River Monsters (15 page)

As arapaima go, it wasn’t a big fish. At fifty inches in length it would have weighed perhaps forty-five pounds. But caught on a rod and line from an area of intensive arapaima hunting, it
was a momentous catch. Three long years later, I was heading back to Brazil with a TV crew.

Actually the ‘crew’ at this point was one person, director/ cameraman Gavin Searle. Our multitasking sound recordist Fernando Setta would join us on arrival. Just three days later
they would be filming my blow from the arapaima and commenting how lucky I was to be hit in an area of protective bone rather than in the face or lower down the body.

The day after that, we boarded a five-seater plane and flew up the Purus. We had been delayed in Manaus, so straight after off-loading our stuff we took the rear door off, strapped in, and took
off to shoot our aerials. My job, sitting next to the pilot, was to relay instructions from behind, shouted above the roar of the wind and the engine. Having circled some backwaters, we were
following the river back upstream, flying low, when I heard Gavin and Fernando shout, ‘More lakes!’ I had a shouted conversation with our local boatman, Louro, seated behind me, then
asked the pilot to climb. As we did so, a ribbon of silver opened up in the green wedge between the Purus and an entering sub-tributary. I instructed the pilot to line up on it and then come in
low.

We were at five hundred feet or less when we heard a loud pop and then the plane started shaking. In front of me I saw the blades of the single prop becoming visible, and in my peripheral vision
I was aware of treetops rising to meet us. From inside a vortex of wordless fear, I heard the gentle flicking sound of something brushing our underbelly. Then again, more heavily, and then there
was a second pause, doubly filled with both certainty and unknowing. Then everything went dark and a giant hand was shaking us, the g-forces coming from all directions at once, before slamming us
sideways and down with the sound of tearing metal. For a millisecond my thought was one thing only: it was over and I was unhurt. Then my lungs filled with an unmistakable sharp taste, as liquid
poured on to my shoulders from above: fuel. I clawed at my harness buckle but found it jammed, as the liquid rose up my body to my chest. Not understanding how there could possibly be this much
fuel, I reached for my knife, but the pilot had freed me, and I swam out through the co-pilot’s door supported by the stinking liquid, which for some reason now extended in all directions
under the trees.

As I swam underneath the plane’s tail, I saw four figures standing on the water’s surface. Moments later they had pulled me up on to the port wing. Sunlight poured through the hole
we’d torn in the canopy, illuminating the wrecked plane and shredded trees, and five men without a single scratch between them. Two of our cameras were destroyed, but one had kept recording
throughout. Back in town that night, having waded and walked to the river, where a flotilla of boats picked us up, we watched the footage back. Before playing it, we all agreed that the time
between the explosion and the plane hitting the trees had been three or four minutes. On the tape it was fourteen seconds.

We also remembered no human sounds, but on the tape there was pandemonium: shouts, obscenities, and then breathless prayers.

Over the days and weeks that followed, I tried to scalpel apart the pages of my memory to find what was locked there. The sheer improbability of our escape haunted me. Establishing the precise
sequence of events – and contemplating all the what-ifs – became my obsession. Returning to the wreck, I saw that we’d stalled in the crown of a rubber tree, which had bent and
then cracked, dumping us side-on into a much larger tree, which would have crumpled us like a tin can if we’d hit it head-on, depositing the engine in my lap. Afterwards, everybody asked us
the same thing. Did we think we were going to die? It happened too quickly, we said. Now, however, as I belatedly worked through the mental in-tray, I sensed there was something there that I had to
deal with.

It was just a flash, but it was there: a moment of certainty that I was going to burn. And for this to happen, after I’d escaped dismemberment, was just so unfair. That was the feeling:
primal and childlike. Then to be spared this fate only to be extinguished by water was just too much, a good-news-bad-news joke without a funny side.

About three weeks later a realisation hit me with such force that it woke me up. The swamp we’d landed in got steadily deeper as it neared the lake. If we’d come down just one second
later, the water that rose while I struggled to free my harness wouldn’t have stopped at my chest.

Cynics have since told me that we could have all retired on the insurance payouts if we’d played the permanent mental damage card. But that never crossed our minds, nor has it since. The
best payout is being alive. Besides, we had a film to make. An Amazon beauty contest, a tussle with a ten-foot caiman, and campfire songs from our strange friend Cabra Bom (‘the good
goat’) awaited us. And, just when we’d given up on the main event, after a day of piranha fishing with Manoel Karajá, he looked at us and said, ‘I’ve heard of a place
where they’ve seen a big pirarucu. You can come there with me, but you’ve got to catch it our way.’

After chugging downriver on the last of our fuel, with no rod in the boat, we followed him to a reed-fringed lagoon where patches of the surface intermittently flickered and distorted. After
watching the movements of this baby arapaima shoal for nearly an hour, along with the occasional bulging displacements made by its watching parents, we cut a dead three-pound traira in half and
whirled the tail end through the air on a 150-pound handline. As soon as the line settled on the water, it started to move, but so slowly that I had to ask Manoel before I heaved back in response.
The next thing I knew, a huge eruption shattered the lake’s surface and the line was running hot through my hands, cutting my palms. To keep it out of the weeds and away from a stump, I had
to stumble first one way along the muddy bank and then the other as the line sliced the surface with a hiss, and the displacements caused by its sudden changes of direction were like detonations of
high explosive. The struggle was over in only a few minutes, but the intensity of such direct contact with a fish that was longer and heavier than me was unlike anything felt with a rod and reel.
Dragged on to the bank, the fish jackknifed its body, punching its head four feet in the air, into the space where my head had been only a moment before. This was a fitting finale to our
Jungle
Hooks
series, a tale of danger and back-to-basics fishing, with the unspoken message that sometimes you can’t get where you want to go by means of a straight line. With a nod from Manoel,
I slid the fish back into the water, supported it while it took a gulp of air, and let it go.

The sight of this fish, all 200 pounds of it, from this shallow pond left me shaking. But the claims for arapaima growing to fifteen feet are certainly wrong. This figure can be traced back to
the German explorer Schomburgk, who visited South America in 1836 and who gave a corresponding weight of 410 pounds. As Leander J. McCormick wrote, ‘These figures have been adhered to for
more than a hundred years without anyone stopping to consider what kind of shape such a fish would have; but any angler with experience of large fish would be sure to notice the disproportion
between length and weight.’ My fish scaled up to that length would weigh in the region of 2,000 pounds, similar to a real-live sturgeon. So fifteen feet can be ruled out as unreliable. The
modern consensus is around eleven feet and 500 pounds.

My only regret was that Martin didn’t see my fish. Since getting a job as a stonemason (he worked on Bath Abbey and the Albert Memorial) and then a family, he hasn’t had time for any
more trips with me. Although he has now given up the regular job, he does have two boys to look after, in between collecting dead animals for his uniquely haunting still-life photographs shot on an
old-style, blanket-over-the-head five-by-four-inch plate camera in hyper-surreal black-and-white. But he did put me up in his spare room for a year before I upgraded to two rooms in a
friend’s house, where I am now, and he always gets a faraway look when I talk about the Amazon. He’s the one person I bring back presents for – usually fish scales or animal bones
–which he keeps in his garden shed, now well known as the place where we film the introductory segment for each
River Monsters
episode.

When I finally went for my coronary angiogram, the doctor inserted a tube into my right wrist and pushed it up my brachial artery to my heart, where it injected radio-opaque dye. At the edge of
my vision I could see a moving X-ray image, a cluster of dark vessels against a light background, near the window behind which the cath lab staff and cardiologist sat. After I’d been wheeled
out, the registrar told me I have a very slight thickening of the coronary artery walls, but it’s nothing more than anyone else might have at my age. Confused, I asked about the dead muscle.
There was no sign of it: an artefact, a trick of the light. But, from time to time, the missed beats are still there. In itself this is nothing to worry about. It’s just a dull thump in the
chest, like a distant echo of a flying arapaima.

Sometimes, too, the vision of an empty canoe floats into my mind: a body knocked into the water, with the piranhas, candirus and caimans finishing the job. On one of my last visits to Manaus I
ran into José’s cousin, buying supplies and ammunition prior to heading back upriver. Arnaldo had introduced me to the dubious delights of small-town nightlife, but I had also seen him
with his head and upper body down a wild pig’s burrow, digging his way to the tusk-rattling beast with his bare hands while José waited behind him with the shotgun. ‘We had
another tourist up the Purus this year,’ he said. ‘He had his own big canoe with a motor, and he was staying with people along the river. When he arrived in the town, he started waving
money around and somebody robbed him. They took 5,000 reais.’

I felt a surge of envy. With that kind of money (nearly £2,000) and kit, I would have surely found the arapaima far more quickly and comfortably without being taken on such a crazy,
exhausting, indirect route: the back-breaking weeks weeding José’s manioc patch and lugging loads to his boat, to earn my right to stay in the forest; the whole month waiting for a
message from the fat man; the tropical ulcers and bone-deep machete wound; all that paddling and dragging of leaking borrowed canoes . . .

I re-tuned to the story. Apparently, before the man came to the town, he had stayed with some of Arnaldo’s friends, an extended family of fishermen scraping a living from the river.
‘When they heard he had been robbed in the town, they were outraged,’ he said.

Despite my bitterness, I found I was cheered by this concern.

‘If they’d known he was carrying that much money, they would have killed him,’ he said. ‘Somebody would have just found his boat.’

7

THE ENGULFER

But nobody was clear about exactly where or when this happened until I met Valmi Pereira. He said he witnessed the incident himself at the mouth of Rio Canumã, one of the subtributaries
of the Rio Madeira, in June 2000. This time of year, in the southern sector of the Amazon basin, is the beginning of the
vazante
, the ‘emptying’ of the flooded forest, when the
floodwaters of the rainy season, which can raise water levels by as much as fifty feet in places, start to recede. At this time multitudes of small fish, which have hatched and feasted in the
flooded forest, pour back into the main waterways, and every year predators, including fishermen, intercept them. On this day, there were several fishing teams working the confluence, and all of
them joined forces to retrieve the net and the body of the fisherman. But in Valmi’s story, the net, a small-mesh seine for encircling shoals of small fish, was empty: no fish and no corpse.
Not until four hours later did the fish appear on the surface, in a state of some distress, choking on its meal. The men clubbed it to death and carefully slit its stomach to reveal the face of the
fisherman, although they knew he was past hope.