River Monsters (12 page)

The lake, known as Lago Camaleão (Lizard Lake), was roughly circular, two hundred yards in diameter, and shelved to about eight feet deep in the middle. But before I tried my lures and
fancy rods, José showed me how they did it. In an area of semi-submerged bushes at the lake margin, he picked up a thin bamboo pole from the bottom of his tiny dugout, unwound the eight feet
of thick nylon line twirled around it, and put a chunk of fish flesh on the large single hook. The hook, I noticed, had an extra long shank, formed by wrapping the final two or three inches of line
inside a thin, flattened cylinder of metal – cut from the case of an old battery, he said. Then, as I held my breath, this renowned, fish-whispering survival expert, from whom I’d hoped
to learn the secrets of ninja-like jungle stealth, whirled the line out overhand and brought it down on the surface with a resounding thwack. Feeling embarrassed for him, I watched the old duffer
make repeated recasts, each one louder and more inept than the last. Somehow, on the last cast he ended up with the rod-tip in the water, sploshing it around in a way that was sure to send every
fish heading for the horizon. Next thing I knew, however, a flash of red and silver was swinging through the air and then flapping in the boat, where José deftly stilled it with the point of
a machete blade behind its clicking jaws.

‘Piranha caju,’ he said. ‘Same colour as cashew fruit.’ I realised I was looking at my first real live (okay, real dead) piranha – and not just any old piranha, but
the notorious red-belly (
Pygocentrus nattereri
). Far from being scared off by the splashing, this half-pounder had homed in on it.

Observing this legendary creature for the first time, I could see that the indigenous Amazonians hadn’t minced their words when they named it. Combine the Tupi-Guarani words
pira
(fish) and
ranha
(tooth) and you’ve got ‘tooth fish’ – and this is exactly what it says on the linguistic tin. Also, just saying the word with their pronunciation,
pir-an-yah, makes you bare your teeth as if you’re about to go into a feeding frenzy yourself. That nyah! sound. Whereas the anglicisation, pira-nah (which is, incidentally, quite acceptable,
as we also say Paris instead of Paree), has lost that edge of menace and sounds a little more friendly.

I took the other rod and – after missing a few sharp pulls, each time bringing in a cleaned hook – swung one of these fish in myself. Its broad, protruding lower jaw gave it a
pugnacious expression, and the solidity of its head indicated powerful jaw muscles. Bending forward to look at its teeth – sharp, triangular points that meshed together like scissor blades
– I asked José if they really were as sharp as people said. He thought for a moment and then produced a surubim catfish from behind him, which he’d netted earlier. Taking my
piranha, he touched its snout to the catfish’s thick, gristly tail, and immediately the jaws started working, like some diabolical trimming machine, as José moved the fish from side to
side, artistically reshaping the tail until it was no more than a stump.

But the novelty of fishing piranha-infested waters quickly wore off. They would devour the deadbaits I put out for arapaima, frustrating my efforts to tempt one of these bigger predators. They
would hit the lures I cast for tucunaré (peacock bass), and on occasion, when they didn’t hit the lure, they’d eat half the fish that did while it was on its way to the boat. If
I caught nothing else, though, we would eat piranha. They are better fried than boiled, and I have been known to reduce one to a pile of bones in seconds. But they are not a species that people
relish, even though a soup made from their flesh is said to be an aphrodisiac. I was surprised once, though, by a piranha I was served by a fisherman called Manoel, who had grown up with the
Karajá Indians on the Araguaia River. He cut thin fillets from the back of a small white piranha, marinated the pale flesh in a squeeze of lime juice and red urucú (annatto) powder,
and served it sashimi style. It was delicious, and I asked him if it was something he’d learned from the Indians, a jungle survival tactic for when you can’t stop to cook.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s just something we picked up from the Japanese.’ But Manoel was unique. Most fishermen who catch piranhas hack their jaws off and throw them on to
the bank to die because of the damage they do to their nets.

Then there were the stories of human deaths. A boat captain told me about a man who fell overboard and disappeared in a boil of attacking piranhas. I also heard about a riverboat that capsized
while attempting to dock, tipping all of its passengers into the water. Their desperate flailing, in an area people constantly baited with fish guts and leftovers, provoked a fatal piranha frenzy.
But these stories never had any names, dates, or precise locations.

And if piranhas really were so dangerous, why did people commonly swim in places where piranhas also swam? (I knew they were there because I’d caught them, often right next to splashing
kids.) I partially abandoned my caution and started swimming myself – and it’s hard to describe what bliss it is to have cool water support your body after a long hot day of mud, sweat,
and biting insects. But I’d only swim where the locals swam, and I avoided the places they avoided. This seemed a sensible enough rule of thumb even though lots of locals had bits of thumb
missing or semicircular scars or bifurcated fingertips or, in one case, a nose-tip that had been bitten off and had then regrown. These were either from a millisecond’s loss of concentration
when fishing or inflicted when they were gutting fish off the side of a floating house. And as an angler I was all too aware of the piranha’s potential. I caught black piranha (
Serrasalmus
rhombeus
) weighing four pounds that had flanks the size of dinner plates and teeth that made me wince just to look at them. Black piranhas have been recorded close to ten pounds, but
fortunately they don’t hang out in hundred-strong packs like the red-bellies. But red-bellies can grow to a very solid three and a half pounds, and I’ve caught them one after another at
one pound and sometimes two. So although individually they are far smaller than most other river monsters, collectively they’re in the same league in that the combined biomass of a shoal of
attacking piranhas could exceed that of a human being – which isn’t a pleasant thought.

The most voracious piranhas I’ve encountered have been in two distinct situations. One day, trying to cut through thick forest from José’s hut to a big lake beyond Lago
Camaleão, I got hopelessly lost. If I headed in the wrong direction, there was uninhabited forest for over a hundred miles, but if I kept going around in circles as I had been for a couple
of hours, drinking stagnant water from puddles, I would end up as food for the ants. Starting to panic, I stopped to think. Far under the canopy, I couldn’t see the sun, but I discovered that
when I held a stick upright on the ground, one of its multiple faint shadows was slightly stronger than the rest, and getting longer. This meant it was past midday, and this direction was east,
which was where I didn’t want to go. Using this improvised compass, I was able to head towards the river, where at least I would know where I was – if I could get around the swamps that
were in the way. But before I hit the river, I arrived at the southern shore of the big lake. Confident now of my makeshift compass but spurred on by failing light, I turned back into the forest,
this time heading due south, and reached Lago Camaleão at sunset. I arrived back at the hut just as José was starting to get worried.

‘But I’d have found you,’ he said, with such assurance that I found myself believing him. Whereas other
ribeirinhos
were totally at home on water, José had a
reputation for stalking the forest with his shotgun and dogs, day and night – something almost nobody else did. With a shudder I remembered that he sometimes rigged his shotgun to a tripwire
next to a homemade salt-lick. He’d once shown me a cartridge he’d made for this, repacked with a solid lump of lead, for smashing the skull of a tapir at point-blank range.

Having made it clear that he didn’t think much of my jungle navigation, he then mentioned that two people he knew, hunting wild pigs, had become lost in the same area the year before. I
asked how long they had taken to find their way home. ‘Twenty-two days,’ he answered.

Then I told him about the small lake I’d found, boiling with fish life, before I arrived at the big lake. Surely arapaima fishermen didn’t know about this place. He snorted.
‘Those guys get everywhere. They carry their canoes on their backs.’ But I refused to believe him and, a few days later, having dragged the canoe down the twisting tree-choked creek to
the big lake, set out on foot to find the place again.

My bait never had a chance to sink more than a few inches; it was set upon and devoured as soon as it hit the water. In the margins at my feet, a black catfish face appeared and looked at me, as
if beseeching, ‘Please get me out of here!’ This was one of those shrunken, hungry, dry-season pools where the piranhas had eaten most of the available food and would set upon any
edible newcomer. That I’d not been tempted to take a cooling dip on my first visit was a good thing.

The other type of place to avoid is the outflow from a backwater lake when the water is falling during the dry season. At this time, small fish are getting washed out into the river channels,
and the piranhas congregate in ambush. You can hear and see them slashing on the surface, and a small shallow-diving plug cast into some lake mouths will take one-pound red-bellies every cast.

One area of backwaters where the piranhas congregate for this small-fish harvest is a place called the Piranha Sustainable Development Reserve near Manacapuru, fifty miles west of Manaus. Here I
finally found a case of a human fatality that was all too true. Because of the big seasonal changes in water level, the people here mostly live in floating houses. One man I spoke to, Julio, told
me how, eight years before, he was looking after his two-year-old grandson when the boy ran from one side of his house to the other and fell into the water. When Julio got there, all he saw was the
boiling of the piranhas ‘devouring’ the child. Eventually they retrieved the body with a net, but all that was left was a skeleton.

I also found a newspaper report of a bus crashing into the Rio Urubú , east of Manaus, in 1976, and this reported that piranhas ate the occupants. Thirty-nine passengers died, but I spoke
to one man who escaped, Dirceu Araú jo. He told me how he climbed through a broken window but had to kick his leg free of a hand that had grabbed on to him. He repeated what the newspaper
had said about some bodies being partially eaten. Another passenger managed to get out of the bus, but his clothing got caught. I spoke to this man’s brother, who was given the body wrapped
in a sheet. Just by holding it, he knew that the sheet contained only bones.

But the bus had been in deep water for several hours before it was retrieved. So it’s likely that the piranhas did not kill the passengers but rather ate them after they had drowned. What
makes this more probable is that the Rio Urubú is a black-water river, poor in nutrients and thin in fish, including piranhas. Red-bellied piranhas, in their dense, potentially homicidal
packs, tend to live in muddy, ‘white water’ rivers, such as the main Amazon, the Purus, and the backwaters of the Piranha Reserve – not the Urubú .

Recently, however, there have been clear cases of piranhas attacking live humans. In 2007 more than 180 people were bitten when swimming and paddling off a shallow beach at an artificial lake
near the city of Palmas. But these were non-fatal single bites. According to Brian Zimmerman, assistant curator of the aquarium at the London Zoo, these piranhas would have been defending their
nests, which they construct in exactly the same shallow areas where people like to bathe. This echoes the attacks on swimmers at Schlachtensee near Berlin, except these were not five-or
six-foot-long catfish but rather solitary fish measuring just a few inches. Seen in this light, the picture that emerges of these piranhas is of feisty, devoted parents.

Brian also mentioned that some recent research into piranha shoaling behaviour indicates that the formation of ‘packs’ is largely a defensive strategy against the animals that eat
them. I have seen giant otters and caimans happily chewing on red-bellied piranhas, and pink river dolphins are also a threat to them.

This is not to say that piranhas are harmless and cuddly; their potential is lethal. But if you understand their behaviour, you can avoid those situations when they can be a serious risk to
human health – unless, of course, your employer is Mr Blofeld.

6

THE RIDDLE OF THE EMPTY CANOE