River Monsters (29 page)

One person who is sure there is something down there is Robbin LaVine, an anthropologist studying subsistence fisheries on the lake. Just a couple of years earlier she had been in a float plane,
about to touch down, when she and a colleague saw a dark shape in the water beside two small islands. Glen took us up so she could point out exactly where she saw it. In this area of the lake there
is a shallow marginal shelf, fifteen to twenty feet deep, which, from three hundred feet up, is clearly visible as a light-coloured band beside the dark blue deeper water. As we circled and
approached, I marvelled at the visibility. I could see pods of salmon, like furls of iron filings drawn to the magnetic poles of the river mouths. Robbin says she observed the animal for a good
thirty to forty seconds. Far too big to be a seal, she said it was ‘distinctly fish-like’ with a long, broad head and large pectoral fins, giving it a profile somewhat like an
arrowhead. She said it wasn’t on the surface: ‘It almost looked like it might have been stirring up something on the bottom, although there were no clouds of silt.’ Her colleague
thought he saw a flash of pink, which made him think it might have been feeding on salmon. She estimated the fish was the length of one of the aluminum skiffs used on the lake – at least
fifteen feet.

Hearing her description, the monster came into sharper focus in my mind. From being a hazy entity, it now suddenly became clear, and when I cross-referenced it against my mental database . . .
yes, I had a match! It was a fish that I knew only from pictures, but now I had to see one in the flesh. But to catch it from this thousand-square-mile lake in water hundreds of feet deep would
surely take a lifetime. The only way I was going to be certain of the monster’s identity was to leave Lake Iliamna and cast a line somewhere else.

About 1,500 miles down the Pacific coast of North America from the mouth of the Kvichak is the mouth of the Columbia River, flowing between the states of Washington and Oregon
in the United States’ Pacific Northwest. Some 100 miles upriver is the city of Portland, and a little upriver from there but below the Bonneville Dam is a hole in the bottom that is ninety
feet deep. From a boat anchored at the upstream end of the hole, just off some fluted cliffs that looked as if they might have been shaped with a jelly mould, I dropped a dead herring-like shad
into the water – a little over a foot long with bright silvery flanks. On the other bank was a beach that shelved away into deep water much like the margins at Lake Iliamna where Robbin saw
her fish. But unlike Iliamna, this water was moving very strongly. To hold the bait on the bottom, I’d put on a pound of lead, and if something took the bait, I’d be fighting the
combined weight of fish and water. On the plus side, however, the moving water would take the scent of my bait way downstream, unlike in still water where the flavour diffuses into a small cloud
that is restricted to the immediate area. I waited in tense anticipation, knowing that something could be following that scent trail right now.

For a long time all was quiet, but then came the knock on the line. There was a pause, and then another knock, and then . . . yes, the line was running out steadily and decisively. As I engaged
the drag and wedged the rod butt into my stomach, the rod took on a frightening bend and a huge weight accelerated downstream, making me double up, like a blow to the guts. The pitch of the ratchet
rose from fast click to continuous squeal as I yelled above it to cast off from the anchor buoy. This was a borrowed rod and reel, and I wasn’t sure how much line I had, although I’d
been told it was two or three hundred yards. But the bright yellow braid was pouring off the reel at a frightening pace. With horror I realised that the spool containing what was left of it, as
well as shrinking in diameter, was also changing colour as the bare spool or backing appeared underneath it.

With only a few turns to go, I learned it was backing, but I had no idea what or how much, so I frantically loosened off the drag and watched the last of the main line disappear through the rod
rings and into the water, followed by thin mono that looked only about thirty-pound strain. But at least the boat was moving now, and in a couple of minutes I had the main line back on the reel and
was putting pressure back on. The fish was hanging deep and made a couple more long charges, and at one point the line cut up through the surface, making me think the fish was going to jump, but at
the last moment it sounded again. We engaged the motor and tried to steer it towards the shallows where we could jump in and secure it, but the fish refused to come up the drop-off, powering away
every time it sensed the light of the surface layers or the reduction in water pressure around it or the grating of the bottom against its belly. But the distance that the fish was going back and
forth was getting shorter, until the line length and angle told me that the magical moment when imagination and reality converge was near. I shifted my focus, hunting up and down beneath the
surface, and suddenly, there it was: a long shape, streamlined as a missile and with the prominent pectoral fins that Robbin kept mentioning.

The creature before me was a sturgeon, said by some to be the biggest freshwater fish in the world. But many would take issue with this because most sturgeon are not full-time residents in fresh
water. Like salmon, they are anadromous, migrating to the sea to feed (more food there) and then returning to rivers to breed (a safer nursery for young). However, they are the biggest fish found
in fresh water. The largest of the twenty-odd sturgeon species is the beluga sturgeon (
Huso huso
), which lives in the Black Sea and Caspian Sea as well as the surrounding rivers in Russia
and central Asia. Historical reports include a twenty-four-foot fish, weighing 3,250 pounds, from the Volga estuary in 1827 and another from the Dnieper estimated at 3,400 pounds. The FishBase
website gives a maximum published weight of 7,040 pounds, which is over three tons. My fish was a white sturgeon (
Acipenser transmontanus
), the biggest North American species. (The word
‘beluga’ also means white, although these fish are not the brilliant white of the beluga whale, whose name shares the same Russian origin.) The fish now in front of me looked grey in
the water, or ‘dull aluminum’, in the reported words of pilot Babe Alsworth. When it surfaced, the water blur cleared to reveal an intricate granular pattern of small white discs
sprinkled on a grey-brown background with a hint of blue. The leathery skin was scaleless, but running down the middle of each flank was a row of diamond-shaped bony ‘scutes’, and
another row followed the ridge of its back. This was what left the ‘bite’ marks in Bill Trefon’s parents’ propeller – not when the fish attacked the boat but when they
motored over the basking fish. And something else now fell into place. Robbin had told me about a fisherman who found a strange bone in the form of a large circular dish on one of Iliamna’s
many islands. When she asked where it was – thinking that DNA analysis might prove useful – he was unable to relocate where he had hidden it. But I’d found it here. Behind the
tapering snout on each side of the head, protecting the gill chamber, was a bony disc about a foot in diameter.

My fish was nine feet long and would have weighed around 300 pounds – at the bottom end of the size scale for the fish seen in Iliamna. (We didn’t get an accurate weight because
local regulations forbid lifting large sturgeon out of the water, as this can damage their internal organs.) But they grow much bigger than this. In the 1970s a legendary sturgeon nicknamed
‘Big Moe’ was sometimes hooked, but never landed, below the McNary dam. The wide-eyed anglers said this fish was at least twenty feet long. In 1893 a 2,000-pounder was reportedly
caught. This was when commercial fishing on the Columbia was at its peak. The year before, the total catch was five and a half million pounds, the average size being seven feet or 150 pounds. Going
by some other fish that were both weighed and measured, the 2,000-pound fish would have been fourteen or fifteen feet long.

But commercial fishing on this scale was unsustainable, and by 1898 it had almost wiped out the Columbia River’s sturgeon. Only after fishing was closed for a decade did they start to make
a comeback. In the 1940s small sturgeon were showing up in salmon gillnets. In 1950 the government introduced strict regulations that forbade the taking of any fish over six feet long. At the other
end of the scale, all sturgeon measuring less than four feet must be returned (thirty inches for those noncommercial fishermen who don’t practise catch-and-release). The results of this
policy are tangible. As well as my catch, some fish around the thirteen-foot mark have been reported in recent years, and these fish would have cleared a thousand pounds. And in early 2008, when
sonar showed what appeared to be a huge pile of rubble beneath the Bonneville Dam, prompting panic among engineers, this turned out to be a solid ‘ball’ of sturgeon, which the operators
of the submersible that was sent down to investigate estimated to comprise around sixty thousand individuals. Maybe in time the mythical leviathans of the past will, after all, be reincarnated.

In the meantime, although the white sturgeon’s massive size isn’t in question, there remains the question of how they might sink boats. Sturgeon are secretive bottom-feeders,
commonly vacuuming up sedentary food items such as shells and crustaceans. Instead of jaws crammed with teeth, they have a strange protrusible mouth on the underside of the head, behind a curtain
of four dangling feelers. To retrieve my barbless hook, I rolled the fish partially on its side and put my hand in this toothless chasm. It was like a rubbery oversize sleeve that I was able to
extend about a foot from its ‘stowed’ position. Even without jaws to seize larger prey, I could now see how a big sturgeon could easily inhale a live shad or even a salmon just by the
suction created when this tube is deployed and opened. Because of the position of its mouth, however, it would have to roll its body to direct this suction, unless its prey was directly underneath
it. And thinking about this, I remembered the strange, twisting movements of the fish that Robbin saw . . .

Its behaviour is, in a way, predatory and aggressive, but there’s a world of difference between nailing a salmon on the lake bed and attacking a boat. But a crop of eye-popping reports
from the Suwannee River in northwest Florida bridge this credibility gap. In the summer of 2006 a flying four-foot gulf sturgeon (
Acipenser oxyrinchus desotoi
, a subspecies of the Atlantic
sturgeon) knocked unconscious a twenty-three-year-old jet skier, Blake Fessenden, who only survived because his girlfriend, on another craft, arrived and held his head out of the water. Another
sturgeon victim that year was thirty-two-year-old Dawn Poirier, who was in a coma for fifteen days and had to have half her face reconstructed. Among nine injuries reported in 2007 was one
fatality, when a boat swerved to avoid a jumping sturgeon, thereby throwing two passengers into the water, one of whom drowned.

Nobody knows why some fish jump. Dominance display, group communication, and getting rid of parasites are the normal suggestions. In the days when I used to camp beside English lakes, I saw and
heard bottom-feeding carp do it a lot, usually crashing down on their sides. And I’m told the white sturgeon of the Columbia River do it as well, which would be quite something if you
happened to be underneath it. In the enormity of Lake Iliamna, such a misfortune would seem extremely unlikely, until you consider that some fish jump when alarmed.

Sometimes, too, the best defence is attack. Picture a fish basking near the surface and suddenly a strange black shape appears right overhead. Whatever that shape is, it’s invading body
space with no regard for the normal niceties of territory and dominance. In 2009 I received an e-mail from a man who was out on Lake Chelan one day, a dammed arm of the Columbia. ‘We came
across a monster as long as our boat, 18 foot. It got mad at us, like a jaws movie. It was faster than us and put up more wake, with a 55 HP Merc opened up . . . It does have old Indian stories
about it, but only two old men believed us, saying they’d seen it too.’

But are they really in Lake Iliamna? White sturgeon are said to inhabit coastal waters from central California right up to Alaska. But bottom-fishing halibut anglers diligently sample
Alaska’s coastal waters, and they never catch sturgeon. And no one would miss a ten-foot fish running up the Kvichak – unless the sturgeon went up at night, like cagey Himalayan mahseer
entering a shallow clear-water tributary. But there are anecdotal reports: of one caught in Bristol Bay; of another spotted a few decades ago in the Igushik River, which runs into Bristol Bay; and
of others allegedly in the Kvichak. Either their range has shrunk or these are strays – or both. Certainly sturgeon worldwide are not as widespread as they once were. Seeing a sturgeon in a
British river would be like spotting a UFO, but there are cast-iron cases of their presence in the past.

For instance, on July 28, 1932, Alec Allen was fishing Gilbert Pool on the River Towy, near the Welsh village of Nantgaredig, when his line caught on something that he at first thought was a
log. But then it started moving upriver. Unable to leave the pool because the water had recently fallen, the thrashing fish leapt into the shallows, where it straightened a gaff before a rock
dropped repeatedly on its head subdued it. The fish was hauled on to a horse-drawn cart and taken to a nearby farm, where it was identified as a common Baltic sturgeon (
Acipenser sturio
),
measured at nine feet, two inches, and weighed at 388 pounds. This still holds the distinction of being the largest fish ever caught on a rod and line in a British river, although technically it
was not a ‘fair’ capture because it was not hooked in the mouth but rather in the skin of the head. Because sturgeon have been a royal fish since the time of Edward II (1284–1327,
and gruesomely murdered in Berkeley Castle beside the River Severn), a telegram was sent to King George V, who apparently wasn’t at home. So the fish was sold to a fishmonger in Swansea for
two pounds and ten shillings (£2.50); the caviar inside it would have been worth £25,000 in today’s money. By all accounts Mr Allen didn’t talk much about his catch in later
years, but when he died twenty-five years later, his ashes were scattered, in a ceremony attended by no priest, on the pool ‘where I caught leviathan’.