River Monsters (34 page)

16

FROM THE AMAZON WITH LOVE

Sometime later, washing in the same stretch of river, Nick Sakat feels something touch his leg. He kicks it away, but it fastens on to his foot and pulls him towards deeper water. Terrified and
confused, he makes a grab for a moored log raft – his family’s washing platform – and manages to drag himself on to its surface. There is nothing in the native fauna that makes a
bite mark like the gushing wound in his foot, a mark that resembles, in shape and size, the imprints of human teeth. He can only think it is an underwater spirit – an invisible person.

From the capital of PNG, Port Moresby, there is no way to drive to the Sepik. Having loaded our thousand pounds of equipment, six of us board a single-engined P-750 XSTOL, a fast-climbing
workhorse of an aircraft originally designed for skydiving, which hoists us to twelve thousand feet, following the coast, and then cuts inland towards the island’s mountainous spine. Below,
the vegetation that covers the valleys and ridges is unbroken. I look for signs of human habitation, but there are none, not even a thread of smoke. As the land climbs towards us, the clouds change
from a low broken layer to a pavilion of unsteady pillars, through which we pick our way.

After landing to refuel at Goroka, a cleared and populous valley ringed by mountains, we re-weigh ourselves and take off again. The moment our wheels leave the ground we’re flying at 5,200
feet, and we climb steeply through the thin air towards a jagged dark line that is intermittently visible above us through rising billows of cloud. Crossing the ridge, we enter a zone where the
clouds are more substantial than the earth below, which rises and falls, a little further away each time, until it flattens into a wide coastal plain, which we turn and follow west.

From where the Sepik’s branched tail leaves the mountains, a straight line to its mouth would measure 250 miles. Between these two points, the land drops just a hundred feet, a gradient
that is scarcely perceptible, except to water. But the Sepik obeys gravity on its own terms, looping this way and then that to investigate far-flung curiosities as it goes. From above, its
signature is confident and expansive, with extravagant loops and curlicues that give away its deeper character. In my role as aerial graphologist, I try to read what the river is telling me, and
immediately I see that all is not well. The river’s identity is not clear and distinct but instead confused with that of the land, which gives back a partial reflection of the sky. The annual
flood has not yet receded, which is going to make finding anything in the water doubly difficult.

The other thing that might not help, on top of this thirty-year flood, is the Sepik’s notoriety as prime crocodile habitat. It has one species of freshwater croc as well as much larger
salties, the same species found in Australia. The human relationship with crocs is complicated. At the village where we set up base, on the banks of a large lake (a
raunwara
, or round water)
in the floodplain, a fisherman, Ramsin Tero, tells me how his twenty-four-foot dugout was attacked from below, splintering its stern. He escaped by climbing a tree that was standing in the water.
He said the massive animal was a
masalai
, a spirit that, although dangerous to individuals, preserves the environment on which humans depend by keeping open the narrow channels that link the
lake to the river. Further downriver, people believe that they are descended from crocodiles and hold initiation ceremonies at which young men are symbolically reborn as crocodile men, identifiable
by the scale-like patterns of raised scars on their backs and shoulders that are created by a painful process of rubbing ash into cut skin. Others hunt the crocodiles to sell their skins and
penises. But when I go out at night with crocodile hunter Alphonse Mava Sanye, I’m surprised by how few crocodile eyes reflect our flashlight. They’d be easier to find if the water was
down and more contained, but even then I’m told their numbers are noticeably down lately. This is attributed to a thinning of the floating weed that used to cover most of the lake, in which
the crocodiles make their nests. I’m told this change dates from about the same time that Francis Sambin was attacked.

Above the surface, this place could be the Amazon were it not for the mountainous horizon above the trees, the solidity of the stilt-house supports, and the appearance of the people –
black skinned and curly haired. The lake is black water, like strong tea. To start getting an idea of what’s down there, I put together my tiddler-catching rod, a six-foot wand with six-pound
line loaded on to a miniature fixed-spool reel, and I flick a small cube of coconut flesh from a moored dugout into the margins in front of the village. After a few minutes the line twitches and
runs, and I bring in a silver-scaled fish about six inches long. A small catfish follows, known here as
nilpis
(nail fish) on account of its dorsal and pectoral spines. A bit later I bring
in something a bit bigger, elongated and brown with a big mouth and spiky dorsal fin. I ask Wapi, a boy fishing with a heavy handline by the nearest house, ‘
Wanem dispela kain
pis
?’ He tells me it’s a
bikmaus
, and some men on the bank get very excited because they never catch this on a hook. Suddenly I have a bit of cred as a fisherman, but this is
only because I’m using much finer gear than they do. And this, I’m quickly reminded, also has its downside, as the next fish, although not very big, breaks the line.

Actually, it bit through it, just after I glimpsed it on the surface: a bright flash of silver with a splash of red. I blink, trying to recall the image. It looked like a red-bellied piranha,
which might not be such a surprise if this was Florida or even southern England, but there can’t be too many fish-tank hobbyists with imported species around here. I rummage in my bag of
terminal-tackle odds and ends, and I tie a larger hook to a few inches of a flexible silvery leader material that incorporates strands of superfine woven wire. To achieve an enticingly slow sink of
the bait through the water, I add a bubble of expanded polystyrene, but things underwater have gone quiet. Then I miss a couple of takes. I cast towards a half-submerged bush, and after a long wait
my answer to a line twitch is in turn answered by a bent rod. As I grab the leader and swing the fish aboard, I do another double-take. The colour scheme is similar to a piranha, but it looks more
like a pacu (
Piaractus brachypomus
), another Amazon inhabitant, which is sometimes confused with the red-bellied piranha. In fact, unless I’m very much mistaken, it is a pacu.

This is another species that gets liberated from domestic aquaria – not because they eat the other occupants but because they grow into potential tank-busters, capable of smashing the
glass if they’re spooked. Once released, they seem to survive in unfamiliar surroundings better than piranhas. Two anglers each caught foot-long specimens from California’s Lake Don
Pedro in 2009, and a man has told me about a twenty-pounder he spotted in Florida. (According to a map on the FishBase website, the only US states where they haven’t turned up are Alaska,
Idaho, North Dakota, New Mexico, and Maine, although to breed, the initial ‘stock’ would need to be numerous enough for them to find one another.) They’ve also crossed the
Atlantic: one recently turned up in southwest England in the East Okement River, a tributary of the River Torridge. But the pacu in PNG, it turns out, were introduced officially in the late 1990s
in order to supplement a very thin selection of native freshwater fish. Because the falls in sea level that accompanied ice ages never linked PNG with the Asian mainland (which at times extended as
far as Bali), the spread of most freshwater fish was blocked. So the thinking behind this introduction was to supplement the existing food source, which would give the added benefit of taking some
of the hunting pressure off the crocodiles.

Pacu are tasty, solid-bodied fish, and I’ve caught a few in the Amazon, where they also go by the name of pirapitinga. Although they are a valuable food fish in their home waters, they
tend to be overshadowed by their larger relative, the much prized tambaqui (
Colossoma macropomum
). During the high-water season, tambaqui enter the flooded forest and gorge on high-protein
nuts and seeds that fall into the water. Rubber seeds are their particular favourite, and they crack these open with crushing teeth. Because of this, they’re one of the few species that can
be reliably caught on a line in high water, but the locals guard their fishing spots jealously. When the water goes down, they’re caught using nets, and it’s normal to find their
stomachs completely empty at this time, as they live on their reserves for half the year. Because of their desirability and high price, tambaqui have attracted the attention of fish farmers, but
without their normal 100-per cent organic diet, they’re not the same.

The pacu is a scaled-down version but with similar vegetarian habits. As intended, it has found favour as a food fish in PNG, where they call it
ret bros
(red breast). Fishermen tell me
that, in high water, they catch them on fruit, cast near fruiting shrubs, usually on handlines. To try this for myself, I go to an area of flooded lake margins where green fruits the size of
marbles hang from low shrubs, and I plop these on to the water using my single-handed rod. In most places I catch nothing and attribute this partly to my less-than-stealthy approach: instead of a
small dugout that slips quietly between the close-packed trunks, I’m with the crew and their kit in a huge forty-footer that has to be noisily manhandled around corners. But in time I catch a
few, each about a pound in weight. It’s incredible to see how they’ve become so established. As a new protein source, the introduction appears to be a clear success story.

But Alphonse the crocodile hunter is not a fan. He says pacu are responsible for clearing the floating weedbeds where the crocs nest. He claims they chew the delicate roots. On a couple of
occasions I see ripples made by something nibbling the tips of reeds where they trail in the water, but I can’t see what it is. Now that I’m looking more closely, I see that many reeds
have ragged tops. There are apparently some hungry fish around.

But there seems to be an absence of predators. I put a wire leader on the bait-caster rod and cast a variety of lures around the lake margin. In the Amazon you might expect a peacock bass,
aruanã, red-bellied piranha, or even surubim catfish to respond to this. But here, I get nothing. There are certainly carnivores down there though, as the small fish that the women collect
from their nets in the mornings often have small pieces missing. One day Wapi brings a good-sized catfish for me to see. It’s a couple of feet long and about fifteen pounds, and it’s
the biggest fish I’ve seen here. But although it has a large mouth that’s capable of engulfing small fish, it has no teeth – only the rasping pads that are standard issue to most
catfish. It’s not the ball cutter.

The only thing with teeth that would do the job is the pacu, but according to all authorities, this is a vegetarian, so it doesn’t have the temperament or the inclination. I did meet a
fisherman who had his finger bitten, but this was while he was unhooking one. It was his thirteenth fish of the day, but because it weighed over thirty pounds, he didn’t feel unlucky, despite
having to paddle home one-handed. But this doesn’t really qualify as an attack. And I’ve not myself seen anything remotely approaching that weight. In one village I visit, however, they
say big pacu are not unusual – about two feet long as far as I can gather. They catch them on dead Java carp, another introduced species, on lines thrown out from their houses. The pacu come
into this area late at night when the village has quietened, and a makeshift bite alarm, made from a bag of stones hanging on the line, wakens the fisherman. I can’t wait to try this, but
they say it doesn’t work now – only in the dry season. But they do suggest I try small live fish. They give me some in a bucket, about the size of a finger, and I cast one out at the
junction of two channels. After about an hour I strike a take and retrieve a bitten remnant. I reason that a big pacu will manage a whole bait, but when I finally connect, the fish is an
unexceptional one-pounder. It is nevertheless a highly significant catch. By the standards of our vegetarian director Duncan, or anyone else for that matter, this fish ain’t no
vegetarian.