I haven’t been paying as much attention as I should to Jeremy Wade’s River Monsters during this chapter of the SFF Bestiary. I had it down as casual entertainment, hard-assed Aussie goes fishing for big fish in remote rivers, not strictly relevant to the search for cryptids. And yet, a lot of what I’ve done is to wonder what actual real animals are the basis for the myths and legends.
That’s what Wade does. He hunts real monsters, creatures that (by his preference, and probably because there’s physical proof) are aggressive toward humans. He’s been all over the planet, tracking down the meanest, nastiest things that live in the water, and finding the truth behind the legends.
The opening episode of Season 7 finds him in Canada. He hasn’t spent much time there, he says, but he really wants to know what’s causing so many reports of snakelike creatures in Canadian lakes. He focuses on the lakes of Ontario, where, he says, a third of the fresh water in the world is concentrated, and specifically, Eagle Lake.
Eagle Lake is a glacial lake, like most of the others in the region. It’s icy cold; he doesn’t mention how deep it is, but a quick search finds that it’s shallow by the standards of Loch Ness and Lake Okanagan, a mere 110 feet (34 meters) at most. What it does have is a long history of stories about dark, snakelike creatures that swim in the lake; they are, he’s told, around 20 feet (or about 6 meters) long.
The description would fit a giant snake, but snakes are cold-blooded and could not survive in Canadian waters. Wade immediately dismisses sturgeon as a possibility. Sturgeon can grow to the requisite size, he tells us, but they’re migratory fish. They come to lakes via rivers from the sea. They won’t be found in a landlocked lake.
He has another theory. He investigates through seriously old-school methods: looking into legends and folktales, interviewing locals, notably the indigenous people of the area, and tracking down an eyewitness willing to talk to him. There’s a report of a fairly recent attack on a boy playing in the water: whatever it was came at him in shallow water and tried to pull him under. It left tooth marks on his leg that somewhat resemble the bite of a shark.
The culprit, he thinks, is a fish native to these waters, called the muskellunge. Its name is a Cree word for “deformed pike.” It’s a greenish, brownish, spotty, sharp-nosed, blade-toothed, aggressive predator, but it doesn’t tick the box on size. Muskies as they’re called tend to grow up to three feet, or just under a meter long. The world record catch was five feet, or 1.5 meters.
Muskies are wicked smart and terribly hard to catch: they’re called “the fish of 10,000 casts.” What makes Wade think they’re the original “Cacheektanabick” is not just that it’s an apex predator known to live in the lake, with plenty of smaller fish to feed on; it’s that they have several signal behaviors. They’ve been seen raising their heads above the water, which is not a fishlike thing to do; and they will sometimes swim together in a line, one after another.
That might explain the stories of the multiple “coils” rising up above the surface. It’s a line of muskies swimming along, and witnesses are seeing the individual fish as they pass by.
Wade doesn’t bother with the cool tools, sonar and underwater cameras and such. He’s a fisherman. He wants to catch one, see and touch it for himself. That’s what he’s there for: hook, line, and rod, and hands on the living animal.
There are echoes of Lake Okanagan and its Ogopogo in the legend of Eagle Lake. This monster is another water serpent, and people placate it with offerings of tobacco. It’s been seen most often off a place called Spirit Rock, which is dangerous to approach without the proper rituals.
The First Nations eyewitness may have been reading up on Loch Ness. He describes his sighting as “like an overturned boat, twenty feet long.” There’s mention of underwater caves, too. He sends Wade to Spirit Rock with a fair share of portentous intoning and dire warning.
I do wonder how much leg-pulling is going on here, but I have to hand it to Jeremy Wade for taking the whole thing right down to the water. He gets his tackle together and goes fishing. He starts by fishing for possible prey, and catches multiple lake trout: nice, nutritious, oil-rich meat for a larger predator. Later he starts landing northern pike, which are smaller and slightly prettier relatives of the muskie.
Eventually he heads out to Spirit Rock and sets to work casting for muskies. And casting. And casting. And casting. For days. A week. More.
Nothing. But he refuses to give up. He knows they’re down there. He understands that they’re terribly smart, known for stalking fishermen and circling around their lures and driving them to distraction by never quite taking the bait.
He’s not going to leave until he catches one. He is on somewhat of a time crunch: the lake freezes solid in the winter. He just might stay that long if he has to.
After literally thousands of fruitless casts, he decides to change tactics and tackle. He’ll fish for prey fish again, with a light line and a small hook, and see what he can land. Before he does that, more or less on impulse, he offers some tobacco to the spirit of the water. It’s a fisherman’s thing: stay out there long enough, you start giving way to superstition.
Of course we know what happens then. His little hook and his flimsy line land him his muskellunge. With masterful management of his equipment and a fair amount of luck—and maybe the grace of the local gods—he gets his hands on the fish itself. It’s a big, beautiful, deadly thing, and it’s not too hard to believe it could be the original Cacheektanabick. All he had to do was stop trying to catch it.
It’s a good story. It’s not the usual cryptid hunter’s tale, and it gives us a real-world lake monster, a creature as impressive in its way as Nessie or Cressie or Ogopogo. He stands there with his arms full of needle-toothed apex predator, and we’re grinning right along with him.
And then he slips it back into the water. He’s not there to keep or kill it. He just wants to prove to himself, and us, that such a wonder exists.
