I had successfully used fruit as piranha bait, and frequently I have seen fishermen stick wads of bread on their hooks. While I photographed, Heraldo netted specimens for his museum collection, rattling off their tongue-twisting Latin names. The Indians basketed on abundant catch of their own. Any piranha still flapping they immobilized not with a bite, as had the Maka, but with the resolute whack of a club.
A week after fishing with the Karaja, Heraldo Britski, laden with jars of preserved specimens, returned to Sao Paulo. I moved upstream to the village of Santa Isabel do Morro, into the John Kennedy Hotel, a traveler’s lodge run by Senhor Roland Ubirajara Santos, hunter, fisherman, and a friend of river Indians. Roland didn’t like piranhas, but neither was he disposed to dwell on their savagery. And I was beginning to wonder about the tales of ferocity. After nearly two months in piranha country, with the guidance of knowledgeable experts, the only instances of aggression had been evoked by capture. I was beginning even to doubt the authenticity of those photographs and movies I had seen showing piranhas boiling to the surface in response to anything fleshy. Whenever I cited the classic story of the cattlemen sacrificing a decrepit cow as a piranha lure some distance from the point where his herds must cross a river, I drew smiles. I met not a single cattleman in Paraguay or in the Mato Grosso who could verify that one. On the other hand, I was reluctant to jump to conclusions. Piranha temperament might well be played upon by any number of variables: season, chemical content and temperature of the water, and of course, availability of food. One ichthyologist has ventured the opinion that adult piranhas, like many another animals of land or sea, are particularly aggressive during the breeding period. Roland knew of my preoccupation with piranhas, “I want to take you the Rio das Mortes,” he offered one day. “It’s four hours upstream by motorboat, but there we will find fierce piranhas, I guarantee!” Next morning, with a native boatman and a guide names Domingo Braga, we whined our way up the Araguaia. The River of Death, a tributary of the Araguaia, seems to have been named in grim remembrance of a massacre, but the details are fuzzy. Some say missionaries, others Brazilian soldiers, were the victims years ago of hostile Indians. That the name derives from the ferocity of the river’s piranhas is an altogether different theory one, I admit, I wanted to believe. The sun had climbed high before we turned from the broad Araguaia onto the tributary with the sinister name. But there was nothing Styx-like about Rio das Mortes. My impression was one of shining, slow water, reflecting low lush jungle on both sides –a setting of perfect tranquility upon which the reverberating roar of our boat’s motor seemed an intrusion. Eventually the river widened and a huddle of thatched huts came into view. Domingo grinned, and we beached among several slender dugouts. Dogs barked as we jumped ashore; a woman appeared at a doorway, recognized Domingos, and shouted a welcome. Her men folk were out tending the cattle, she explained.
