River Monsters (14 page)

The presence of this city of more than a million inhabitants in the middle of the jungle is both reassuring and baffling. A noisy sprawl of high-rise blocks, stilt-house slums, and
roller-shuttered shops, it owes its existence to the rubber boom of the late 1800s and early 1900s, when thousands of migrants poured into the Amazon to collect latex from wild
Hevea
brasiliensis
trees. Along with its neo-classical opera house, Manaus had electricity before London, telephones before Rio de Janeiro, and electric trams when New Yorkers were still staring at
horses’ backsides. But boom turned to bust when the British created rubber plantations in Malaya and Ceylon grown from Brazilian seeds. After that, to stop the region from becoming
depopulated, the Brazilian government made Manaus a free-trade zone. This explained the shops selling tax-free TVs and computers from factories in the
distrito industrial
, mostly destined to
be airlifted to Brasilia and São Paulo.

But the high-tech communications didn’t extend to the Purus. At the floating port, they told us there were no boats at this time of year. But we kept asking because we didn’t have
any other ideas, and after three days we were directed to a disreputable-looking tub called the
Mario Antonio III
. The skipper, who looked like an incarnation of Beelzebub, assured us he was
going up the Purus ‘tomorrow,’ although the places he mentioned bore no relation to those on our map. The next day the price changed when the government announced a new currency, the
cruzeiro real, which was actually the same as the old currency but with the last three zeros ignored. Three days after that, with our hammocks swinging on the upper deck, we rolled on to the water
again.

Once in the Purus, even boat time became distorted. As the river twisted this way and that, the confused sun whirled crazily around us. At night, in the close-packed hammocks, I’d wake to
find a stranger’s toe picking my nose. Shifting position, I’d head-butt the sleeper on the other side. Some bends seemed to go on forever – past the same fallen tree, the same
lonely stilt house. And on board the same pans of rice, beans, and fish (lunch? supper? breakfast?) were again plonked on the table. But something was changing. Each day the river sunk a little
further below its banks. We finally disembarked down a narrow plank to soft mud and then climbed a steep flight of steps, at the top of which was the town. To get here from Recife had taken three
weeks.

Getting to a likely floodplain lake was equally laborious. In the following month, from our base in the forest, I managed just four days on Lago Grande while Martin toiled in the forest garden
of our host José. To get there I had to manhandle a wooden canoe down an overgrown creek, heaving it over fallen trees and dragging it through mud. Baitfish were hard to catch and then
lasted no time against the piranhas. So I trolled a lure behind the canoe, but piranhas cut the line, attacking the vee it made in the surface. But most disheartening was my growing awareness of
the scale of commercial fishing for arapaima.

This was driven by the imported Portuguese taste for salted fish. Traditionally the target species was cod, but here was an abundant freshwater alternative. Thus, arapaima became the
bacalhau
da Amazônia
, or Amazonian cod. For former rubber tappers stranded up in tributaries, here was a new source of income. Having been left alone for thousands of years because of the
pointlessness of hunting fish that were far too large to feed a family, whose leftovers would go rotten in hours, arapaima were now under relentless assault. Their habit of gulping air made them
vulnerable to harpooning, and they were also taken on set lines attached to flexible tree branches. A fleet of travelling buyers filled their holds with tons of salted meat. I’ve seen old
photographs from the Purus of unimaginable slaughter, the barrel-bodied corpses of giant arapaima alongside those of harpooned manatees, their nostrils plugged with wooden pegs to suffocate them to
death.

Now, with numbers much reduced and the easy availability of nylon monofilament, arapaima are most commonly taken in nets. Teams of fishermen wait for the precise day a lake becomes cut off by
falling floodwater and then move in, watching and encircling. Sometimes, if there are branches in the water that would snag their nets, they dive down and clear them with saws. Often they will
remove all of the large fish from a lake in a matter of days. At first I saw the huge fillets, like six-foot kippers, spread out on drying racks by riverside houses, and took this as a good sign.
Then I realised I could never beat the locals to the fish, certainly not on the Purus, which, it turns out, is the Amazon’s most heavily fished tributary. Fully 40 per cent of the fish eaten
in Manaus come from here.

Four weeks before our flight home, Martin and I returned to the town and started waiting for a boat. If I’d achieved nothing else, I now understood why I’d seen no recent reports of
arapaima caught by rod and line, and I tried to accept my failure philosophically.

I was back in England when the Amazon rains came. The footmarks I’d made in the mud now vanished under fifty feet of floodwater: fish swam where I had walked. Amazon folklore is full of
stories about the
encante
, an enchanted underwater kingdom whose occupants enter the dreams of fishermen and lure them away from their human lives. Sometimes this is the explanation given
for the empty canoe – the equivalent of being with the angels. A year later I was in a canoe again, back at Lago Grande, a water that fascinated and terrified me in equal measure. I had seen
things here that I couldn’t explain – huge upheavals in the water, distant snakelike shapes – and my curiosity had drawn me back. I was still trying to make a break as a freelance
writer, and I was sure there was a story here – something more substantial than a light piece for the travel pages – but I didn’t know what it was.

That year and the next three had no direction that I could discern at the time other than a slow submersion. Each year I spent another three months or more without Martin now, going further
beneath the surface of the Amazon’s aquatic and human life. Slowly I gained fluency in the mutated, hybrid Portuguese of the interior, with its sub-vocabulary of hard-edged indigenous names.
Every year I felt that my knowledge had increased to a point just short of some ill-defined critical mass, which lured me back again.

And while I reached,I had the sense that something was reaching for me: the line of bubbles, speeding towards me like the trail of a torpedo, then passing underneath the boat; the sudden
explosion of air and water, right underneath me, nearly tipping me into the water from fright. These were boto dolphins: massive, hunchbacked, and pink-skinned, like giant foetuses – the
malformed offspring of those lost fishermen perhaps. And indeed, Amazon folklore says dolphins do hybridise with humans. This happens when male dolphins take the form of young men and visit village
festivals, taking care to keep their hats on to conceal their blowholes. In this way they are the cause of many otherwise unexplained pregnancies.

The locals call this troublemaker the red dolphin, or
boto vermelho
, but foreigners call it the pink dolphin following a 1980s documentary series. ‘We know it’s pink, but its
name is the red dolphin,’ a man lectured me in the captain’s cabin of a riverboat. ‘Who does Jacques Cousteau think he is, changing the names of our animals?’

He went on, ‘Did you know that a female dolphin has parts that are exactly the same as a woman’s? That’s why some of these fishermen try to catch them. So they can
passar
regra
with them.’ I nodded, not knowing what to say, as he gestured towards my notebook. ‘That’s another thing Jacques Cousteau doesn’t know about red
dolphins.’

Then there was that outlandish saw-backed animal in Lago Grande – the hallucination that turned out to be real. By this time I had concluded it was a malformed pink dolphin, which drove my
research into this species, but I was no nearer to discovering what had caused it to look that way.

Meanwhile, the dolphins introduced me to the snakes. When I showed my pictures of the saw-backed apparition to fishermen, most had never seen anything like it. But some had seen other things.
Commonly this looked like a floating tree trunk, complete with root mass, but it would have been moving upstream, creating a wake. This apparition is the
cobra-grande
, literally ‘giant
snake’, and I met several sober fishermen who claimed to have seen it. This set me off on a prolonged anaconda hunt after the real-life giant snake of the Amazon. I was told about a distant
creek that held veritable monsters that were the width of oil drums and thirty feet long. If I could verify that with a tape measure and camera, not only would it be the largest snake ever
accurately recorded, but it would also qualify for the $50,000 prize, on offer since 1912 from the Wildlife Conservation Society of New York, for evidence of a (live) thirty-foot snake. But nobody
ever went up that creek – except one team of fishermen: arapaima fishermen.

They agreed to take me on their next foray. But they were on their own mission, and the snake hunt took second place. It was like a military operation, hacking our way through fallen trees with
an axe, dragging canoes through swamps, catching and cooking up small jaraqui on the run. And this was just the journey to work. The fishing itself was done at a different pace entirely –
silently watching then deploying the nets and then waiting for the fish to rise again. Finally, with the trap set, the men would beat the surface with sticks and thrash the branches of sunken
bushes to flush the fish out and drive them into the net. But the arapaima showed uncanny intelligence. I saw one grey torpedo launch itself four feet into the air and clear the net, to oaths from
the fishermen; luckily no one was in the way. Another time, one of the net floats dipped fractionally then popped back up. One of the men then pulled up the net to show me the hole that had just
been made. An arapaima had inserted its snout then expanded its head to break the meshes before sliding through to freedom. Then one day while travelling, I found the partial skeleton of an
anaconda that I estimated at possibly twenty feet long. But the arapaima had come back to the fore. I had seen how they were killed and butchered and how the fishermen just ate the chopped-up heads
with handfuls of gritty
farinha
, saving the boneless fillets for the merchants. At night, we rested our tired bodies in hammocks slung from trees while the group’s leader, who they
called ‘the fat man’ – though not to his face – told tales for hours about other fishing trips: the humanlike screams he’d heard not far from here and the patch of
jungle floor near the place known as
Meio do Mundo
(Middle of the Earth) that was so hot you couldn’t stand on it. On our third or fourth trip, with the live anacondas still not
showing, he turned to me and asked what I was really looking for. Many people still thought that I was an undercover gold prospector, so this was a familiar question. I said I wanted to catch an
arapaima on a line.

He thought for a moment and then said, ‘I think there’s a place where you could do that. We hardly fish there because it’s too deep and there are too many trees in the water.
But you’ve got to carry a canoe through the forest. I’ll get my son to take you.’

I duly waited another year, as instructed, for the forest to flood and then drain again. Then, with a piece of rag on my shoulder cushioning one end of a canoe, I sweated three miles along a
twisting forest path to the lake. When we got there, his son Josiney and I were too exhausted to fish right away, so we walked a little way along the bank to a place where we could watch the water.
The lake was long and narrow, about four hundred yards by seventy, with inlets at each corner reaching into the forest like tentacles. Along our bank, fallen trees with skeletal crowns sloped down
into black water. Opposite, the bank appeared steeper, with vegetation reaching over the surface and creating a dark secret space underneath. A strong wind was blowing up the lake, but we spotted a
couple of distant ripple-rings and launched the canoe. Then we saw another fish rise closer, but when we paddled near, the next movement was a tail-slap that flung water in a twelve-foot-high arc.
This was the sign that they knew we were here. To have a chance of catching one, I needed their surfacing to be
manso
(calm), not
brabo
(wild). We’d be better leaving the boat
and returning fresh in the morning.

The next day a silent creature stalked the lake, twitching the single fin at its rear to creep forward stealthily, almost imperceptibly. At its other end a single tentacle extended, motionless
for long periods and then flicking in the direction of its prey. Dangling from this rod was a dead six-inch ararì, suspended six feet beneath a cigar-sized float. But with the wind blowing
again, this time down the lake, and the few rises mostly out of casting range, my chances didn’t look good. I decided to change tactics and fish blind in an area where there had been some
earlier rolls. With the canoe in the middle of the lake, the cast landed just short of the branches on the far side, and immediately the wind pushed a belly into the line, which started dragging
the float parallel to the bank while we drifted alongside. I watched, holding my breath, as it passed some likely ambush spots, close to the
galhadas
, sunken tree-crowns, where I’d
seen arapaima move before. Then it was in an open gap. Then I couldn’t see it anymore, and my line was running out.

The next minutes were a blur of me yelling at Josiney to keep the canoe ‘in the middle!’ as the fish made for the sanctuary of the fallen trees. Then the canoe was spinning as water
slopped over the sides, and the line was somewhere behind me as I tried to twist to face it. Then it was straight down, and I had the first feeling that I was gaining control. A mass of bubbles
erupted underneath us and the rod kicked back – and then a sight I had waited six years to see: a long, shining, smoky-grey body trailing tendrils of water as it hung suspended in the air,
level with my face. Then the back of a machete blade being brought down on its sculpted, bony head followed by a sickness in my stomach that this was part of the deal – my payment for being
brought here.