River Monsters (21 page)

This is exactly what you’d read from a similar type of breach from an arapaima. Like arapaima, alligator gar are air-breathers, capable of surviving in poorly oxygenated water, like the
shrunken Trinity in September. Their swim bladder, in addition to being a buoyancy device, is also a primitive lung. So from time to time they have to rise to change the air inside. And if they
feel unsafe at the surface – perhaps because they have been shot at with arrows before in this place – this operation is not calm and relaxed but quick and noisy. We ended the day with
no fish caught, despite transferring to the bank, where the movements of my four-person entourage would transmit less into the water..

The next day’s fishing was with another bow-hunting guide, Mark Malfa, who also took rod-and-line anglers, if anyone expressed an interest, but these were very much in the minority. We
spent the day moving into holes where fish were moving, only for them to move elsewhere, leaving our water empty. In desperation I reached down the years to the time when I was a schoolteacher, and
I then delivered a hissed lecture to the crew about the vital importance of keeping quiet. I wasn’t so concerned about talking, which was fine within reason, as I was about knocking and
banging on the hull. These are wild animals we’re trying to get close to, I reminded them. Just a cable-end dropped in the boat could send them all scattering, and then we’ll have to
wait two or three hours for them to come back. And with only four days allotted for fishing in our eight-day schedule, we could go home empty-handed. The situation was as serious as that. Like
naughty schoolchildren, they considered themselves reprimanded, and I’ve not been allowed to forget it ever since. But these were early days, and since then I’ve got everybody well
trained, which is more to their credit than mine: a mobile, stealthy film crew is a thing to behold.

A little later, something took my bottom-fished carp chunk. I let the line run out, ever so slowly, under no tension, and after maybe sixty yards, I tightened and wound down, bringing back an
intact bait. Any other fish would have been well and truly hooked, but people have noted that gar feed in a very characteristic way. When they take a live fish, they grab it crosswise in the end of
their jaws and then move off with it to a place where they feel undisturbed, like a dog retreating to its den. Then, the prey’s struggles having died down, they will turn it, little by
little, until it’s ready to go headfirst down the gar’s throat. At this point the mouth will fully close and the prey will be in a pelican-like pouch that runs along the lower jaw. Even
when feeding on a small piece of dead fish, gar will apparently treat it in the same way, as if this behaviour is somehow programmed. As one man said to me, a gar’s mouth is like its shopping
trolley: they will keep food in there for later. So if the angler tries to set the hook before the bait is passed to the back of the mouth, either the hook is not inside the mouth or it fails to
make any impression on the bony jaws. Already I could see why some fishermen of old, always inventive, had done away with hooks altogether and had taken to lassoing gars by the snout with wire
nooses threaded with fish pieces. Others armed the bait with a nest of thick line, a short length of frayed rope, or a piece of women’s nylon tights to tangle the teeth of this unco-operative
critter.

Mark said to let the run go even further, but when I did this the fish dropped the bait, probably because of the drag caused by having all that line out. But later that afternoon I brought in a
four-footer, which was not the fish I wanted but nonetheless an indication that, possibly, I was one step nearer to that fish.

The next day, I decided on a new tactic: let the fish make its long, slow, twenty-minute run downstream and then, after waiting for it to move off again, drift down after it, steering around
fallen trees with the electric trolling motor. Again, the rolling fish mostly moved away whenever we approached and the day was a slow chase, but late in the afternoon I had the chance to put the
plan into action. As I slowly wound more and more of the line back on the reel and we drifted closer and closer to the fish, I scarcely dared to breathe. Then, from the angle of the line, I saw
that the fish had started to head back upstream, which probably meant that the bait was now properly taken. This time when I tightened, there was a heavy weight on the line and the fish surged away
in response. Thinking of all the dead branches in the water, I strained to keep it on a short line, changing the direction of my pull to keep it confused when it was close to the boat. When I
finally saw it, for just a fraction of a second, the plume of water it sent up drenched me despite my position on the foredeck four feet above the surface. The rod doubled over in response, but the
150-pound braid held, and after some more plunges beside the boat, Mark was able to loop a strap behind its pectoral fins and heave it aboard.

By now the sky was dark, but under the light of several torches I marvelled at this beast with its pterodactyl-proof armour. The body behind the head was round like a barrel, drab olive green on
top, and shaded to pale cream on the belly. Then there was a hiss as it expelled air, and I saw the plates of its upper jaw come apart, widening the head to maximise the volume of the mouth cavity
before it pushed the new charge back into the swim bladder, releasing a small surplus from the gills as its big yellow-reflecting eye, in its recessed socket behind the angle of the jaw, seemed to
pop at the effort of it all. But from this I knew it would be okay once it was back in the water. It breathed strongly once or twice more as we weighed it in the sling and ran a tape along its
length. Then the two of us cradled it for photos before slipping it back into the dark water, where it swept its tail lazily and sank from sight.

I wiped my left forearm where I was bleeding, cut by the rearward points of its diamond-shaped scales where its slimy body had slid backwards in my arms – a memorable demonstration of why
these were once used as arrowheads. Then there was the relief all around that we had a film. At 123 pounds and six feet, eight inches long, it was a serious-sized fish and a tangible sign that the
species is not done for yet. The only downside was that it had swallowed the hook, so I’d had to cut the leader. This is common in gar fishing, but at least I’d been using a single hook
rather than the trebles that are normally used for gar. Furthermore, it appears that the fish survive with this minor irritant, possibly dissolving it with their gastric juices. But even so, I
resolved to try circle hooks, instead of conventional J hooks, if I ever return. These are hooks I’ve been using for a decade now, originally for arapaima, and I’ve found they
practically eliminate the risk of deep hooking. If the line is tightened steadily rather than sharply struck, the turned-in point will pivot and lodge, almost without fail, in the corner of the
mouth. But they require a leap of faith for each new species, particularly those with teeth that might grip a leader and prevent its gradual tightening.

On our last fishing day, back with Bubba, I managed to cut myself on the outside of the mouth of a lively three-footer, and I followed this up with a 111-pounder. Also with me in the boat was
Mark Spitzer, assistant professor of writing at the University of Central Arkansas and a walking encyclopedia on all things gar as well as a tireless champion of this ‘very despised, hated
fish’. He summed up their treatment at the hands of humans thus: ‘Basically they look scary, and so that led to people just wanting to run them out of town. And so they were run out of
town.’ As for the alleged attacks on humans: ‘Where’s the evidence?’ There are certainly large gar still around, but there are no reliable recent accounts of them injuring
people.

Perhaps there are just too few of them or the reason for the lack of attacks is because the really big ones are no longer around. Many books (such as
A History of Fishes
by J. R. Norman)
say they can grow to 20 feet, but there’s no evidence for this, even though there are fossilised gars that are nearly 15 feet. The current consensus is closer to 10 feet, and there are photos
that show fish around this size. Perhaps the best known is one in the archive of the American Museum of Natural History. This photo shows a fish caught from Moon Lake in Mississippi in 1910 lying
on a sagging plank between two trestles with a top-hatted man sitting behind it. But the fish is unusually thin and its fins are unnaturally flared. My guess is that this could have been just a
skin, opened down the side, which had stretched when it was hung up. And the fins could have simply dried out when set in the spread position. In other words, this was probably an amateurish
attempt at taxidermy. We’ll never know, but nonetheless, this was certainly a very big fish. Other old pictures show gar strung up in trees, as if lynched. One old picture I’ve seen has
‘10½ foot gar, 465 pounds’ written on the back. It was caught by a net maker, Fred Miller, when he was testing a net in winter in an oxbow of the Mississippi near Memphis. The
gar’s tail hangs just above Fred’s knees, and the whole front half of its body is above Fred’s head. Somehow it doesn’t look quite as big as claimed, but that could be
because its belly is turned towards the camera, and as a result, we don’t see the body’s full depth. (It’s not unusual for a photo not to do justice to a fish’s size.) And
the weight-to-length ratio is absolutely plausible, being about the same proportions as my 111-pounder. The man who showed me this picture, whose family knew Fred, told me the Memphis newspapers in
the 1950s carried lots of pictures of 100- to 200-pound fish, usually caught on sawn-off pool cues with rotting chicken carcasses. But the biggest gar he ever heard of was never weighed. It got
caught in a gillnet his grandfather set in the St. Francis River in the early 1900s and had to be pulled in with the help of a mule and then finished off with a shotgun. For years its scales were
used as ashtrays. (I have some scales from a six-footer, discarded on the bank by a bow hunter, that measure just over 1½ inches, so that gives some idea of the size of this other large
gar.)

Another man, Bobby Fly, who caught a seven-footer weighing 162½ pounds from Lake Livingstone, told me he’s seen a fish twice this length: ‘I was tied up in the top of a willow
tree in a fourteen-foot flat-bottom, and this bad boy came right up beside, and just surfaced right there. And I seen the front of my boat and the back of my boat, and I’ve seen fish all the
way. So I . . . went home to the house. I didn’t hang around.’

As for rod-caught specimens, the IGFA record is a fish of 279 pounds that a man named Bill Valverde caught from the Rio Grande in West Texas in 1951. But this was surpassed by a nine-foot,
six-inch fish, weighing 365 pounds, that was caught by Trinity fishing guide ‘Capt Kirk’ Kirkland in 1991. Since then, well-documented fish over 200 pounds have been caught most
years.

Fish of this size are easily big enough to grab and pull in a person, if they were so inclined. So why aren’t they still snaffling the occasional child or toe-dangling fisher-boy? For a
start, alligator gar only eat prey that they can swallow whole. Compared to a goonch or piraiba, their jaws are narrow, so a human would be beyond them. And they are not like sharks or goliath
tigerfish, which can bite pieces out of large animals. That leaves a territorial response: perhaps they’re just aggressive, like wels catfish. But I’ve heard from people who have
happily swum with wild seven-foot gator gar and survived unmolested.

To test this myself, I decided to get personal with a couple of two hundred-pounders that live in a pond at the Texas Freshwater Fisheries Center. Seen through the observation window, they
looked like mobile sculptures – huge flexing slabs of carved marble. Diving down, I almost bumped into one of them that was lying loglike between some stumps under a floating weedbed. Seen
this close, even allowing for the magnification of my mask, its bulk was astounding. You could have put a saddle on it, as the old boys say. I reached out a hand, but it slid away faster than I
could follow. I wanted to lie on the bottom and become part of the underwater landscape, but every time I dived, both fish edged away until I had to return gasping to the surface. Once, for a brief
second, I ran my hand down a cobbled flank, but I got the feeling my clumsy advances unnerved them, and they wanted to be left alone. Although the encounter left me awestruck, at no time did I feel
threatened.

On reflection, though, I think some of those old tales might have a grain of truth. Back in the early 1900s, before houses had running water, fish were commonly gutted and cleaned at the sides
of rivers and lakes. And fish of all species would come to feed in such places, associating splashing with food. This is exactly what still happens with piranhas in the Amazon – except with
one difference. If a piranha nips you, you lose a piece of finger. But if you get your splashing foot shut in the jaws of a hungry alligator gar, with its five hundred needle-sharp teeth up to an
inch long, it’s entirely possible that you’ll end up in the water or get your leg shredded. But this wouldn’t be an intentional ‘attack’. And because of changed living
conditions, there’s almost zero risk of anything similar happening today.

So it’s high time we re-evaluated the gator gar and saw it for what it really is: a unique zoological relic that is worthy of our protection – and not just for its own sake either.
Perhaps if this misunderstood predator hadn’t been extirpated from the Illinois River, the current plague of Asian carp in that waterway would never have happened. So when, on September 1,
2009, shortly after the
River Monsters
gar episode aired in the United States, the state of Texas limited the number of gar that recreational or commercial fishermen can take from the water
to one per day, this was indeed momentous news. Previously there had been no protection whatsoever in this last hiding place. Spitzer cites one commercial fisherman who removed 38,200 pounds of gar
in 2008, the equivalent of four hundred 100-pounders. Yet people, even some bow hunters, have gradually welcomed the move.