River Monsters (41 page)

At Vic’s suggestion, we met at a creek near his plant just before dusk. Finally, I was getting my rods out – a whole week after arrival. I set up a very simple rig: a forty-pound
main line with a running lead on a weak link that was stopped by a rubber bead and a barrel swivel, with the hook attached to eighteen inches of fifty-pound wire. I opted to use a circle hook
because these normally catch in the edge of the mouth, with a crushed-down barb for easier unhooking. I nicked this in a small mackerel strip, keeping the point clear, and swung it towards some
trailing branches on the opposite bank. With Vic chumming the pool’s inlet with abalone guts, the first run came very quickly. I let it go for a few seconds, but as soon as I closed the reel
and tightened, the fish fell off. My lack of cursing puzzled the crew, but I assured them I knew what I was doing. A bigger fish would take the bait properly, whereas a small one would just hang on
to it, so this method would select the bigger fish and avoid the messy business of unhooking small ones. For once, the practice bore out the theory, with a handful of smaller eels dropping off and
a couple of bigger ones being slid up the bank, although at less than three pounds, these were not as big as Vic had been expecting.

Vic also taught me how to ‘bob’, a traditional way of fishing without a hook that he had used as a commercial fisherman. At first I wasn’t convinced, considering it only
marginally more likely to succeed than the lamb intestine method Claudius Aelianus described in the second century. (You put a reed tube in one end and dangle the other end in the water. When an
eel grabs it, the fisherman blows ‘with all his might’ and inflates the eel.) To make a bob, you wrap a strip of fish or meat in wool. It works because the eel’s tiny teeth get
tangled in this – and because its predatory instinct makes it reluctant to release its meal. Normally the bob is fished on a piece of strong cord that is attached to a stiff pole. When you
feel the eel take, you allow it a few moments before hauling it unceremoniously on to the bank. I also cast out a bob using a rod and reel, and I found that, if I pumped in the line in a smooth and
businesslike way, I could land a good proportion of the eels that took.

But although the eels were numerous and voracious, they were still a long way from man-eating. In order to devour a human in the way that a giant piraiba or jaú catfish could, by
swallowing whole or part-swallowing, an eel would need jaws wider than a person’s shoulders, and this would mean a very large animal indeed – a good deal longer than eight feet. A more
likely scenario would be a number of eels acting
en masse.
Having heard now of them attacking live sheep and humans as well as having filmed them spin-feeding, crocodile-fashion, on a deer
carcass, imagining them killing and eating a human wasn’t such a huge step.

To demonstrate this visually, we needed to find a place where the eels are both bold and hungry: a place with no commercial fishing and no feeding by people. Having selected a likely locality in
the southwestern Fiordland, we were helicoptered in to a remote river, where the only stipulation was no eel fishing with hooks. For once, we were blessed with fine weather, and as we flew up the
valley with our kit slung underneath us in a net, I alternated between gawping at the stunning mountainsides and the river below. From this vantage point I could see through the water to a clean,
sandy bottom that appeared devoid of life. Despite our five hundred-foot altitude, the water clarity was so exceptional that if there had been any dark squiggles, I felt sure I would have seen
them. Although the scenery was breathtaking, I suspected we might have come to the wrong place.

Nevertheless, we proceeded as planned. The idea was to duplicate, as closely as possible, the situation in which a deer hunter, carrying a bloody carcass on his back, comes to the banks of the
river. He’s hot, tired, and dirty, and the sandflies are biting. What could be more natural than to dump his burden on the grassy banks and plunge fully clothed into the river?

On the grassy riverbank I set about turning myself into human bait. In the absence of a deer carcass, I soiled my shirt by smearing shellfish guts over it. Underneath I wore a thin wetsuit
because we were past summertime and the water was cold. This also meant that any eels would not be at their most active. But even so, I was not keen to have any bare flesh exposed. For this reason,
I also wore protective cut-proof gloves. Stitched to these were finger-sized bobs made from mackerel strips to give my hands some flavour.

I get in at a small scoop in the bank, with no other signs of life visible. Just a few steps out, the water is up to my waist and washing a cloud of scent into the eddy around me, with a thin
trail peeling off downstream. Inside just five minutes, I feel something bump my leg, but I can’t see it because the bottom sediment is now stirred up. Five minutes later I can see perhaps
half a dozen eels, each three or four feet long. Other long shapes are arriving from downstream, but the original ones came seemingly from nowhere. They must have been hiding under the trailing
grass of the bank. I feel a nip on the inside of my right ankle and then a sharp twisting for a few seconds – good thing I’m wearing neoprene dive boots.

Steve, the director, tells me he has just counted more than thirty eels around me. Keeping an eye on them all is becoming difficult. A few are closing in on my crotch, and from time to time I
reach down and push them away, my hand on the bulbous muscle of their heads, to which some react by rearing their heads back with open mouths. I start to touch others. They don’t mind a hand
gently on their backs, pushing them down on to the bottom, but they’re sensitive about any contact on their undersides. I beckon some with my fingers and they close in, coming close to the
surface, even pushing their horned snouts into the air to catch the dribbles running off my shirtsleeves. They appear to sniff my hands, and a few allow me to lift their heads out of the water. Two
fish are very different in colour from the rest, being brownish instead of dark grey. Both are thick bodied. There’s one other of similar size, and it’s closing in on my hand. Now it
has gripped the wrapped mackerel strip and is working it back into its mouth. I move my hand and it clamps down to stop its prey from getting away. Only when I heave its twisting body fully clear
of the water does it finally let go and crash back down, but this added commotion does not perturb the other eels. The animal that hung from my hand was about four feet long and, I’m
guessing, about fifteen pounds in weight. A quick calculation tells me there’s about twice my body mass writhing around me now. If just a few decided to latch on at once, I couldn’t do
much about it. I reckon I’ve done enough to prove the capabilities of these animals and the best thing now is to get out.

Safely on land, I start to wonder whether I could catch one of these big fish on a bob. But the rain is now tipping down, and even with the rain cover, we can’t risk the camera being out
in this. The rain falls constantly during the night, something I’m aware of because, for the first time here, I’m unable to sleep, a delayed effect of my dislocation perhaps. In the
morning the river has risen seven feet. The small scoop in the bank is now a long, narrow inlet. I chum the water with the pungent liquid squeezed from abalone guts, being careful not to let any
bits into the water because doing so might start to satisfy the eels’ hunger.

When the rain eases, and with half an hour to spare before we have to pack, I pick up a six-foot pole from the end of which hangs a bob tied to three feet of 150-pound cord, and I creep towards
the inlet. I’m looking for one of the brown-bodied fish, but another big one is in a perfect position: just a couple of feet out, pointing straight towards the inlet’s gently shelving
apex. If I can get it to take without alarming it, I should be able to drag it up here before it realises what’s going on.

I lower the bob into the cloudy water just in front of where I judge the eel’s head to be, and the line instantly twitches and starts to inch out as the now-flexing body reverses away. I
give a little line and then take up the slack and pull back in a long sweeping motion. The resistance I encounter almost dislocates my shoulder as I remember what Vic said about the impossibility
of getting a big one in. Then, with a great eruption, the grey body is on land, still heavy but with no water now to grip. Several seconds pass before it releases its meal, then it writhes on the
damp grass, sliding back towards the river. Throwing the pole down, I put myself in the eel’s way, and with bent arms I scoop it up the bank. Only now do I try to pick it up. The thing is the
size of my leg and has the strength of a constrictor. Under its smooth, moist, oddly sweet-smelling skin, its muscles are hard and I can’t hold it. I try rolling it on to its back to induce
tonic immobility, a tactic that worked on some smaller eels (and works on sharks), but this one isn’t having any of it. So I do the counter-intuitive thing and stop trying to fight it.

As if sensing that something has changed, she stills and allows me to lift her. After all I’ve heard and seen, I feel certain I’m holding the monster described in Cook’s
journal. Eight feet long? Maybe that is a slight exaggeration, but who knows? And a shoal of eels even this size would have no trouble overpowering a weak or injured human in the water and then
devouring the corpse.

However, more than two centuries later this serpent in paradise is still a creature of mystery. Patrolling river and sea, daylight and darkness, reality and imagination, it slips through our
hands and escapes to regions where we can’t follow. I wonder what Cook would make of its underwater navigation. Where are its charts? What instruments does it use?

A vibration of the air, getting closer and louder, is the signal that my time has come to leave this land. The chopper pushes through rain and drops us by our vehicles, and we drive to
Queenstown airport where, after one aborted take-off, the 737 takes us back to Auckland. Then two nights between clouds and stars, homing in on a distant destination while the clear mountain
streams retreat into memory.

20

WHAT ELSE IS DOWN THERE?

Every now and then dolphins get caught in fishing nets, although this is something that happens very rarely because of dolphins’ exceptional ability to ‘see’ underwater using
echo-location. But when it does happen it results in a torn net or a drowned dolphin. The weeks and months I have spent in the Amazon now add up to two or three years, spread over nearly two
decades, and I’ve seen this a couple of times myself. I’ve witnessed how Amazon fishermen, driven by hard economics, are not sentimental about dolphins; they see them as a nuisance and
will throw a dead one aside with a curse. But, maybe this one was still alive when the net was retrieved, and the fisherman, angry about his ruined net, cruelly mutilated it. Then, being a
resilient animal, it recovered from its wounds and began its new incarnation as a mystery monster, exacting revenge on the human race by frightening the wits out of the few people who glimpsed it.
By chance or design, it also taught one person to trust his own eyes, when it came to unknown things beyond the surface.

Other things are harder to explain. In September 2000 I was at another Amazon lake, small and crowded in by weeds – resting in my hammock after an exhausting day. Getting here from the
river had taken us an hour and forty minutes along an uncertain bearing, wading through two thigh-deep swamps. Zé Carlos was one of just two people who knew the way, and he said no one had
been here for years. On arrival we’d found the remains of a small dugout, which we’d patched with rags and mud. But the baits I’d cast to swirls on the weed margins had been
scoffed by two-foot arowhana rather than the giant arapaima I had hoped for.