River Monsters (44 page)

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Authors: Jeremy Wade

BOOK: River Monsters

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4.
A FIFTY-EIGHTPOUND MAHSEER
, which dragged me down rapids on the Kaveri River in South India on my thirtieth birthday. Local handline fishermen have been nearly
drowned.

5.
IN ZAIRE
(now Democratic Republic of Congo) in 1985, I travelled on one of the legendary giant riverboats – with two thousand other passengers, uncounted stowaways
and secret policemen, and trussed live crocodiles.

6.
ZAIRE VILLAGE CHILDREN
show me a standard-issue, striped (not goliath) tigerfish. Its feared larger cousin, they told me, can almost bite a person in half.

7.
PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CONGO
, 1990. When I took this picture I was incubating a near-fatal dose of malaria.

8.
BATTLING WITH SOMETHING
that grabbed a ten-inch piranha. Something about that compact eruption tells me it’s not made by a normal fish.

9.
FIRST AMAZON EXPEDITION
, 1993. Fishing from the island on Lago Grande. Plank-built canoes are precarious in bad weather.

10.
MY FIRST TEACHER
of Amazon jungle-craft. Hard-as-nails José fishing with gillnets on Lago Grande.

11.
BECAUSE OF THEIR GREAT WEIGHT
, fishermen butcher arapaima at the lakeside. Mostly you just see their huge, kipperlike fillets.

12.
FISHERMEN SELLING THEIR CATCH
on the waterfront at Manaus. The amount of commercial fishing in the Amazon truly shocked me.

13.
IN MOST OF BRAZIL
, fishing for arapaima is now banned, but river people have few other sources of cash. The man on the left became a bodyguard for the town mayor and
was wounded by shrapnel in an assassination attempt.

14.
THE LAST-GASP ARAPAIMA
caught on my
Jungle Hooks
shoot, using neither rod nor reel. From painful experience I know this fish can be very dangerous indeed, but in
an unexpected way.

15.
REVISITING THE SCENE
of my Amazon plane crash. Only weeks later did I realise how close I’d come to dying.

16.
THE FISH THAT HIMALAYAN VILLAGERS
say is a man-eater. My capture of this 161-pound goonch, after plunging after it into monsoon floodwater, gave weight to their
stories.

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