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Every fisherman dreams of catching a big fish, or even better, a giant fish. Some fish dream of catching fishermen. This predator lives not only in the depths of the oceans and tropical rivers, but also in our north. It is very convenient to see the endless Siberia on the map. It is a continuous green area through which a thin stream flows. It borders the Kamchatka Mountains, the Arctic Ocean, and the Kazakh steppe. Everything is compact and clear.In fact, it's hard to imagine vast coniferous forests and tundra – tens of thousands of kilometers of wild nature that humans have never set foot in. Many regions of Siberia can only be known through aerial photography, and even geologists study them, moving mainly along the riverbed. The local population also liked to settle along the river - the Khantics, Mansi and Yakuts of central Siberia, as well as the Chukchi, Dolgan, Nganasan, Yukagil of the east and north.
No one knows what is hidden in the taiga jungle. Rumor has it that there are also hominid-like mammoths and djinn living here. There are other mystical creatures, including:Giant piranha barracuda
Legend has it that this fish can be found in the Great Lake. According to the Serkup people, the hundred-year-old barracuda will specifically seek out deeper bodies of water when the river is overflowing and stay there until it dies. The habitat of this monster is easy to find - such a lake has no source, and birds and animals avoid it. The people of Serkoupu call these lakes "purulto"."Blackwater Lake"., they will never fish or swim here. Even in winter, they did not dare to approach them, believing that huge barracuda could break the ice and feed on travelers.
The Yakuts have a similar story. Soviet ethnographer Alexei Okladnikov recorded the story of a hunter about how a barracuda ate a young man.
"An old man lives with a man. One hot day, the deer left the old man and swam to an island in the lake. The guy got on a birch bark boat and chased the deer and didn't let them go far. At this time, the old man is at home. Suddenly, the water began to flow without wind. A big tail appeared, and a huge barracuda swallowed the guy, setting off huge waves that overturned the boat. The barracuda also tore at the deer with its teeth. The old man wept bitterly and mourned the death of his son. The next morning, he rode the deer around the lake, trying to find at least the bones of the deceased.
The old man had an axe in his hand. Suddenly, when he drove the car closer to the shore, the water became turbulent again, like a hillock**. A huge fish rushed out of the lake. The coast is low and flat. The force with which the barracuda rushed out was so great that it remained on the dry shore and did not reach the old man. The old man jumped up and hacked her to death with an axe. He cut open her stomach and found bones - bones left by the man on the boat, only fragments remained. The old man took the lower jaw of the fish and used it as a door and placed it on the way from this mountain lake to Lake Syalakh. Everyone drove through this door, without a deer, with a high and wide chin. ”
Yakutia and Serkup are separated by several kilometers of impenetrable swamps and coniferous forests. It is unlikely that they will borrow stories about cannibals from each other. It is even more difficult to believe that the Chukotka learned such a story from them. However, they also talk about giant barracudas.
In the excellent monograph of Vladimir BogorazChukchi, there is a separate chapter dedicated to monsters. It also mentions the barracuda, which Kolyma residents refer to as "juutku-naen"."Bite the fish".。According to legend, giant fish live in distant tundra lakes and prey on humans, especially swimmers. They also do not despise fishermen.
The Chukotka people have a story about how a barracuda ate a frightened young man on the lake. She was caught in a very primitive way. The Chukotka people lowered four sleds loaded with venison into the bottom of the lake. When the barracuda tried to eat the bait, its teeth got stuck in the sled's shards. It took several people to pull the fish ashore.
The Yukagir people, who live near the Chukotka River, also know about the giant barracuda. They tell a story about a fisherman who swam to check his nets, and in the water - on either side of the shuttle, he saw two large yellow eyes, the distance between which was equal to two oars. According to the fishermen, it was a huge pike lying motionless on the bottom of the water.
Okladnikov heard a similar story from the Yakuts:"We once saw a barracuda on the lake: its eyes could be seen on both sides of the birch bark boat. ”
In Yamal, six thousand kilometers west of Kolyma, there is a legend about wheat grass - a piranha with horns on its head. Valery Chernetsov, who recorded local legends, believed that the prototype of such a monster was a huge spear. A Nenets hunter told him that three men had once killed a large fish in a lake in the Yenisei Delta and found a belt buckle in its belly. Sharks are rare in these areas. There are no man-eating sharks at all, especially in freshwater lakes. Chernetsov considered it a huge pike.
In the southern Ob River valley, the Khantes believed that the water god Satrunga would transform into a giant pike. Fish-people live in deep pools and lakes and can easily catch boats.
By the way, the Khantes believed that the pike was not a fish, but a headless animal created by the supreme god Torum, apparently fearing his cruelty. But the barracuda was not confused, but poked its head out of itself. She swam along the Ob River and swallowed everything she came across—a moose, a bear, a woman with a bundle of firewood, a fisherman, a crow. The eaten thing forms a head.
After preparing the barracuda, the Hunters took its skull apart piece by piece and told the children who the first pike had eaten. The bones of the barracuda head do resemble the shape of people, animals, and birds. Therefore, the Hunters not only make the children happy, but also instill in themAquatic cannibalsThe danger.
Hunter's neighbors also knew about the existence of the terrible barracuda. The Mansi told folklorists about one species – the giant lake barracuda with an elongated body and a large head, and another species – the four-legged pike, which sometimes eats a person.
Incredibly, if there is no convincing reason, such a different peoples as the Chukchi and Mansi would have the same legend about the same animal. But we still assume that the Serkup people somehow unbelievably came up with stories about cannibal pikes, and all the other peoples liked them so much that they began to retell them in their own way. In this case, it is not clear what to do with similar stories of Canadians, Finns and even Kalmyks.
The legend of the Canadian Eskimos tells how a giant fish eats two fishermen at the same time. At the time of the incident, three men were swimming on a large lake near Sanina York. Two people were sitting in kayaks tied to each other, and a third was swimming alone when they suddenly heard a loud cry for help. The big fish attacked the tied kayak and swallowed it. The Eskimo, realizing that he could not save his comrades, quickly swam to the shore. The monster caught up with him. He was too fast, and the waves rushed in front of him, pushing the kayak forward. As soon as the boat came to shore, the man jumped out and fled.
Finnish epic"Kalevala".It tells about a barracuda in the Tunella River, whose mouth can be made into a large cantele harp.
The Kalmyks have an interesting belief that in remote steppe lakes there are very old, mossy barracuda that devour people and ships. In addition, during the full moon, they climb ashore and crawl through fields in search of food, attacking calves and cows.
Legends about giant barracudas are common. It is worth noting that we are not just talking about piranhas, but also about barracuda in particular. This is no accident. In addition to the barracuda, there are many other monsters in mythology, including the cruel god of water. Why not blame them for the trouble and the attack? Why don't they belong to the sturgeon or catfish, but specifically to the barracuda?
So do these stories have a realistic basis? Why can't you find a giant barracuda anywhere but folklore? That's the way it was, they met. The same ethnographers have seen the remains of a huge barracuda several times.
An old researcher of the pre-revolutionary Siberian peoples nGrigorovsky in his writingsIn the Essay on the Narem Region, it is written, "In a remote area where mankind has never set foot before"Giant barracuda was indeed found. For a long time, he said, pike's jaw (the length of a horse's head) was nailed"Near the village of Ketsky"On a tree in the forest. By the way, according to him, local residents call jaw shuttle sleds "chin pike sleds", which also speaks of their huge size.
Soviet scientists also saw huge remains. Ethnographers Vladislav Kulemzin and Nadezhda Lukina mention in one of their books a spear jaw nailed to the wall of a Khanty's hut. There are teeth on the chin, and fishermen can hang raincoats and blankets on them.
The great-grandfather of a resident of the Don River saw a huge barracuda in the floodplain meadow near the haystack during a major flood, which looked like an old log covered with moss. He killed her with a pitchfork and fed her to pigs.
Traveler Anatoly Pankov inOymyakon Meridiantalks about a bulldozer operator who shot a giant barracuda with a gun. This happened in Yakutia, in the lower reaches of the Indigilka River. The fish are old, covered with algae, greenish-brown in color, flabby, like cotton wool. Its length reached four meters. In addition, Pankov told another interesting story.
"An employee of the Silianakhsky State Farm (whose center is located on a tributary of the Indijirka River) is a young and knowledgeable specialist who, after learning about my passion for water travel, offered to be a travel partner.
- Are we going to sail along Siliani? - I asked, half-jokingly.
- Siliani?! On a canvas kayak? There are such barracudas, they either bite through the kayak or pull you out of the boat. How many cases have a barracuda caught a fisherman's leg? They're so big that it's scary to think about......”
Biologists do not admit the existence of giant pike, especially man-eating piranhas. The most they would like to do is admit that they are two meters long. However, what's stopping a pike from growing bigger – after all, it, like most fish, grows all its life!
Ethnographers have recorded jaws that exceed the recognized size of barracudas, and legends about barracuda in various countries indicate that they can indeed reach enormous sizes.
Why don't scientists know about them? The answer is actually quite simple. Almost all of the stories are about the fish in the lake, not the fish in the river. This is not surprising - barracuda have strong competitors in the river, they are caught by fishermen, and in old age they simply cannot reach huge sizes.
In the lake, no one threatens the barracuda, especially in the disappearing taiga reservoirs. Very few people come here, and there are almost no large predators. Indeed, there is very little food. Perhaps this could explain the fact that barracuda attack humans. If a four-meter-long predator can drag a moose underwater, then why can't a fisherman? Especially when she's hungry.
Most of the coniferous forests and tundra lakes where such giant creatures are found have not been studied. But giant barracuda are clearly rare. The reason is also simple - in order to grow to such a huge size, the pike must live to be more than a hundred years old.
It is doubtful that several monsters live in one body of water at the same time - it is impossible for the ecosystem of even one large lake to feed two giants. This means that after the death of a monster, it will take up to a hundred years for another monster to appear. And, most likely, more time will pass – not every pike will live to such an advanced age.
Therefore, it is unlikely that this rare animal will reach scientists in the near future. But if you find yourself in the middle of nowhere and start fishing in a dark lake without **, be careful. Maybe you'll see a huge, meter-long barracuda and want to grab it for the glory of science. Indeed, it is better to get to the shore as soon as possible. Maybe a monster has surfaced to eat you. And you still can't catch him. This type of barracuda cannot be caught with a fishing rod or a spinning rod.
There are giant barracuda in the Vologda region. In the vicinity of Krasavin on Lake Romanovsky, a visiting fisherman, hearing that the pike had attacked the fisherman's punt, decided to catch it and ordered a tee from the forge, fried the chicken, and dragged the tee across the lake, where the people took the end of a very thick fishing line on the shore. As soon as the barracuda grabbed the bait, it was quickly pulled out and killed.
As the barracuda hangs from a branch, an adult angler of medium height stands on tiptoe and reaches the barracuda's gills, with its tail hanging about a meter on the ground. The fisherman takes off the head and tail of the fish and throws the rest onto shore. Lake Romanovskoye is close to everything described in the article above: four kilometers long, with three drops, with a double or triple bottom, as divers say, they try to find people who drowned in the lake, but as a rule, without success.
You can remember that in Yakutia, Siberia, and even in the Ryazan region there were lakes with real prehistoric monsters with eyes located on the sides of the head, since they attacked the victim from the front, and not from below. Ambush predator-barracuda. Many of them are described as barracuda (or crocodile) heads and even have protruding teeth. In Africa, similar monsters also eat hippos. This is evidenced by the fact that an international expedition decided to verify the information of the inhabitants of the lake, that the monster feeds on hippos, brought in a family of hippos from a nearby lake, and a few days later found an adult male hippopotamus, bitten in half.
However. As the barracuda swims close to the surface of the water, the waves move forward from the upper fin instead of from the muzzle, and you can clearly see how the fins cut through the water, but there are no waves near the head. So maybe these mysterious lake giant predators are similar to barracudas?
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