River Monsters (6 page)

To the end of its tail, the fish was six feet long. It weighed 161 pounds. I also measured the width of its mouth (nearly thirteen inches), its maximum girth (forty-one inches) and the
‘wingspan’ of its pectoral fins (forty-four inches). Armed with this data, I was now in a position to make some conclusions about the identity of the Kali ‘man-eater.’

That people have disappeared in the Kali is fact, but there’s no direct evidence so far that goonch have taken and eaten them. Certainly this six-foot goonch could pull somebody under if
it grabbed a leg. But it would have to be even bigger to be capable of swallowing someone. The question is: how much bigger? If this fish were scaled up one and a half times, to nine feet, it would
have a mouth nineteen inches wide and a mouth cavity two feet deep, extending to nearly twice that when the throat is open. That would comfortably take me head first until just above my knees, and
it would leave many of the local men with just their feet protruding. Given the authenticated existence of near-nine-foot Mekong giant catfish, the existence of goonch big enough to swallow a man
cannot be ruled out. Going by the proportions of my fish, such an animal would weigh some 550 pounds.

Such a fish deliberately targeting a human is a frightening thought, partly because this would require a degree of intelligence not normally associated with fish. More likely, perhaps, a goonch
made a reflex grab at some movement or splash. The victim then took a lungful of water and sank. And the fact that no corpse ever floated back up points to it having been eaten by something. If
that something was the goonch and if it wasn’t big enough to swallow the corpse whole, it could have ripped off pieces of flesh or possibly removed limbs by crocodile-style spin-feeding.
It’s then conceivable, however, that the next time a leg was grabbed, it wasn’t a simple reflex, particularly because the large tasty biped was so surprisingly easy to overpower. Indeed
Man Singh’s description of his buffalo’s disappearance definitely sounded like deliberate behaviour. With no goonch alive being big enough to swallow such a large animal whole, this
story points to a strategy of drowning and then dismembering. If that is the case, the Kali man-eater could be a goonch even seven or eight feet long, weighing between 250 and 375 pounds, or maybe
more than one such animal.

Part of the problem with fish stories, though, is that we fill in the blanks with assumptions, ascribing will or intent where none exists. A couple of years ago I met a Tibetan man who used to
train the Indian army in mountain survival and who had long been puzzled by something that had once happened to him. He was rafting a Himalayan river with a group of young men when a wave flipped
the raft at the head of a pool. As the water pummelled him against a rock cliff, he felt bodies underneath him in the water and called out the men’s names. But when he dragged himself ashore,
all the men were there, having remained close to the raft. Before I told him my answer, based on my dives with Rick along similar rock walls, he asked, ‘So who were those people in the water
who saved me?’

3

EUROPEAN MAN-EATER

I think it was the morning after only my second night at a place called Tiddenfoot Pit when, against the odds, I found myself attached to a strong, deep-pulling fish that had picked up a dead
perch. But twenty seconds later I was shaking for another reason, contemplating the end of the line where it had been rasped through. I kept coming back until I got one . . . and then a few more:
seven fish over the course of the summer, the biggest a yard long.

For a mystery predator that had existed until then only in the imagination, its appearance didn’t disappoint. It was hardly like a fish at all, or at least none that I was familiar with.
With its scaleless, elongated body, long tentacles, and cavernous mouth, it was more like the work of some mad geneticist, a cross between a slug and a snake. At eleven pounds, my biggest one was
still tiny for the species: they don’t grow well in England, with its long cold winters. But a big one, if you encountered it in the water, would be terrifying.

Fast-forward to 2008. Newspapers in Germany carry front-page reports of something attacking swimmers in Schlachtensee, a lake on the outskirts of Berlin. Over the course of just a few summer
days, several people have emerged with bleeding wounds on their legs and a new-found terror of the water. One victim spoke of feeling something ‘like a snake’ touch her before she was
bitten.

Typically there was one long wound, broad and slightly curved, on each side of the leg. Close observation revealed tiny punctures. Hospital staff have never seen injuries like this before and
have no idea what caused them. From the shape of the wounds, some fisheries scientists identify the perpetrator as the wels.

This supposed taste for humans is nothing new. In the 1500s the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner, in his
Historiae Animalium
, told of a human head found in the stomach of the wels, along
with a hand wearing gold rings. Other reports talk of entire human corpses, mostly of children. This predator’s fabled size gives these stories a chilling credence. The most widely quoted
capture, from the River Dnieper in Russia (where they are called
ssum
) in the 1800s, weighed 673 pounds and measured over sixteen feet. Another fish, said to be a wels and caught in 1761
from the River Oder, weighed 825 pounds without the viscera. To drag such brutes from the water, fishermen would tie the rope line to a team of horses or oxen. Based on such reports, the maximum
size for wels is widely quoted as 1,000 pounds. And although there is no physical evidence of wels this size, nor any to support any of these stories, the attacks in Germany seemed to lend them
credence and revive speculation that there might be a freshwater man-eater in the heart of Europe. I ventured to Schlachtensee to investigate.

Being back in Berlin was strange. I had been here once before in 1989, just before the Berlin Wall came down. I remembered crossing on the U-Bahn (underground) to East Berlin, when movement in
the other direction was still prohibited, and surfacing into a world of cobblestones and two-stroke Trabant fumes. After dark I ducked down an alley behind a grey residential block and pulled
myself up to look at the death strip between the two parallel walls. As I fiddled with my camera I heard a voice – very quiet and very near. My blood froze as I realised that it came from a
gun tower right in front of me. Very slowly I lowered my head back behind the concrete (out of the cross-hairs?) and dropped to the ground.

In West Berlin too there had been a unique atmosphere, a relentless pursuit of modernity and devil-take-tomorrow hedonism that seemed like a collective denial of its encirclement. Later, when I
visited Manaus, the industrial city at the centre of the Amazon, I recognised a similar feeling. But now, two decades later, Berlin seemed sanitised, much the same as any other modern city. This
time the unreality came from our filming schedule: travelling at dawn from hotel to lake, then back at dusk, so I experienced the city centre as a place of perpetual darkness.

Schlachtensee lies hidden behind trees at the edge of the Grunewald forest, approached by shaded paths through still air. It is a narrow, winding ribbon of water over a mile long, but it is
mostly less than two hundred yards across. People jog, walk, and cycle around its banks, enjoying the clean air. Others, I was surprised to see, were swimming, just weeks after the attacks and a
warning to stay out of the water. Most were bathing near the banks, including a few ‘naturists’, and a few hardy souls were doing lengths. There had been no more attacks since the
newspaper story, even though the culprit – or culprits – hadn’t been apprehended and removed, but the water was still a lot less busy than usual.

Unlike piranhas and sharks, wels don’t have teeth that cut; instead, they swallow prey whole. A hypothetical sixteen-footer (the reported length of the Dnieper fish) would have a mouth two
feet in diameter, wider than my shoulders. The depth of its mouth cavity would be about three feet, but it could engulf an animal twice this length because wels, like many fish, can open their
throats to take prey right down into the stomach, which extends the whole length of the body cavity, almost as far as the vent. Such a fish, then, would be capable of swallowing an adult human. And
like any fish that swallows large prey, it would take it down head first, as most animals slip down more easily in that direction.

But the bite marks on the Schlachtensee victims were inflicted by fish well short of man-swallowing size. Typically the marks were about seven inches long, indicating a fish measuring about five
feet and weighing some fifty pounds. But the historical accounts of human body parts being found inside wels stomachs raised the possibility of another feeding strategy. Could they drown large prey
and dismember it?

I am nearly six feet tall and weigh 175 pounds, and normally I can handle a fish out of water that I have brought to land or into a boat, even if it’s bigger than me. In its home element,
though, it’s a very different story. I remember seeing a report about a diver in a Scottish sea loch who got caught in some fishing line that was attached to a conger eel. He was dragged from
the shallows down to 150 feet before managing to cut himself free, whereupon he made an emergency ascent and then blacked out. Later it emerged that other divers had previously seen this eel, and
the point is that it wasn’t enormous: just 40 pounds. So a full-grown man, used to being in the water and equipped with dive fins, had been unable to resist a fish a quarter of his size.
Without his air tank and knife, he’d have been a goner.

So how big – in real numbers, pounds and feet – would a wels need to be to overpower a person in the water? To find out the pull that would be necessary to take me under, I attached
weights to myself until I couldn’t keep my head above the surface. It turned out that just thirty pounds will do it. Then I attached a cord to my waistband and swam against a spring balance
to see how much horizontal force was needed to pull me backwards. The figure was about the same. So what size wels would exert a pull of thirty pounds? The answer is not thirty pounds.

Although anglers set great store by fish weights, most fish weigh nothing in the water. You could hang a dead fish, of any size, on your leg without risk. This is why you don’t need to use
a twenty-pound line to catch a twenty-pound fish. In open water you can land a fish this size with a breaking strain of three pounds as long as you have plenty on your reel. You let the fish swim
around against just enough resistance to keep it moving until it tires itself out and floats belly-up. Then you ease its weightless, buoyant body over your landing net or within grabbing range. But
if you try to stop the fish when it’s running, to hold it from a sunken tree or boulder, it will snap the line. This is analogous to the difference between a boat with its motor stopped,
which you can move with your little finger, and the same boat with its motor running. What you feel is not the fish’s weight but rather its engine power. In general, this is proportional to
weight – big fish pull harder than small fish – but the actual numbers, for weight in the air and muscle force, are not the same.