River Monsters (35 page)

Perhaps I should have known. In the Amazon I’ve caught a couple of pacu on small subsurface lures and witnessed half a dozen more, all about five pounds. I’ve also caught a couple of
nonvegetarian tambaqui, one on a whole nine-inch fish. But these were over a period of more than ten years, so I’d mentally filed them under ‘freak captures.’ All were in the dry
season, when nuts and seeds aren’t available, which suggests hunger might cause more opportunistic feeding. And in PNG, which, despite superficial similarities, is not the Amazon, it’s
possible that the pacu goes hungry all year round. (Although I didn’t catch any on lures here, I did have one chase a fruit I was retrieving and then take it when I paused. My Amazon lures,
however, were definitely mimicking fish rather than a motorised nut – or at least I think so.)

Maybe I should have tried something bigger. Long ago I saw a picture in a fishing magazine of a foot-long, multisection pike lure called a ‘wibbly-wobbly banana.’ I remember this
now, because Alphonse has just told me that he once found a hatchling crocodile inside a pacu he’d caught. But he also tells me that a crocodile bone placed in a fire will divert storms that
might otherwise devastate a village. It also repels ‘magic men’ who approach the village at night, making sounds like birds.

As it happens, I hook my biggest pacu on a white cube of coconut flesh, right in front of the hut where we’re staying, from a moored dugout. The six-pound line sings painfully as I strain
to hold it from trailing branches, and I wince as it grates around the supports of Wapi’s house. Pound for pound, its big brother the tambaqui is one of the strongest fish there is, and the
pacu can’t be far behind, so on this gear my chances aren’t good. At length I get it away from the snags and into open water, but its strength seems undiminished. After a while, it
boils at the surface and I can see its deep flank. Each run is now taking less line, down and out and then slowly back to the surface, until it’s lying still on its side and I can just reach
the leader. As I swing it aboard, the 2/0 hook partially opens and then loses its hold.

Solid and deep bodied, the fish must weigh eight pounds. It’s as big as any they’ve seen here lately but well short of the fifty-five-pound maximum quoted for the species. (Tambaqui
can reach ninety pounds, but even weights halfway to these figures are exceptional nowadays.) Its small scales are iridescent, showing hints of violet, green, and pearl. The fin area is large,
including the characteristic small adipose fin, which marks it as a characin. But what truly defines this fish is its mouth. It looks like an overweight European river bream with badly fitting
dentures. Looked at head on, the almost straight row of teeth at the front of the lower jaw appears eerily human. But they are molars, not incisors, with ridges that work against cusps embedded in
the upper gum. In front of the teeth is a rubbery lower lip for manipulating food along with suction. When opening and closing, the tooth surfaces stay squarely aligned to one another, although
individual teeth have a degree of float, all of which makes for a very effective nutcracker operated by powerful jaw muscles. There’s no doubt they could cause a very painful wound to a
person.

We’ve put the word out that we want to talk to ball-cutter victims, and one day a canoe arrives from a village downstream. One of the men is Nick Sakat, who tells me in his gravelly voice
about the terror he felt when his foot was grabbed. There’s a young girl who was bitten on the buttock while playing near her mother, who was washing plates. The girl instinctively swiped at
the fish and flipped it out of the water. She says it was a pacu. Now she washes very quickly and never stays long in the water. Another man, Patrick, dived into the water and felt a sharp pain in
his scrotum. Thinking he’d stabbed himself on the dorsal spine of a catfish, he climbed on to a floating raft, from where he saw a large fish homing in on his dripping blood and then circling
at his feet. Patrick said he was very afraid, and he was adamant that this fish was a pacu.

Finally I meet Francis Sambin, not dead as the newspaper and Internet reports stated but instead fully recovered thanks to treatment at a medical centre. He thinks he inadvertently chummed the
water by washing his dinner plate before getting in himself, something he’s careful not to do now.

It seems an open-and-shut case. The locals all agree now that the ball cutter is the pacu, a normally vegetarian fish that, finding itself in a new, nutrient-poor environment, is giving
expression to latent carnivorous tendencies. ‘Good meat, problem fish,’ as Alphonse puts it. Or a bit of a
bagarap
, as they say here. But the biologists who introduced the pacu
say the accounts of pacu attacking humans are fabrications. They don’t suggest an alternative culprit though. So you’re left wondering: who is invoking spirits now?

17

A CHARGE MOST SERIOUS

Watching aghast from his horse on the riverbank was Reginaldo Fernandes Neres. Although a strong swimmer himself, he felt powerless to help, as he feared he would become a victim too. But after
some time had passed, he summoned the courage to get in the water. Although the horses had been walking in shallows, the men were thrown into deeper water: ‘It was black water, about twelve
feet deep. I couldn’t see anything on the bottom. I just felt with my hands, but I didn’t find anything.’

The next morning a search party turned up with boats. They fired up their outboards and circled the area, and by the end of the day the wash from their propellers had dislodged two corpses. They
found the final body the next day. One of the boatmen was Hermes Alves da Silva. He told me that all three men had clenched fists, gripping handfuls of weed, a detail that Reginaldo also mentioned.
The bodies also had patches of black discoloration. ‘A bit like burn marks, but without the skin being broken,’ said Hermes.

Normally we expect monsters in deep water; in the shallows we feel safe. In the Amazon, there are two large predators that ambush prey in shallow water. Black caimans can sometimes be seen at
periscope depth, with the gnarled head appearing like a piece of waterlogged driftwood. The rest of the time they lurk like submarines, the nictitating membranes over their eyes acting like goggles
as they look up into the air, ready to launch themselves at a dog on the edge of a floating house or, perhaps, something more substantial. Anacondas are likewise masters of invisibility, remaining
submerged for long periods or just breaking the surface film with their nostrils in the midst of some bank-side weeds, as they wait for hours for the thirsty animal that will feed them for the next
few weeks.

But neither of these was responsible for the cowboys’ deaths. The victims of caimans and anacondas are normally never found unless the predator is disturbed. In that case the killer will
have left a clear signature. The teeth of a big caiman make deep punctures, and an anaconda’s needlelike teeth cut two crescent-shaped wounds. In the case of an anaconda, there might also be
signs of partial digestion, as this predator sometimes regurgitates its prey, and possibly broken bones too, inflicted during the slow, crushing suffocation. These bodies had no such marks.

This left one possible perpetrator. Unlike other monsters, it has insignificant teeth and very little muscle. But the poraquê is greatly feared because it has invisible powers. The
poraquê is otherwise known as the electric eel (
Electraphorus electricus
), a creature with a unique aura in the Amazon and in the wider consciousness because of its ability to kill at
a distance. At least with a goliath tigerfish or a bull shark you can see what you’re dealing with, and if you don’t come into direct contact with it, you’re safe – but not
this animal. Teeth are easy to understand but an animal that generates electricity is beyond the power of most of us to comprehend. We’re all told by anxious parents not to take hair-dryers
or other mains-powered appliances anywhere near the bath because the combination of electricity and water is lethal, but here’s a power source that lives in water, in open defiance of the
laws of physics – it’s a sci-fi fantasy made flesh. Thus, the fear of poraquê is the fear of the supernatural.

There are actually hundreds of fish species that make use of electricity in some way, over and above the transmission of nerve impulses. Sharks and rays detect weak electrical fields in the
water, and these lead them to prey. Others, such as knifefish (so named because of their bladelike bodies, which taper to a pointed tail) generate their own electricity, creating a field around
them that becomes distorted by external objects. By reading these perturbations with electro-receptor organs, these fish can navigate and communicate with others of their own species, even in pitch
dark. The voltages these fish produce are tiny – too weak for a human to feel. But an elite few species have taken things one stage further, using electricity as a weapon.

Despite its English name, the electric eel is not an eel at all. It is not related to true eels and has no marine stage in its life cycle. It is, in fact, a type of knifefish. These belong to
the same superorder as catfish, carp, and characins, whose main common feature is the Weberian apparatus – the tiny bones linking the ears to the swim bladder that give these fish their
super-sensitive hearing. But it is the poraquê’s eel-like shape that is the key to its powers. Its tail makes up 80 per cent of its body length, and almost everything in this part of
the body, beneath the backbone, is an electric organ (of the nonmusical kind). This is modified muscle tissue that, instead of converting the stored energy in blood sugar to mechanical energy,
converts it to electrical energy.

At the microscopic level, this organ (actually three separate organs, each with a left and right half) is composed of vast numbers of flattened electrocytes – minibatteries – that
are stacked like poker chips down the length of the body. One of the organs, the Sachs organ, produces only low-voltage discharges of about ten volts for electro-location. But the voltage the other
two organs produce is much higher. Each electrocyte produces only 130 millivolts when stimulated by a nerve impulse, but when large numbers are connected in series, the voltage starts to add up.
Thus, a small eel can produce 100 volts, but a four-footer, whose electrocytes number in the hundreds of thousands, can produce 500 to 600 volts. This is the maximum voltage normally quoted. But a
bigger eel will produce an even higher voltage. I’ve heard stories (from Peru) of electric eels growing to twenty feet, but the consensus of scientists is closer to eight feet. One of my aims
was to catch a fish close to this size and measure its output, and in order to chart this unknown territory, I’d brought a voltmeter. Perhaps not surprisingly, some people I told about this
before going to Brazil thought this was taking curiosity too far.