River Monsters by Jeremy Wade Read Free Book Online Page B

car, wrapped in a damp sack in the boot, a means of relocation that the Environment Agency is keen to stop.) Very few were caught,
    and nobody knew exactly where they were or how big they grew. For me, disillusioned by the increasing predictability of carp fishing, this was precisely their appeal. I approached them with all
    of the obsession I had once applied to carp – camping by the water for two or three days at a time and fishing day and night in a mental state in which I was never properly awake or asleep.
    So the wels is a fish that has always seemed rather unreal to me – and one that has come to signify an altered perception of time.
    I think it was the morning after only my second night at a place called Tiddenfoot Pit when, against the odds, I found myself attached to a strong, deep-pulling fish that had picked up a dead
perch. But twenty seconds later I was shaking for another reason, contemplating the end of the line where it had been rasped through. I kept coming back until I got one . . . and then a few more:
seven fish over the course of the summer, the biggest a yard long.
    For a mystery predator that had existed until then only in the imagination, its appearance didn’t disappoint. It was hardly like a fish at all, or at least none that I was familiar with.
With its scaleless, elongated body, long tentacles, and cavernous mouth, it was more like the work of some mad geneticist, a cross between a slug and a snake. At eleven pounds, my biggest one was
still tiny for the species: they don’t grow well in England, with its long cold winters. But a big one, if you encountered it in the water, would be terrifying.
    Fast-forward to 2008. Newspapers in Germany carry front-page reports of something attacking swimmers in Schlachtensee, a lake on the outskirts of Berlin. Over the course of just a few summer
days, several people have emerged with bleeding wounds on their legs and a new-found terror of the water. One victim spoke of feeling something ‘like a snake’ touch her before she was
bitten.
    Typically there was one long wound, broad and slightly curved, on each side of the leg. Close observation revealed tiny punctures. Hospital staff have never seen injuries like this before and
have no idea what caused them. From the shape of the wounds, some fisheries scientists identify the perpetrator as the wels.
    This supposed taste for humans is nothing new. In the 1500s the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner, in his Historiae Animalium , told of a human head found in the stomach of the wels, along
with a hand wearing gold rings. Other reports talk of entire human corpses, mostly of children. This predator’s fabled size gives these stories a chilling credence. The most widely quoted
capture, from the River Dnieper in Russia (where they are called ssum ) in the 1800s, weighed 673 pounds and measured over sixteen feet. Another fish, said to be a wels and caught in 1761
from the River Oder, weighed 825 pounds without the viscera. To drag such brutes from the water, fishermen would tie the rope line to a team of horses or oxen. Based on such reports, the maximum
size for wels is widely quoted as 1,000 pounds. And although there is no physical evidence of wels this size, nor any to support any of these stories, the attacks in Germany seemed to lend them
credence and revive speculation that there might be a freshwater man-eater in the heart of Europe. I ventured to Schlachtensee to investigate.
    Being back in Berlin was strange. I had been here once before in 1989, just before the Berlin Wall came down. I remembered crossing on the U-Bahn (underground) to East Berlin, when movement in
the other direction was still prohibited, and surfacing into a world of cobblestones and two-stroke Trabant fumes. After dark I ducked down an alley behind a grey residential block and pulled
myself up to look at the death strip between the two parallel walls. As I fiddled with my camera I heard a voice – very quiet and very