River Monsters (13 page)

A few years ago I went for a routine diver’s medical examination. As part of this I was partially stripped and shaved and then wired up for an electrocardiogram. The
printout should have shown a nice, regular sequence of blips. However, the doctor, after a pause, told me I had irregular ‘ectopic’ heartbeats and sent me to a specialist for further
investigation.

The cardiologist looked at me and said he was 99.9 per cent sure I was okay, as I had none of the normal risk factors for heart disease (I don’t smoke and I’m not overweight), but
nonetheless, he sent me for an MRI scan to make sure. When I came back for the results, I could tell something was wrong. The scan had revealed two patches of scarring, areas of heart muscle that
were dead and that would never recover.

In the six weeks before my urgent follow-up test I pondered my mortality. With time now revealed as something finite, I was struck by how little I’d achieved, in any conventional sense, in
my life. The weight of the things I had done was inconsequential when divided into the years. And it struck me now as never before how much this was due to the immense weight of something else.
This other thing, a neural malfunction, was invisible to all instruments and outside observers, but like some hideous parasite, it gorged itself daily on my time and energy and had robbed me of
irreplaceable years. In a way it felt like a monstrous fish pulling me down, but I couldn’t give the line to anybody else or admit to needing any kind of support as this figment tried to
break my back.

But mostly I railed against this heart defect, questioning why it should happen to me. Although my diet is mostly good and I’m normally active, I’d had lapses over the years. I had
also suffered periods of severe stress, most significantly when a publishing partnership swallowed most of my savings, after which I worked single-handedly for three and a half years simply to get
back to where I’d started – this was the period when my hair turned white. I knew that stress can kill invisibly by raising blood pressure, thus causing the walls of the coronary
arteries to thicken in response, which further raises blood pressure, and so on – a classic example of runaway positive feedback. Maybe I’d had a small heart attack sometime, a few
moments of dizziness and clutching at the nearest surface, before coming round to woozy puzzlement. I racked my brains. Then it hit me. A frantic hour of Internet research confirmed my worst fears.
Myocardial contusion is normally the result of a severe blow to the chest, most commonly from the steering column in a road traffic accident. In July 2002, I’d suffered just such a severe
trauma to the chest. But I was nowhere near a car.

I was in Brazil filming my
Jungle Hooks
series. As part of this, I was helping a scientist friend of mine, Alexandre Honczaryk, and a team of fishermen to net one of Alex’s ponds.
Alex is an aquaculturist, working at the National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA) in Manaus, the Brazilian city at the heart of the Amazon. His consuming interest is the arapaima.
Specifically, he is trying to breed them in captivity in order to take pressure off the wild population, which, in most of the Amazon, has been decimated by overfishing. What we were trying to do
was change the combination of fish in his main pond, to get some fishy love-action going. For female arapaima, size matters – they will kill a male that is too small to satisfy them –
so we were trying to make sure that the next date didn’t end badly.

I was in the water, to one side of the semicircle of cork floats that marked the net perimeter, following it in as the two ends were pulled up on land, thus making the trap smaller and smaller.
On our previous attempt, a fish had leapt clear at the last minute, so I reached forward with both hands and lifted the net’s top cord into the air so it was level with my head. Because Alex
had warned me about getting too close to the net, I held my body well back from my outstretched arms as I waited to see what we had got this time.

I didn’t see it coming at all. From inside the belly of the net, I received a sledgehammer blow to my sternum that sent me flying backwards in agony. I struggled to my feet and then
doubled over as body fluids squeezed out through clenched eyelids. I remembered something about a martial arts death blow that sends the heart into arrhythmia, quickly followed by it stopping for
good, so I fumbled to find my pulse, and was reassured to find it strong and regular. But for the rest of the afternoon I kept checking, just to make sure. I now know I should have gone to the
hospital for observation and oxygen. But at the time I felt okay, not much different from how I used to feel most winter days as a teenager after an afternoon playing rugby as a punch-drunk
prop-forward. And besides, we had a television series to make. So I scarcely gave it a second thought despite the fact that, for six weeks, I couldn’t raise myself into a sitting position in
bed. In order to get up, I first had to roll on to my front and then slide my knees on to the floor.

But now as I looked back, something else struck me. During my time in the Amazon, I’ve heard various tales of fishermen disappearing, leaving only a canoe floating empty on a deserted lake
like a miniature
Mary Celeste
. Nobody ever found out what happened to them, but generally people said that a
bicho
got them. This is a generic term for ‘animal’ or
‘beast’. But, if pushed, people would say the most likely suspect was a
jacaré-açu
or as we know it, the black caiman (
Melanosuchus niger
), a broad-bodied
crocodilian that once used to grow to nearly twenty feet. Or they may attribute it to an anaconda (
Eunectes murinus
). Nobody ever mentioned arapaima, a fact that now struck me as odd.
Perhaps this is because arapaima don’t have big teeth (although if you’re a small fish swimming nearby, this is academic, because you’ll be sucked in from a distance and then
crushed by a bony tongue). They are also very pretty fish. Their vernacular name, pirarucu, comes from
pira
(fish) and
urucú
, the indigenous name of the
Bixa orellana
tree, from whose seeds, extracted from bright red spiky pods, we get the food dye annatto. So the arapaima is ‘the red fish’, from the coloration that edges its sculpted scales, getting
more and more vivid towards its broad paddle of a tail. Normally the background colour is dark green on the back that shades to silver flanks and a cream belly, but sometimes it is smoky black. And
sometimes, most rarely of all, it is the deepest black imaginable, like ink distilled from the midnight sky. Surely, the thinking seems to go, something so pretty can’t possibly be a
villain.

My involvement with this fish is long and complicated. After I finally caught a goliath tigerfish, I was looking for a new challenge. The arapaima had always occupied a mental backwater where it
surfaced infrequently, but after my successful return to the Congo, the arapaima seemed to breach more insistently, sending out ripples that tugged my attention towards the unseen creature at their
centre.

Something happens when you start going after fish that are potentially bigger than you, and the arapaima, so they say, is the biggest of them all. Anglers traditionally measure themselves by the
size of their catches: the bigger the fish, the greater the achievement, or so the thinking goes. As a product of this tradition, I used to weigh carp to the nearest ounce and rank them
accordingly. But since then I’d come to realise that it’s also about the things you can’t measure: an element of hardship, sometimes shading into danger – and, for those
truly obsessed, a whiff of unattainability.

In 1949, writing about the arapaima, Leander J. McCormick had declared, ‘Nowhere else in fresh water is there a fish so large and sporting . . . and yet this giant fish has hardly been
tested on a rod.’ Nearly half a century later, this still appeared to be the case: I could find no records of any contemporary captures. Maybe the arapaima was extinct. But surely this
wasn’t possible. I decided to make catching one my new mission. After my nightmare journeys to the Congo, the world’s second-largest rainforest, the world’s largest rainforest was
a daunting prospect. But with the Congo behind me and a track record of travelling alone, I considered myself uniquely qualified. All I had to do was get myself to a remote lake with enough energy
left to chuck out a bait, and the fish would be mine.

First I had to decide where in the Amazon to go. Most statistics about the Amazon are meaningless because the figures are too large to comprehend. As I read that the basin covers an area of 2.72
million square miles, my eyes glazed over. I needed that in terms of something that was familiar, and preferably something better than a multiple of Belgium, which for some reason is the normal
unit of comparative area. (The Amazon basin is 230 times the size of Belgium.) More meaningfully it covers 40 per cent of South America – which means it is twice the area of the Congo and 85
per cent of the land area of the United States’ forty-eight contiguous states. For most of this huge, semi-aquatic territory, there are no roads.

I tried to narrow my scope down a bit. I wanted to be away from centres of population, with their fish markets and fishing boats, but not too remote; I needed to be in and out within three
months. And I wanted ‘white water’, which, in the Amazon, means muddy: nutrient-rich and abundant in life. So my choice of the Rio Purus, one of the southern tributaries, wasn’t a
completely random stab on the map.

At two thousand miles in length, the Purus is one of the world’s great rivers in its own right, being longer than both the Danube and the Zambezi. To get there I planned to take a boat
nine hundred miles up the Amazon to Manaus, the main navigation hub (at the confluence with the longest northern tributary, the Rio Negro), and then find a smaller vessel ascending the Purus. It
looked simple on paper, but one thing worried me. I needed to be there in the dry season when arapaima are confined to the floodplain lakes rather than spread through flooded forest. But some
sources said the Purus, one of the most winding rivers in the world, isn’t navigable at low water.

I was glad to have Martin with me on this trip, the veteran of our heroically unsuccessful Congo expedition. Although he’s not an angler, I wanted him to be part of something when things
went right, and for an enthusiastic naturalist, what could be better than seeing the mythical ‘red fish’? He was as keen to see the Amazon as I was, giving up his job and room in Paris
for this shoestring journey to the rainforest, for which we’d specially acquired a £9.99 non-waterproof children’s toy tent.

The cheapest flights we could find were to the Brazilian coastal city of Recife, where the shoulder of South America pushes out into the Atlantic. Because we arrived on a day when the banks were
shut, we changed some money in the back room of a bar-cum-brothel in the port area, which held the biggest piles of cash I’ve ever seen. Brazilian hyperinflation was running at more than 40
per cent per month, and we emerged as cruzeiro multimillionaires. Looking for food that evening, Martin and I came across a political rally and a funfair, where the main attraction was a noisy
face-off between two men that ended when one man was floored from behind and then repeatedly kicked on the ground. We returned to our hotel, with its strange system of paying by the hour, its
wipe-down PVC mattresses, and the contraceptives on sale at the reception desk, and suddenly, with mutual horror, realised why the staff were giving us questioning looks.

The next day we took a bus northwest through the drought-stricken
sertão
backlands, and two days later we staggered out into equatorial humidity at Belém, the city at the
great river’s mouth.

At Belém you can’t see the Amazon’s far bank. An island the size of Switzerland is in the way. After two days we boarded a boat, slung our hammocks with three hundred other
passengers, and set off up the river. The next day the sun rose out of our wake, slowly climbed and passed above us, and then sunk into the watery horizon ahead. Distant grey islands floated
between water and sky. Ghastly yodelling
sertanejo
music blared nonstop from speakers on the upper deck. Where possible, the boat hugged the bank, where the current is slower, with the other
bank looking like a pencil-thin line. Looking out through the railings, as five days and nights came and went, I reflected how, if things had gone differently on an earlier trip to Southeast Asia,
I might now be rotting in jail. It was something I could imagine only too well, having served eight years, from the age of ten, at boarding school. To get through this I’d developed the
ability to dissociate mind and body, entering a state in which I could pass through empty time without feeling boredom. Minutes and hours lost meaning, ceased to exist. This stratagem served me
well at the time, but back in the outside world, it became a handicap. Now this sleight of mind was no longer the default setting – something else had claimed the psychic vacuum – but I
could still summon it when required, such as at times like this.

Then there were our fellow travellers. Before coming here, I’d studied Portuguese using textbooks and tapes for three months, for three hours every day. But these people on the boat
sounded nothing like the cake shop owner in Lisbon, from whom I used to buy imaginary custard tarts. A young man, if I heard him right, told me he was a ‘professor’ of kung fu and that
his baby boy was called Van Damme. A girl named Castia helped me with some colloquialisms, despite her disappointment that I knew neither Tom Cruise nor the New Kids on the Block. And her
faux-blonde friend, sunbathing on the top deck, filled me in on Manaus: ‘There’s lots of corruption, prostitution, poverty, crime . . . it’s great!’