River Monsters (36 page)

These high-voltage discharges are normally used to stun small fish and amphibians, which are then sucked in and swallowed, going quickly past the delicate membranes at the back of the
poraquê’s mouth that it uses to absorb oxygen from air gulped at the surface, an ability that enables it to survive in poorly oxygenated water.

But a human being like me is hundreds of times bigger than its normal victims. Nevertheless, in the records of the forensic science office at the town of Marabá, also in Pará
state, there is a case in which an electric eel is cited as the cause of death. The victim was a twenty-one-year-old farm labourer, Francisco Conceição Souza, who drowned in
waist-deep water. An internal examination revealed no medical condition that might have caused him to faint or lose consciousness, so the pathologist, Dr Ivo Panovich, concluded that a shock from
the electric eel paralysed the man, thereby causing him to fall into the water where, with no one able to pull him out, reflex breaths resulted in a fatal inhalation of water into the lungs. To see
‘
peixe elétrico
’ (electric fish) written on an autopsy report sent a shiver through me. In this context the fish’s capabilities were much more than an academic
curiosity. Perhaps more than any other fish, the poraquê makes water an alien element because it makes empty water an invisible extension of its body, where you can trespass without intention
and pay the price without warning. Despite the strangeness of this notion, it was something I had to fix in my head to make sure I didn’t end up on Dr Panovich’s slab.

Visiting the farm where this fatality happened, I spoke to Fernando da Silva Nunes, the boy who witnessed it. He said that Francisco, newly arrived at the farm, wanted to go fishing in a small
pond nearby, a scoop in the ground just thirty feet long by fifteen feet wide. Fernando warned him against this, as an electric eel had shocked him there, but the man brushed off his concerns.
Arriving at the pond, he waded out to his waist, leaned forward so his arms were in the water, and swept his woven palm basket along the bottom. After lifting the basket out and finding no fish
inside, he repeated the procedure with the same result. On the third dip, only his hands and wrists had gone beneath the surface when he cried out and fell face downwards into the water. Moments
later, Fernando saw an electric eel encircling the man’s chest. After trying to pull it away with a stick, Fernando ran to his house for help, and when he returned with his uncle and
grandfather, there was no sign of Francisco, so they thought he might have clambered out. But when they hit the water with a stick, something rose to the surface: the head of the missing man,
lifted up by the poraquê, which was still coiled around his body.

This creepy detail brought to mind something the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt had written. Humboldt wanted to examine some electric eels, but the Indians in the Venezuelan Llanos
refused to fish for them in any normal way. Instead, they employed a novel way of discharging the eels before catching them with harpoons tied to long pieces of dry cord, bringing them in
‘only slightly wounded’. To do this, they herded thirty wild horses and mules into a muddy pond and then forced them to stay there by beating them with sticks when the eels started to
shock the trampling animals in self-defence. Several of the horses collapsed and drowned. ‘They attack the heart,’ observed Humboldt, and on reflection, this is probably what happened
to Francisco. From the eel’s point of view, a large creature was attacking it, and its initial shocks paralysed the skeletal muscles. But it would have still detected electrical activity from
one part – the heart – meaning that its attacker was still alive. So it delivered further shocks to this region of the body to extinguish this final sign of life.

Using a long stick with a hooked end, the men finally pulled Francisco’s body to the side, still wrapped in the eel’s embrace right up to the moment it grounded in the shallows. With
the corpse lifted clear, they then dragged the bottom and hauled the fish ashore, where it shocked one of the men when he struck it with a machete. They eventually killed it with a wood-handled hoe
and hacked it into three pieces. The combined length of the pieces was just over six feet.

This desire to exact revenge or to make the water safe is understandable. Fishermen routinely carry out pre-emptive executions of caimans and anacondas. But one story I heard, in which villagers
drained a lake with buckets after a boy had been fatally shocked there, was a bit hard to believe. Then one day the crew and I called in at a roadside shop, whose owner had lost her son to an
electric eel some years before. The owner wasn’t there, but a young woman customer told us an eel had shocked her dog just two hours before and then stated, ‘Everybody’s gone to
drain the pond.’

The place was barely a hundred yards away. At the edge of a field we entered some scrub and followed a short path to a felled tree that bridged a narrow ditch some twenty-five yards long and
eight feet across. Below us, around the water’s edge, were about twenty people, mostly men and boys. Some were sweeping and jabbing the water with long poles. Others had plastic buckets and
were forming a chain to tip water into another pond nearby. As we paused on the bridge, a thick serpentine form broke the surface underneath us, heading up the pond, and everyone yelled,
‘There it is! Kill it!’ A moment later the water erupted just short of the far end. One of the men had a pole like a shepherd’s crook, with twelve inches of angled-back
side-branch at its far end, and I now saw this swept down and jerked back. Someone at my side shouted, ‘Don’t kill it!’: we wanted to see it alive. But this lynch mob was deaf and
purposeful. There was only one way this was going to end. Next time the victim could be a child, and what alternative could we offer? A long-handled billhook was already slicing the air on its way
to the writhing black form.

Hacked halfway through, bleeding and twitching, the corpse was taller than any of the men there. But more impressive was its girth. Behind the respiratory chamber in the head, electric eels have
a very truncated gut cavity, with the vent opening shortly behind the gills. This creates a distinct hump behind the snout that, on this specimen, was as thick as my thigh, and it tapered only
slightly to the tail. Its impressive profile was also due to the long anal fin, running all the way from the vent to the tail. When alive, this can ripple both forwards and backwards, enabling the
fish to swim without flexing its body. Its colour further accentuated its bulk: almost black on the back, shading into olive green, with a bright orange throat and red spots on the flanks like
glowing coals.

Having seen this huge fish and convinced now of their ability to kill humans, I was increasingly apprehensive about grappling with a live poraquê in the wild. So I thought it best to start
with a small one in an aquarium. With the Brazilian-born ichthyologist Dr Jonathan Ready at my side, I donned thick rubber boots (rated to 7.5 kilovolts) and gloves (1,000 volts) and lowered a
plastic-handled probe into the water. The probe consisted of two copper strips, at opposite ends of a clear plastic rectangle, that were connected by wires to a receiver unit that converted
electrical pulses in the water into sound. At first we heard only isolated deep-toned blips, but when I moved the probe towards the fish, the speaker emitted a sound like a small motorbike trying
to start. Assured that this was just the Sachs organ emitting low-voltage pulses for electro-location, I dipped a bare finger in and verified that this was indeed below the threshold for me to
feel. Then, with my finger safely out – because their shocks can be felt up to three feet away in water – we prodded the fish and heard the speaker rasp a short, angry buzz.

The next stage was getting it out of the water, which Jon did using a cotton pillowcase and two twigs as a makeshift dip net. Tipped on to a plastic sheet, the two-foot-long fish flapped feebly
while we touched a copper terminal to each end – nothing like the writhing of a true eel, which still has all of its tail muscle. The tiny eyes seemed to accuse us. What were we doing, two
grown men in protective clothing, holding down such a puny creature? But the terminals were linked to a bank of LEDs, which flashed repeatedly as the eel discharged, indicating a pulse of at least
one hundred volts. Without insulation, handling even this small fish would have been like sticking our fingers into a mains socket: it could have floored both of us.

Having seen now what these fish were capable of and being reassured that the gloves and boots gave adequate insulation, at least on a small specimen, I was as ready as I would ever be to go
after a big one in the wild. But where should I start? Normally one might get a lead at a fish market, but fishermen don’t fish for them and people don’t eat them, although those that
are caught accidentally are sometimes rendered down for their oil, which is said to ‘contain electricity’ and is believed to ease rheumatic pains when rubbed into the skin. (I’ve
also met fishermen who treat cuts with anaconda fat, the original ‘snake oil’.) But I’d already seen and heard enough to give me a clear pointer. Now was the dry season, and the
best places to look were shrinking, drying-out pools in the river floodplain. This is where electric eels breed, the male making a foam nest from his saliva, into which the female lays up to
seventeen thousand eggs and where the firstborn larvae cannibalise the later-developing eggs and embryos. It sounds almost as unlikely as their reputed taste for vitamin-rich açaí
palm fruits, which they cause to fall during the flood season by shocking the trees; or the Tupi myth that the ancestral poraquê received its powers when it was struck by lightning; or the
fact that you can sometimes stumble upon this monster in tiny water bodies where you’d never find a big fish of any other species.

I’d heard about a small pond on a cattle ranch where poraquê had been seen, but getting a boat there, several miles from the river, was going to be a problem. I had visions of us
doing a re-enactment of Werner Herzog’s epic movie
Fitzcarraldo,
in which hundreds of people drag a riverboat through the jungle. Brazilians, however, pride themselves on their ability
to
dar um jeito,
to find a way. This is a special kind of lateral thinking, usually involving a bending of the rules. In this case the answer was a tractor driven by Milton Pereira de
Freitas that swung an aluminum skiff out of the river, suspended by a rope from its loading arms, and set it down on a trailer. An hour later, after a bumpy ride over dried-out swamp, the trailer
was reversed into the lake and we were in business.

The lake was a winding thirty-foot-wide ribbon, and we slowly paddled down the middle with the receiver in the water. But the speaker emitted just ambiguous crackles and hums, nothing like the
clear messages in the tank. Perhaps they were not on the move and were instead taking a siesta. I dipped another device into the water, a transmitter of low-level pulses, to maybe get a
conversation going, but there was no response. So at midday I resorted to a bait on a line. Near the lake was a shallow ditch, and taking Milton’s bamboo fishing rod, I baited up with a small
piece of cut fish and flicked it just beyond the marginal weeds. On the third or fourth cast the line jagged sideways, and my firm strike swung a silvery blur on to the bank. According to Milton,
the slippery, gap-toothed traira is a preferred food of the poraquê, and also a favorite of his for eating sashimi-style, so we decided to catch a few more. I was also enjoying this
back-to-basics fishing until the line got snagged next to a branch in the water. Having pulled to no avail, I shuffled out along the branch, with the water halfway up my canvas ‘ninja
boots’ (bought in Thailand, and the perfect footwear for deep mud), and I reached down the line with a stick. But I still couldn’t free it.

‘Just break the line and put on another hook,’ Milton called.

So I pulled, and something started to move. A tangle of mud-clogged roots appeared, and in the middle of it was a sinuous grey form. Somehow I jumped vertically clear of the water and managed to
come down on the bank while not letting go of the line. As the grey-brown fish squirmed in the grass, Milton chuckled, ‘It’s a mussum. They’re good bait for jaú, but you
don’t often catch them on a hook.’

Regaining some dignity, I held the fish, a marbled swamp eel (
Synbranchus marmoratus
), in front of the camera and reflected on my good fortune that it hadn’t been a poraquê.
If I’d been shocked, at least there were other people around with rubber boots and a wooden-handled plastic hook for pulling me out, as well as a portable defibrillator for stopping a heart
that has been shocked into spasm prior to restarting it with cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).

Word then came of a place where the pools were almost disappearing, as the heat of this extra intense dry season baked the land far drier than in normal years. Walking through a parched
landscape of singed trees with a farmhand named João, I spotted a pool in the distance, scarcely twenty feet in diameter and partially shaded by a small tree. On getting nearer, we saw the
surface bubbling with four-inch armoured catfish, sipping air. Then something that looked like a tree root slid out of the shade and into the body of the pool. Six feet long and snakelike, with the
whole of its back out of the water, it could have been an anaconda, especially as the water, which was actually liquid mud, obscured any markings. But it moved without making lateral loops, and on
a few occasions it went instantaneously into reverse. What’s more, its mouth was regularly pushing clear and opening, after which bubbles appeared from behind its arched head. I had found my
giant poraquê – but how to get it out?

There seemed little point using a bait, as our aim was simply to see it out of the water. João suggested capturing it cowboy-style – by lasso – which seemed fitting. I found a
forked stick and rigged an open noose to its Y-shaped end. João then prodded the monster’s tail with another stick and it started swimming straight towards me. I’d been expecting
to chase it round the pond for half an hour but, on dropping the noose right in front of it, managed to snare it on the first attempt.