"He's got a deer hide, but otherwise he's just a big rat," Marty said, and tried to explain to the guides: "We didn't come out here for rats. We came for pig." Rob had snuffed the big rat with a slug to the thing's armpit, a crack shot in the dark, a feat he repeated a few minutes later at the next paca sighting. Joe later managed to blow away a caiman, putting a slug through the beast's eye and leaving the top of its head attached to the body only by the skin at the top of the creature's mouth.
Rat and croc in place of pig was not the end of the world. That didn't seem to arrive until the 13th day of the journey, when everything fell apart. Rain from the previous day left the cameras with cataracts that threatened to sink the whole shoot. The boats' trolling motors kept shorting out. The anglers were exhausted. Marty was fighting some kind of jungle flu that had him popping a morning cocktail of Cipro and NyQuil on top of his regular malaria pills.
Angie Thompson
Cameramen Wes and Carey
At night, on the open river, Rob fired slugs into two large rodents known as paca.
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To top it off, the fish had vanished. "If we weren't waiting for a charter plane," Angie told Marty as the boats left a fruitless lagoon, "I'd call this right now."
Then for perhaps the first time all trip, Gonzaga dipped into an old well. He led the anglers into a lagoon with recent chop marks showing on logs fallen across its entrance — lo, this was the pond where Joe had caught his 20-pounder. The water was a little higher, the logs already showing signs of decay, but this was the same place, seven days later. With the water temperature lower after the rains and the fish loitering lower, Rob was casting jigs, which sink. Then there was a terrific splash. Peixe grande. And Rob in a temporary, vein-straining panic, realizing he had the largest fish of the trip hooked on the smallest rod in his quiver.
"That's a good fish, bro," Joe said as Rob rocked the beast closer to the boat. Gonzaga hurried with the scale, putting the clamp on the lip.
"Twenty-two," the guide said.
"Kiss him, Gonzaga," Joe said.
"I'm gonna kiss him," Rob said, and did. The fish was the length of a man's arm, with bright-orange eyes, a yellow throat, burnt-orange fins. Of the more than 200 fish the men caught over two weeks, it was one of their final ten that was the largest of the trip. No one held out realistic hope to top the 22-pounder, not the day before breaking camp to head homeward, not after a dozen days of standing in the brutal sunshine, of running foreign food through protesting guts, of a homesickness that hit Joe so hard he could stave it off only by writing letters to his girlfriend on a legal pad, trying not to, in his words, "lose it."
We returned to the initial camp the next night and, in the morning, boarded a small Cessna for Manaus. There, we feasted on steak and beer, slept in separate rooms, and flew back to Miami. The world had moved very little in two weeks. The Chicago Bears had been winning. The mail had piled up. My grandfather had died three days earlier, and I found out about it just 16 hours before the funeral, which I attended, in Oklahoma, and there fielded questions from cousins about the Amazon, grateful to have a topic for such easy discussion.
Of the bullshit tales I did then tell, of snakes and crocs and jumbo sun, there was no time to explain the only moment of the trip I missed that I would have liked to have seen. On the night after Rob landed the 22-pounder, their 14th straight sleeping in the same room, flying in the same planes, eating at the same tables, fishing from the same skiff — that night, Rob and Joe took a little time apart. Rob went to the lounge while Joe stayed behind, writing. When Rob returned, there was a note on his pillow. Joe had written two sentences. He couldn't bring himself to say them aloud, but by then, he didn't have to.
