Billy Sole was the tracker on the rescue team led by Alan "Dutch" Schaefer in Predator, the 1987 film in which Sonny Landham played him. A quiet Native American scout, Billy read the trail for the team from the crash site of the minister's helicopter to the guerrilla camp and beyond. He was the first man to sense that something was hunting them, and he later made a last stand on a fallen log against the Jungle Hunter, which killed him and took his skull as a trophy.
Biography
Earlier Life
Billy Sole served on Dutch's team, the small rescue unit that the CIA man Dillon brought to Val Verde to recover a cabinet minister lost in the jungle. The film gave him almost no backstory beyond his skill as a tracker and his Native American heritage. He spoke little, wore a bandana and long hair, and moved ahead of the others on the trail. When Dillon asked whether the team had picked up the trail, Dutch answered that Billy was on it.
The novelization by Paul Monette filled in his past. There Billy had been a Kit Carson scout, was half Sioux and half Italian, and wore his hair two inches past regulation. He had seen 13 years of combat duty and survived wars from Angola to Cambodia. The book also said that he had hunted raccoon with his brother in Louisiana as a boy, and it described him as lean and fast, the best tracker the men had ever worked with.
The novel also sketched his years on the team. It said that Billy had joined Dutch's unit around 1980 and had served with it in Lebanon and Afghanistan as well as in Angola and Cambodia. Shortly before Val Verde, the team had ended a terrorist siege at the Sudanese embassy in Berlin. Billy kept to himself among the men, but the book gave him a loose friendship with Poncho, the teammate who later stood beside him at the night camp. It also described a sense that went beyond tracking, since Billy could reach the memories of his ancestors and of the ancient Maya who had lived in the jungle.
Flying Into The Jungle
Before dawn, a Huey helicopter flew the team over the jungle of Val Verde toward the crash site. Under the red cabin light the men checked their weapons and joked while Blain passed around his chewing tobacco. Billy took little part in the banter. He sat quietly, smeared dark camouflage paint across his face and watched the others as the helicopter neared the drop point. Once the team rappelled down into the trees, he moved out ahead of them to find the trail that Dillon wanted followed.
The Crash Site
After the team found the wreck of the minister's helicopter, Billy read the ground around it. He told Dutch that something was strange, since there had been a firefight with men shooting in all directions, yet he could find no track leading away. The men, he said, had never left the spot and seemed to have simply disappeared. The team then found the skinned bodies of the Green Beret unit sent in before them, among them men from Jim Hopper's team, hanging from the trees.
In the novelization, Billy was the one who found the three skinned men and vomited at the sight. He also read more from the tracks than the film showed. He counted ten to twelve guerrillas and six sets of US-issue boots, all the same size, from men of about 160 pounds who marched like a machine. Those tracks led the team toward the guerrilla camp, and they hinted that Dillon had sent other soldiers into the valley before Dutch's men.
The Guerrilla Camp
Before the assault, Dutch assigned Billy and Poncho to take out the camp's guard. Billy then fought through the attack with the rest of the team as the men blew up huts, trucks and the main building and killed the guerrillas inside. He left the camp with a cut across his cheek, a mark he carried for the rest of the film. In the aftermath, Anna was the only survivor the team took prisoner.
The novel gave Billy a larger part in the raid. He killed a sentry who was listening to a Walkman, and a guerrilla knife opened the cut on his cheek during the fighting. He used one man as a shield and shot the rebel captain with his shotgun, then cleared the bunker, which he said looked like the Pentagon. After the raid he mapped the route to the pickup point at LZ 49, and Poncho's nickname for him in the book was Tonto.
The March
When Dutch asked Billy for a way out of the valley, the tracker told him that the only route led east toward the border. On the march, Hawkins told Billy a crude joke about his girlfriend, and Billy answered it with a long, loud laugh. The Jungle Hunter recorded that laugh, and at the end of the film it replayed the sound as it triggered its self-destruct device, a moment covered on the Yautja laugh page. The joke was one of the few light moments the team had in the jungle.
The novelization added a stop at a ruined Mayan temple. There Billy fell into a kind of trance, collapsed and ran a fever of 103 degrees. He told Dutch privately of a Sioux legend about a god-creature from beyond the sky that had killed half of his people and would one day return. Dutch told him to keep the monster talk away from the others, and the book used the moment to set Billy apart as the man who understood the danger first.
Sensing The Hunter
Billy was the first to notice that something was following the team. He stopped on the trail and stared into the canopy, and one of the men blamed his nose for spooking him. Billy told Dutch that there was something in the trees, but when Dutch asked what he had seen, he admitted that he could see nothing. Soon afterwards the creature killed Hawkins and Blain, and Billy searched the jungle around the bodies for any track that could explain what had attacked them.
The novel gave Billy a larger part in that search. He found the gear Hawkins had dropped and a set of three-toed tracks that no animal he knew could have made, and he was the first man to call the creature a predator. He also found Blain's bag slashed open beside the trail. From that point on the book had Billy carry the team's radio for the rest of the march toward the pickup point.
The Night Camp
As the team dug in for the night, Billy told Poncho that he was scared. Poncho told him that he had never been afraid of any man, and Billy answered that something was waiting for them out there, that it was no man, and that they were all going to die. His fear stood out because he was the most experienced man in the jungle, and it shook the others more than any shot fired so far. Dutch then had the men set traps and flares around the camp.
When a wild boar set off a trip flare in the dark, the team fired wildly into the jungle and killed the animal. In the confusion, the Jungle Hunter took the body of Blain from the camp, and Billy was the one who reported that the body was gone. He told Dutch that the boar had set off the flare, since there were no other tracks around it. Billy then compared the creature to a hunter, the word that gave the team its first clear picture of the enemy.
Last Stand On The Log
After Mac and Dillon were killed and Poncho was wounded, the survivors fled toward the helicopter, and Billy stopped on a fallen log that crossed a river. Dutch shouted for him to come on, but Billy threw his rifle into the water, dropped his gear and drew his machete. He drew the blade across his chest to mark himself and stood alone to face the Jungle Hunter so that the others could get away. The film cut away before the fight, and the team heard only his scream from the trees behind them.
The novelization gave the scene more ritual. There Billy dropped his radio and rifle, painted war stripes on his face and a wheat-stalk symbol over his heart, and tied his medicine bag to the hilt of his knife. He chanted while facing north as he waited for the alien. The book made clear that he chose to stay, and it framed his stand as a warrior's death rather than a delaying action alone.
Death & Trophy
The Jungle Hunter killed Billy off-screen, and moments later it shot Poncho with its plasma caster. Later in the film, the creature returned to Billy's body, which lay propped against a tree with his long hair matted with blood. It reached into the corpse and pulled out his skull with the spine attached, the practice described on the Predators ripping spines page. The skull became one of the Jungle Hunter's trophies, and the scene confirmed what had happened on the log.
In the novelization, the alien's weapon cut Billy's jugular and slashed down his chest, and the creature then pulled his body apart. Dutch later saw it carrying Billy's heart and brain. Poncho died soon after from a spear in the book, and Dutch remembered Billy before his own final fight with the creature. The Predators vs Native Americans page covers how Billy's death fits the wider history of the Yautja and Native warriors.
Personality & Traits
Billy was quiet and watchful, and he spoke mostly when he had something to report. His teammates trusted his reading of the jungle without question, and Dutch turned to him first for the trail and for a way out of the valley. He laughed as hard as any of the men at Hawkins's joke, which showed that he shared the team's rough humor. He also had instincts that the others lacked, since he sensed the hunter in the trees long before anyone saw it.
His fear at the night camp did not make him a coward. Billy faced what he feared directly, and his last act was to stand alone against the creature with a blade. The novelization tied that courage to his heritage through the Sioux legend, the war paint and the medicine bag. In both versions he understood sooner than Dutch that the team could not outfight the hunter, and he chose to meet it on his own terms.
Weapons & Equipment
In the film, Billy carried a rifle styled as an M16, built on an AR-15 and fitted with a Mossberg 500 shotgun under the barrel. He also wore a Desert Eagle pistol in a shoulder holster and carried a machete, the weapon he kept for his last stand. He wore a bush hat at the crash site, then a bandana for the rest of the mission. He threw the rifle away on the log, which left the machete as his only weapon against the Jungle Hunter.
The Monette novelization armed him with an M-203, the grenade-launcher combination that the book used in place of the film's shotgun rifle. In the book he used a shotgun during the camp raid and a knife for the sentry kill. After the march began he also carried the team's radio. His medicine bag, which he tied to his knife before the end, was the one personal item the novel described him carrying.
Echoes After Val Verde
Billy did not return after Predator, but later stories looked back on his death. In Predator 2, the government agent Peter Keyes hunted a new creature in Los Angeles with knowledge drawn from the Central American incident in which Dutch's team had died, though the film never named Billy. The novel Predator: Concrete Jungle by Nathan Archer later recalled the men of Dutch's team who were killed in the jungle, and it listed Billy among them. In both works his death stood as early proof that the hunters had come to Earth before.
Behind The Scenes
Sonny Landham played Billy in Predator, which John McTiernan directed for 20th Century Fox from a script by Jim Thomas and John Thomas. Born William Marion Landham III in Canton, Georgia, in 1941, he was of Cherokee and Seminole descent. Before Predator he had appeared in The Warriors and played Billy Bear in 48 Hrs. in 1982, and he later appeared in Lock Up in 1989. The film opened in the United States in June 1987.
Landham later turned to politics. He ran in the Republican primary for Governor of Kentucky in 2003, and in 2008 he sought the Libertarian nomination for the US Senate before he withdrew. He died of congestive heart failure in Lexington, Kentucky, on August 17, 2017, at the age of 76. Billy's laugh, recorded during the Hawkins joke scene, was reused for the creature's laugh in the film's final scene, which made the actor part of the Jungle Hunter's last moments.
Early drafts of the script, then titled Hunter, named the character Miguel rather than Billy. His fight with the creature was written to happen off-screen, with only his scream heard, so the long-running rumor of a cut death scene had no basis. Interviews in the documentary If It Bleeds, We Can Kill It said that the production hired a bodyguard because of Landham's temper, to protect the cast and crew from him. In 2012, the goblin spider Predatoroonops billy was named after the character in a genus whose species all honored the film.
Famous Quotes
- "There was a firefight. They were shooting in all directions."
- "Hell, it's like they just disappeared."
- "There's something in those trees."
- "I'm scared, Poncho."
- "There's something out there waiting for us, and it ain't no man. We're all gonna die."
- "Like a hunter."
Conclusion
Billy Sole was the quiet tracker of Dutch's team, the man who read the trail from the crash site to the guerrilla camp and beyond. He was the first to sense the Jungle Hunter in the trees and the first to admit that it was no man. Rather than run, he threw away his rifle and faced the creature with a machete on a fallen log, buying the survivors time. The hunter took his skull as a trophy and kept his laugh, and his death in Val Verde left Dutch with only a handful of allies.
Appearances
- Predator (1987)
- Predator novelization by Paul Monette (1987)
- Predator 2 (1990), indirect mention
- Predator: Concrete Jungle novel by Nathan Archer (2005), mention
Tag Categories: Predator Universe Characters | Predator Lore
