
rivers and sometimes wandering a long way up them, something most sea fish are unable to do. Dharma Ghat is a thousand miles from the sea, but bull sharks have been reported in the Mississippi
above St. Louis and more than two thousand miles up the Amazon. And the species is known to swim the Ganges. If it were simply a matter of distance, we would have to consider a bull shark a
possible suspect. But this is another animal that doesn’t venture into the mountains, being restricted to warm water. And although bull sharks are known to navigate small rapids in the Rio
San Juan in Nicaragua, the rapids it would have to scale to get here are far bigger, not to mention the man-made barrier at Tanakpur, a hydro electric and irrigation dam, which effectively puts an
end to this line of speculation.

Faced with events that seem to have no natural cause, it would perhaps be understandable if some people invoked the supernatural. Maybe the forces at work are not simply the product of gravity
acting on water but also the earthly manifestations of a divine will. In the Ganges, known to Hindus as ‘mother Ganga’, there is a custom of ritual bathing, to wash away sins and hasten
the end of the mortal cycle of death and earthly rebirth. But on this stretch of the Kali, it is noticeable that nobody bathes in the river. This fact might just be due to the cold water, which
comes from glaciers in the high Himalayas, but it might be something else. Even the buffaloes, which people keep to plough their terraced fields and that normally need no persuasion to wallow in
water, have to be driven into the pools’ shallower margins with blows to their thick hides.

Then we met Man Singh. One day, two years before, he had heard his young granddaughter screaming from the head of the pool. When he got there, he saw a huge underwater creature dragging his
prize buffalo into the water. But he’d seen this animal before and knew what it was. He said it was a goonch.

When I heard this word, a twenty-year-old memory surfaced. It was my first visit to India, and I was on the West Ramganga River in the Himalayan foothills. I was fishing with a bright silver
spoon in a rapid, and my lure had just splashed down near the far bank when something took it with a sickening lunge and carried it away downstream. Then, just as suddenly, the line was dead.
Either it had swum round a sunken snag or it wasn’t playing by the rules and had just decided to sink to the bottom where my eleven-pound line would make no impression on it. So, abandoning
the rules myself, I heaved a rock a little upstream of the point where the line entered the water. On the fourth or fifth throw, it was on the move again, and I stumbled downstream after it, trying
to draw level and apply pressure from the side. Then it went to ground again, and this time it felt different. Here there were large branches washed up on the banks, and I visualised others on the
riverbed, with my line wrapped around one of them. This time the boulders didn’t work, so in desperation I laid the rod down and kicked off my shoes in preparation for following the line
down, although there was no way I’d keep my footing once the water was past my knees. It was more of a gesture than a realistic plan.

A scraping sound caught my attention, and I saw my rod moving towards the water. Thinking it was only the current, I picked it up and immediately felt the fish, which was coming towards me now.
The memory is then a bit blurred. I know for sure that I didn’t land it by grabbing the jaw, as the teeth were unlike anything I’d ever seen. Then there were the tentacles festooning
its scaleless body, and its tiny eyes. At four feet, eight inches long (including tail tentacles) and weighing about thirty pounds, it was the largest fish I’d ever caught. But there was
something repellent about it, even though it would be another two decades before I’d hear this species (
Bagarius yarellii
) stand accused of being a man-eater.

Since then I’d seen pictures of goonch in the water that could have weighed two hundred pounds. But do they grow big enough to take a person? This seemed to be the ultimate tall tale
– until I thought about it. When somebody is in the water, with nothing to hold on to, it’s possible to pull them under using very little force. As for a fish eating someone, it’s
not as far-fetched as it first sounds because some fish can swallow whole prey almost the same size as themselves. Going by the relative size of its mouth, I reckoned a goonch would need to be nine
or ten feet long to swallow a small adult human. But some freshwater fish can grow this big. Earlier that same year, an eight foot, ten inch Mekong giant catfish, weighing 646 pounds, had been
netted in Thailand – the largest freshwater fish to be fully authenticated.