River Monsters

by Jeremy Wade

  From the capital of PNG, Port Moresby, there is no way to drive to the Sepik. Having loaded our thousand pounds of equipment, six of us board a single-engined P-750 XSTOL, a fast-climbing workhorse of an aircraft originally designed for skydiving, which hoists us to twelve thousand feet, following the coast, and then cuts inland toward the island’s mountainous spine. Below, the vegetation that covers the valleys and ridges is unbroken. I look for signs of human habitation, but there are none, not even a thread of smoke. As the land climbs toward us, the clouds change from a low broken layer to a pavilion of unsteady pillars, through which we pick our way.

  After landing to refuel at Goroka, a cleared and populous valley ringed by mountains, we reweigh ourselves and take off again. The moment our wheels leave the ground we’re flying at 5,200 feet, and we climb steeply through the thin air toward a jagged dark line that is intermittently visible above us through rising billows of cloud. Crossing the ridge, we enter a zone where the clouds are more substantial than the earth below, which rises and falls, a little further away each time, until it flattens into a wide coastal plain, which we turn and follow west.

  From where the Sepik’s branched tail leaves the mountains, a straight line to its mouth would measure 250 miles. Between these two points, the land drops just a hundred feet, a gradient that is scarcely perceptible, except to water. But the Sepik obeys gravity on its own terms, looping this way and then that to investigate far-flung curiosities as it goes. From above, its signature is confident and expansive, with extravagant loops and curlicues that give away its deeper character. In my role as aerial graphologist, I try to read what the river is telling me, and immediately I see that all is not well. The river’s identity is not clear and distinct but instead confused with that of the land, which gives back a partial reflection of the sky. The annual flood has not yet receded, which is going to make finding anything in the water doubly difficult.

  The other thing that might not help, on top of this thirty-year flood, is the Sepik’s notoriety as prime crocodile habitat. It has one species of freshwater crocs as well as much larger salties, the same species found in Australia. The human relationship with crocs is complicated. At the village where we set up base, on the banks of a large lake (a raunwara, or round water) in the floodplain, a fisherman, Ramsin Tero, tells me how his twenty-four-foot dugout was attacked from below, splintering its stern. He escaped by climbing a tree that was standing in the water. He said the massive animal was a masalai, a spirit that, although dangerous to individuals, preserves the environment on which humans depend by keeping open the narrow channels that link the lake to the river. Further downriver, people believe that they are descended from crocodiles and hold initiation ceremonies at which young men are symbolically reborn as crocodile men, identifiable by the scalelike patterns of raised scars on their backs and shoulders that are created by a painful process of rubbing ash into cut skin. Others hunt the crocodiles to sell their skins and penises. But when I go out at night with crocodile hunter Alphonse Mava Sanye, I’m surprised by how few crocodile eyes reflect our flashlight. They’d be easier to find if the water was down and more contained, but even then I’m told their numbers are noticeably down lately. This is attributed to a thinning of the floating weed that used to cover most of the lake, in which the crocodiles make their nests. I’m told this change dates from about the same time that Francis Sambin was attacked.

  Above the surface, this place could be the Amazon were it not for the mountainous horizon above the trees, the solidity of the stilt-house supports, and the appearance of the people—black skinned and curly haired. The lake is black water, like strong tea. To start getting an idea of what’s down there, I put together my tiddler-catching rod, a six-foot wand with six-pound line loaded onto a miniature fixed-spool reel, and I flick a small cube of coconut flesh from a moored dugout into the margins in front of the village. After a few minutes the line twitches and runs, and I bring in a silver-scaled fish about six inches long. A small catfish follows, known here as nilpis (nail fish) on account of its dorsal and pectoral spines. A bit later I bring in something a bit bigger, elongated and brown with a big mouth and spiky dorsal fin. I ask Wapi, a boy fishing with a heavy handline by the nearest house, “Wanem dispela kain pis?” He tells me it’s a bikmaus, and some men on the bank get very excited because they never catch this on a hook. Suddenly I have a bit of cred as a fisherman, but this is only because I’m using much finer gear than they do. And this, I’m quickly reminded, also has its down side, as the next fish, although not very big, breaks the line.

  Actually, it bit through it just after I glimpsed it on the surface: a bright flash of silver with a splash of red. I blink, trying to recall the image. It looked like a red-bellied piranha, which might not be such a surprise if this was Florida or even southern England, but there can’t be too many fish-tank hobbyists with imported species around here. I rummage in my bag of terminal-tackle odds and ends, and I tie a larger hook to a few inches of a flexible silvery leader material that incorporates strands of superfine woven wire. To achieve an enticingly slow sink of the bait through the water, I add a bubble of expanded polystyrene, but things underwater have gone quiet. Then I miss a couple of takes. I cast toward a half-submerged bush, and after a long wait my answer to a line twitch is in turn answered by a bent rod. As I grab the leader and swing the fish aboard, I do another double-take. The color scheme is similar to a piranha, but it looks more like a pacu (Piaractus brachypomus), another Amazon inhabitant, which is sometimes confused with the red-bellied piranha. In fact, unless I’m very much mistaken, it is a pacu.

  This is another species that gets liberated from domestic aquaria—not because they eat the other occupants but because they grow into potential tank-busters, capable of smashing the glass if they’re spooked. Once released, they seem to survive in unfamiliar surroundings better than piranhas. Two anglers each caught foot-long specimens from California’s Lake Don Pedro in 2009, and a man has told me about a twenty-pounder he spotted in Florida. (According to a map on the FishBase website, the only US states where they haven’t turned up are Alaska, Idaho, North Dakota, New Mexico, and Maine, although to breed, the initial “stock” would need to be numerous enough for them to find one another.) They’ve also crossed the Atlantic: one recently turned up in southwest England in the East Okement River, a tributary of the River Torridge. But the pacu in PNG, it turns out, were introduced officially in the late 1990s in order to supplement a very thin selection of native freshwater fish. Because the falls in sea level that accompanied ice ages never linked PNG with the Asian mainland (which at times extended as far as Bali), the spread of most freshwater fish was blocked. So the thinking behind this introduction was to supplement the existing food source, which would give the added benefit of taking some of the hunting pressure off the crocodiles.

  Pacu are tasty, solid-bodied fish, and I’ve caught a few in the Amazon, where they also go by the name of pirapitinga. Although they are a valuable food fish in their home waters, they tend to be overshadowed by their larger relative, the much prized tambaqui (Colossoma macropomum ). During the high-water season, tambaqui enter the flooded forest and gorge on high-protein nuts and seeds that fall into the water. Rubber seeds are their particular favorite, and they crack these open with crushing teeth. Because of this, they’re one of the few species that can be reliably caught on a line in high water, but the locals guard their fishing spots jealously. When the water goes down, they’re caught using nets, and it’s normal to find their stomachs completely empty at this time, as they live on their reserves for half the year. Because of their desirability and high price, tambaqui have attracted the attention of fish farmers, but without their normal 100-percent organic diet, they’re not the same.

  The pacu is a scaled-down version but with similar vegetarian habits. As intended, it has found favor as a food fish in PNG, where they call it ret bros (red breast). Fishermen tell me that, in high water, they catch them on fruit, cast near fruitin
g shrubs, usually on handlines. To try this for myself, I go to an area of flooded lake margins where green fruits the size of marbles hang from low shrubs, and I plop these onto the water using my single-handed rod. In most places I catch nothing and attribute this partly to my less-than-stealthy approach: instead of a small dugout that slips quietly between the close-packed trunks, I’m with the crew and their kit in a huge forty-footer that has to be noisily manhandled around corners. But in time I catch a few, each about a pound in weight. It’s incredible to see how they’ve become so established. As a new protein source, the introduction appears to be a clear success story.

  But Alphonse the crocodile hunter is not a fan. He says pacu are responsible for clearing the floating weedbeds where the crocs nest. He claims they chew the delicate roots. On a couple of occasions I see ripples made by something nibbling the tips of reeds where they trail in the water, but I can’t see what it is. Now that I’m looking more closely, I see that many reeds have ragged tops. There are apparently some hungry fish around.

  But there seems to be an absence of predators. I put a wire leader on the bait-caster rod and cast a variety of lures around the lake margin. In the Amazon you might expect a peacock bass, aruanã, red-bellied piranha, or even surubim catfish to respond to this. But here, I get nothing. There are certainly carnivores down there though, as the small fish that the women collect from their nets in the mornings often have small pieces missing. One day Wapi brings a good-sized catfish for me to see. It’s a couple of feet long and about fifteen pounds, and it’s the biggest fish I’ve seen here. But although it has a large mouth that’s capable of engulfing small fish, it has no teeth—only the rasping pads that are standard issue to most catfish. It’s not the ball cutter.

  The only thing with teeth that would do the job is the pacu, but according to all authorities, this is a vegetarian, so it doesn’t have the temperament or inclination. I did meet a fisherman who had his finger bitten, but this was while he was unhooking one. It was his thirteenth fish of the day, but because it weighed over thirty pounds, he didn’t feel unlucky, despite having to paddle home one-handed. But this doesn’t really qualify as an attack. And I’ve not myself seen anything remotely approaching that weight. In one village I visit, however, they say big pacu are not unusual—about two feet long as far as I can gather. They catch them on dead Java carp, another introduced species, on lines thrown out from their houses. The pacu come into this area late at night when the village has quieted, and a makeshift bite alarm, made from a bag of stones hanging on the line, wakens the fisherman. I can’t wait to try this, but they say it doesn’t work now—only in the dry season. But they do suggest I try small live fish. They give me some in a bucket, about the size of a finger, and I cast one out at the junction of two channels. After about an hour I strike a take and retrieve a bitten remnant. I reason that a big pacu will manage a whole bait, but when I finally connect, the fish is an unexceptional one-pounder. It is nevertheless a highly significant catch. By the standards of our vegetarian director Duncan, or anyone else for that matter, this fish ain’t no vegetarian.

  Perhaps I should have known. In the Amazon I’ve caught a couple of pacu on small subsurface lures and witnessed half a dozen more, all about five pounds. I’ve also caught a couple of non vegetarian tambaqui, one on a whole nine-inch fish. But these were over a period of more than ten years, so I’d mentally filed them under “freak captures.” All were in the dry season, when nuts and seeds aren’t available, which suggests hunger might cause more opportunist feeding. And in PNG, which, despite superficial similarities, is not the Amazon, it’s possible that the pacu goes hungry year-round. (Although I didn’t catch any on lures here, I did have one chase a fruit I was retrieving and then take it when I paused. My Amazon lures, however, were definitely mimicking fish rather than a motorized nut—or at least I think so.)

  Maybe I should have tried something bigger. Long ago I saw a picture in a fishing magazine of a foot-long, multisection pike lure called a “wibbly-wobbly banana.” I remember this now, because Alphonse has just told me that he once found a hatchling crocodile inside a pacu he’d caught. But he also tells me that a crocodile bone placed in a fire will divert storms that might otherwise devastate a village. It also repels “magic men” who approach the village at night, making sounds like birds.

  As it happens, I hook my biggest pacu on a white cube of coconut flesh, right in front of the hut where we’re staying, from a moored dugout. The six-pound line sings painfully as I strain to hold it from trailing branches, and I wince as it grates around the supports of Wapi’s house. Pound for pound, its big brother the tambaqui is one of the strongest fish there is, and the pacu can’t be far behind, so on this gear my chances aren’t good. At length I get it away from the snags and into open water, but its strength seems undiminished. After a while, it boils at the surface and I can see its deep flank. Each run is now taking less line, down and out and then slowly back to the surface, until it’s lying still on its side and I can just reach the leader. As I swing it aboard, the 2/0 hook partially opens and then loses its hold.

  Solid and deep bodied, the fish must weigh eight pounds. It’s as big as any they’ve seen here lately but well short of the fifty-five-pound maximum quoted for the species. (Tambaqui can reach ninety pounds, but even weights halfway to these figures are exceptional nowadays.) Its small scales are iridescent, showing hints of violet, green, and pearl. The fin area is large, including the characteristic small adipose fin, which marks it as a characin. But what truly defines this fish is its mouth. It looks like an overweight European river bream with badly fitting dentures. Looked at head on, the almost straight row of teeth at the front of the lower jaw appears eerily human. But they are molars, not incisors, with ridges that work against cusps embedded in the upper gum. In front of the teeth is a rubbery lower lip for manipulating food along with suction. When opening and closing, the tooth surfaces stay squarely aligned to one another, although individual teeth have a degree of float, all of which makes for a very effective nutcracker operated by powerful jaw muscles. There’s no doubt they could cause a very painful wound to a person.

  We’ve put the word out that we want to talk to ball-cutter victims, and one day a canoe arrives from a village downstream. One of the men is Nick Sakat, who tells me in his gravelly voice about the terror he felt when his foot was grabbed. There’s a young girl who was bitten on the buttock while playing near her mother, who was washing plates. The girl instinctively swiped at the fish and flipped it out of the water. She says it was a pacu. Now she washes very quickly and never stays long in the water. Another man, Patrick, dove into the water and felt a sharp pain in his scrotum. Thinking he’d stabbed himself on the dorsal spine of a catfish, he climbed onto a floating raft, from where he saw a large fish homing in on his dripping blood and then circling at his feet. Patrick said he was very afraid, and he was adamant that this fish was a pacu.

  Finally I meet Francis Sambin, not dead as the newspaper and Internet reports stated but instead fully recovered thanks to treatment at a medical center. He thinks he inadvertently chummed the water by washing his dinner plate before getting in himself, something he’s careful not to do now.

  It seems an open-and-shut case. The locals all agree now that the ball cutter is the pacu, a normally vegetarian fish that, finding itself in a new, nutrient-poor environment, is giving expression to latent carnivorous tendencies. “Good meat, problem fish,” as Alphonse puts it. Or a bit of a bagarap, as they say here. But the biologists who introduced the pacu say the accounts of pacu attacking humans are fabrications. They don’t suggest an alternative culprit though. So you’re left wondering: who is invoking spirits now?

  CHAPTER 16

  ELECTRIC EEL

  The extraordinary noise made by the stamping of the horses made the fish jump out of the mud and attack. These livid, yellow eels, like great water snakes, swim on the water’s surface and squeeze under the bellies of the horses and mules. A fight be
tween such different animals is a picturesque scene....

  Several horses collapsed from the shocks received on their most vital organs, and drowned under the water.

  Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, 1825

  IT STARTED AS A NORMAL DAY’S WORK for the six vaqueiros, Brazilian cowboys, out checking animals on the ranch in the northeastern state of Pará. In the middle of the afternoon they came across a donkey struggling in the waters of the Rio Vermelho, trying to make its way to land. Three of the horsemen rode in to rescue it, but before they reached it, their mounts reared up and threw them into the water. One of the men was a very strong swimmer, but accounts vary about the other two. What’s certain is that all three disappeared beneath the surface, and by nightfall their companions had seen no further trace of them.

  Watching aghast from his horse on the riverbank was Reginaldo Fernandes Neres. Although a strong swimmer himself, he felt powerless to help, as he feared he would become a victim too. But after some time had passed, he summoned the courage to get in the water. Although the horses had been walking in shallows, the men were thrown into deeper water: “It was black water, about twelve feet deep. I couldn’t see anything on the bottom. I just felt with my hands, but I didn’t find anything.”