Why Some Fishermen's Tales are True

It's a disturbing experience — seeing something that doesn't exist.

In July 1993 I was floating in a leaky wooden canoe on a muddy Amazon lake, known simply as Lago Grande (big lake), looking for arapaima. Unusually for fish, Arapaima gigas are air-breathers. Despite having gills, they have to surface at half-hour intervals to burp stale air from their swim bladder and gulp a fresh mouthful down. It's a quirk that allows these super-predators to stay active in stagnant water, when other fish are going belly-up. And without doubt it's one of the reasons they grow so huge. Just how huge is not known for sure, but they are commonly said to be the biggest freshwater fish in the world, with some supposedly reliable sources quoting a maximum length of fifteen feet.

So they shouldn't be too hard to spot, particularly as they're also not exactly camouflaged, being decorated all over with vivid red markings. So why hadn't I seen a single one?

Perhaps they had all been harpooned or netted — the one drawback to being so large and visible. But local fishermen assured me there were still arapaima in the lake, mainly because there's a very deep hole, over seventy-five feet deep, off the southern end of the central island where their encircling nets can't reach the bottom. A few days before, José had even pointed some out to me:

"There! The size of this canoe!..."

But the distant ripples looked no different from any of the others that he had pointed out earlier, made by river turtles, caimans at periscope depth, and other fish. Or so he said. As far as I was concerned, he was seeing things that were invisible. I recalled how other fishermen had told me that the lake was encantado — enchanted — how an invisible force sometimes held canoes out in the middle, and how the fishermen had strange dreams when they camped here, dreams about ghost ships from an underwater kingdom whose occupants silently beckoned. No wonder fishermen have such a reputation for invention and exaggeration and for being all-around unreliable witnesses. Perhaps the arapaima wasn't a real fish at all but rather a spirit living in another dimension, a spirit you can only see once you've lost your grip on reality after too much time staring at the water. ...

...Such was my state of mind when, thirty yards from the boat, the surface opened and something huge heaved into the air. The size was right for a very big arapaima, but the shape was all wrong. What I'd seen — if the blurred afterimage wasn't deceiving me — was an arched back, bright pink in color and bearing a row of large triangular points.

It was like some huge gear wheel in the lake's workings, briefly cutting into the air before spinning back into the depths.

What it was not like was any living creature in the real world.