Tigerfish

There were no signs warning you not to swim in the Congo River or elaborating on the dangers of parasites, bilharzia, crocodiles, snakes, or tiger fish. If you wanted to practice river swimming, or just cool off, you might wind up in the gullet of a lurking crocodile, or in a ward for tropical diseases.

We sat on the front of the barge reading and taking it easy while the river passed by like a scythe that sliced through a wall of trees that were a hundred feet high. 

The slow trip up river was okay with us; we needed the rest and weren’t in a hurry to get to any particular place.

The lazy days did us good and we were beginning to get back our energy. We had all but forgotten the claustrophobia of the jungle, the insect bites, snakes and scorpions and the oppresive canopy of green that let only stray feathers of light flutter down to the tangled undergrowth.

In contrast to the deep shadow of the jungle, on the open river the sun bared its teeth all day, every day. To get a respite from the heat and humidity and pass the time, I dove in from the bow of the barge and caught the stern of the boat when it passed, or hung on to a ten-meter-long length of rope and let it tow me from behind while we plowed slowly upstream. I never considered what the consequences would be if I missed the stern or lost my grip on the rope and got left in the middle of a predator filled river that could measure ten kilometers from shore to shore.

I hadn’t heard the warning “Don’t swim in the Congo River.” I didn’t know about the fearsome Goliath tiger fish with their voracious appetites and two-inch-long daggers that they had for teeth, and that packs of them attacked anything that moved in the water, or thought about the ubiquitous crocodiles camouflaged and patient, waiting to drag under any unsuspecting prey.

The thought never occurred to me either, that the enthusiastic crew might have been playing a grim practical joke on me, letting the “white guy “dangle from a rope among fish that could slice off an arm with one bite or using me for bait while they were trolling for crocodiles.

Thinking back, these were the same guys that I saw on the deck a few weeks earlier shouting something that sounded like war cries and chasing each other with spears, so it might not have been beyond them to let me swim among those river monsters.

When it came to crocodiles, like sharks, it was the ones you couldn’t see that you had to worry about. One morning a few years earlier, I had been swimming in an unusually calm sea on a remote Goan beach in India when some fishermen, agitated for reasons I didn’t understand just then, waved frantically and shouted that I should come to shore.

What I didn’t see didn’t frighten me, until they pointed to the dark silhouettes with triangular dorsal fins breaking the surface where I had been treading water a few minutes earlier.

Congo tiger fish were the river’s answer to the ocean’s sharks and had the voracious appetite of the Amazon’s piranha. A tiger fish could grow to over two meters and weigh seventy or eighty kilos and attacked anything that moved in the water. Even if the river seemed deceivingly peaceful, it was only afterward that I learned that these hyper aggressive killing machines lurked just under the surface.  Once you were caught in those teeth, whatever body part that got stuck between them would be gone in one bite.