Enoch Nakai was a Navajo corporal at Cole Army Base in New Mexico who survived the Big Game Predator's destruction of his base and then killed the hunter alone in the lava fields of El Malpais. He was the hero of the 1991 Dark Horse Comics series Predator: Big Game, later adapted as a novel, and he returned in Predator: Blood on Two-Witch Mesa. Years later he joined Jaya Soames and her privately funded team of Predator hunters in Predator: Hunters, Predator: Hunters II and Predator: Hunters III. Raised on the stories of his grandfather, he recognized the creature as a Navajo witch long before the US Army believed him.
Biography
Earlier Life
Enoch Nakai grew up among the Navajo, the Diné, in western New Mexico, where he was raised a hunter. His mother died giving birth to his twin brother, who was stillborn, and after his father abandoned him, his grandfather raised him. The old man, a yataali or medicine man, taught him to track, to stay hidden and to lure a monster. He told him of the adilgashii, witches that appeared as a shimmer in the air, and allowed no whiskey under his roof. When the young Nakai drank, his grandfather smashed the bottle and told him he could belong to the Belagana, the white people, or to the Diné, but not to both.
Nakai later enlisted in the US Army, rose to the rank of corporal and was stationed at Cole Army Base in Cibola County, where he ran anti-aircraft duty on the open prairie. His girlfriend, Alda, worked at a diner in the nearby town of Agate, and his duties had kept him away from her for months. The other soldiers treated him as a curiosity, calling him Chief and mocking his strong and silent manner. Even his friend Dietl, a blond private who kept bourbon hidden in his footlocker, called him Nava-ho Joe.
Cole Army Base
At Cole, Nakai asked Sergeant Coates about a three-day pass that he had requested a month earlier, hoping to see Alda, but the request was refused because he had anti-aircraft duty the next day. In the barracks that night, Dietl shared his bourbon and joked that Nakai never seemed to grit his teeth. The next morning, both men were hungover on a tracked anti-aircraft vehicle. Nakai explained that the land spoke to him through smells and that an unfamiliar smell meant danger. His grandfather had taught him to tell from smell alone how long a carcass had lain in the desert sun. Dietl, the city boy, admitted that he smelled nothing.
The Adilgashii
Nakai soon caught a strange odor like sweat and heard heavy breathing in the trees above them, although his eyes found nothing there. A cloaked hunter crouched in the branches, and moments later a bolt of plasma killed Dietl on the spot. Nakai ran for his life, recognizing an adilgashii just as his grandfather had described it. He flagged down a jeep and reached a survey team that was lifting the hunter's ship onto a flatbed truck. Coates accused him of abandoning his post, and Colonel Athelry ordered him to keep his story to himself and to stay with the men guarding the craft.
The Barracks
That night, the other soldiers taunted Nakai about his story, and Private Kroft suggested that he had scalped Dietl himself. Nakai punched him and beat two of the soldiers before Coates burst in and ordered him out. Instead of a punishment, he received a private meeting with the colonel in a storage closet. Tests had proven that the captured craft was a hostile combat vessel, and the officers now accepted that Nakai had met its pilot. Fearing that the creature would want to eliminate the only witness who could recognize it, they pushed through his pass and had a jeep drive him to a bus stop before dawn.
Cole Destroyed
Hours after Nakai left, the hunter triggered the self-destruct of its captured ship from a distance. The explosion obliterated Cole Army Base, along with Colonel Athelry, Sergeant Coates and the soldiers who had mocked Nakai. Only the colonel's decision to send him away had saved his life. A television bulletin later reported that a nuclear explosion had destroyed the base at 7:04 that morning and that there were no survivors. As far as the army knew, Corporal Enoch Nakai had died with the rest of his unit.
Ben's Saloon
Nakai spent the day drinking Jack Daniel's at Ben's Saloon in Agate, a town between the Zuni and Ramah reservations, too drunk to follow the talk of a big explosion to the southeast. The owner, Ben, eventually let him keep the bottle. When a local taunted him as Chief, he tried to start a fight and fell flat on the floor, and Alda took him home. Asleep at her place, he dreamed of his grandfather and then of his dead parents presenting the glowing ghost of his stillborn brother. Alda made him promise not to drink under her roof and accused him of self-pity.
The Campfire
When the news about Cole broke, a local sheriff asked Nakai for help with a double murder on the reservation, but Nakai felt that his duty lay with his base. Turned back at an army roadblock, he learned by phone that the sheriff and his deputy were dead. He told Alda to flee into Arizona and set out on foot across the prairie toward the crater. On the way, he came upon the hunter's campfire, where it crouched unmasked among its trophies, including the sheriff's skull. A mountain lion leapt onto the creature, and Nakai escaped while the fight with the cat ended in plasma fire.
The Bazooka
Near dawn, Nakai slipped past the sentries of the army camp at the crater and walked into the command tent of Colonel Trench and Major Amblin, warning them that the blast was the least of their problems. He later waited with the soldiers in the evacuated town of Agate, and when the hunter leapt onto a passing car, he stood in a jeep and fired a bazooka. By grandstanding first, he had warned his prey and lost the chance for a clean shot. The wounded creature killed his driver with a spear and fled across the prairie, and Trench ordered Nakai to stay in town where he could keep an eye on him.
Monster Slayer
In Agate, a Zuni soldier named Dan Tilden greeted Nakai as a red brother and asked how his family had taken his enlistment. Nakai drifted into the memory of a visit to his grandfather's hogan three years earlier. His grandfather had been in the fourth day of a long chant for banishing witches, and he had pointed to Nayenezgani, the Monster Slayer, in a sand painting on the floor. He also showed him Tobadjishchini, the Monster Slayer's twin, and explained that nobody could dispel the adilgashii without the Hero Twins. When Nakai told him about the recruitment office, the old man asked whether he truly knew what he claimed to know.
The Gunship
When Tilden wondered why the creature had not used its ray gun against the soldiers in town, Nakai realized that the hunter kept its weapons at a camp. Trench refused to recall his men, so Nakai took a jeep and drove after the pursuit force alone. Major Amblin had him arrested for stealing army property, and an attack helicopter seemed to destroy the hunter with a salvo of rockets. Moments later, a plasma blast brought down the gunship, and the creature slaughtered the patrol. Amblin died gasping Nakai's name, while the corporal survived the massacre by hiding in the grass.
El Malpais
At sunrise, Nakai stood on the black rock of El Malpais with an M60 machine gun. In Navajo legend, Monster Slayer had pierced a giant's heart there while his twin distracted it, and its blood had hardened into stone. His grandfather had first brought him there as a small boy to tell him the myth. Fear had driven him into hiding the night before, and a voice inside him called him a coward. His radio was out and help lay more than ten miles away, but he chose to be the hunter. Then the ground cracked beneath him, and he fell through the roof of a lava bubble.
The Island Camp
<Climbing out, Nakai spotted vultures circling an island of jungle that the lava had never covered. He found a carrion pit with the hunter's bio-mask among the remains and then its camp, its trees hung with trophies, exactly where he had predicted. As he crept closer, he stepped into a snare that swung a spiked log into his arm, and his scream woke the Predator. Nakai fired a long burst from the M60 as it charged through the trees, but it dropped onto him from a branch, and both crashed to the ground. Nakai fled across the lava with his arm in a sling and only a pistol left.
Fire On The Island
Nakai thought it pathetic that Monster Slayer had killed a giant on that very spot while he ran from one little monster, until he remembered that Monster Slayer had help. He realized that the creature had not been sleeping on the island but recovering from its fall. Wounded, exhausted and heavy, it would suffer badly from the sixty-foot drop inside a lava bubble. Using a lighter he had taken from Major Amblin, he set the jungle island on fire to drive the hunter onto the rock. A plasma shot answered from the smoke, and Nakai waited for his prey beside the thin crust that he had chosen as his trap.
The Lava Bubble
The hunter emerged from the burning jungle firing plasma bolts, and Nakai taunted it as a fat, ugly lizard as he led it across the lava. He dived over the thin crust, the creature leapt after him, and the rock gave way beneath its weight. It burst out of the hole, knocked his pistol away and stood over him with its wrist blades extended. Then gunfire struck it from the valley, since the fire had reached the ammunition belt of his abandoned M60 and set off the rounds. Nakai grabbed his pistol and killed the wounded creature with three shots.
Ask Him
Colonel Trench arrived with a tank and a relief force much too late. His soldiers found the bodies of Amblin's men scattered across the rock, and one of them wondered why the creature had cut off all their heads. Trench replied that only a savage could answer that. Nakai stepped forward with his arm bandaged and his face battered, holding up the hunter's severed head by its dreadlocks, and invited the colonel to ask it himself. The Navajo soldier whom the army had dismissed was the only survivor of the hunt, standing on the stone where Monster Slayer had killed the giant.
Discharged
Nakai left the army with an honorable discharge, granted on the condition that he tell no one what had happened. A colonel reminded him that he had disobeyed orders, trespassed and abandoned his post before dismissing him. Back in civilian life, Nakai worked at a Fastway gas station and was haunted by dreams of the monster. His grandfather, who heard him screaming in his sleep, blamed hochxo, a sickness of disharmony, and suggested a healing ceremony. Over dinner at a diner, Alda threatened to leave him as he complained about the government cover-up, while a man in a cowboy hat listened in through an earpiece.
Blood On Two-Witch Mesa
One night, as Nakai drank on a rock beside the hogan, his grandfather brought out a dart that his own father had given him many years before. The old man believed that his father had met the same kind of monster, and he had kept the secret because he had promised never to speak of it. Hoping to restore his grandson's hozho, his harmony, he told how a few years before his birth the government had leased oil rights on the reservation, and how an oil company had begun work on Two-Witch Mesa, a sacred place. A hunter had slaughtered the company's men there, and the land later became a national monument.
The next day, a man calling himself John Smith of the Defense Department visited Nakai at the gas station. He was the eavesdropper from the diner, and he explained that his people had been watching Nakai and were interested in his understanding of unusual visitors. Nakai bristled at being spied on, but Smith offered him a new job that might be of personal interest and asked him to call on Monday. Left alone with the man's card, Nakai weighed the offer against the devil he already knew. His answer was left open.
The Snake Pit
Years later, Nakai was working at the Snake Pit, a run-down gas station whose roadside sign advertised an alien space monster, when Jaya Soames, Tyler Swain and Raphael Herrera pulled in and said that they had no ties to any government. Nakai told them that the ordnance accident reported at Cole had been a cover story and that federal agents had later asked him to join a secret unit that hunted Predators. By his account, he refused because they cared more about the creatures' gear than killing them, and the army labeled him a psycho and discharged him. When Swain mocked him with racist taunts, Nakai squared up to him.
Soames insisted that Nakai was a warrior rather than a zookeeper and invited him to go to war with them. He quit on the spot, dumped a bucket of snakes on his boss and agreed to join once the team took him home for his belongings. On the drive, he heard how Herrera, Swain and Soames, fellow survivors of Predator hunts, had each faced the creatures. Aboard her ship, the Durga, he met Mandy Graves, a survivor of a Bad Blood Predator attack. When Swain grabbed her and she threw him over her shoulder onto the deck, Nakai joked that he would marry her one day.
Aboard The Durga
Once the Durga was underway, Nakai doubted that the team could match the hunters' technology, and Soames answered with the ship's armory and a vault of captured Predator equipment. In the gym, Swain mocked Nakai as Grandpa, and Soames threw him to the mat again and again in a judo bout. She showed him the scars of a Predator that she had killed and told him that he had two more weeks at sea to get ready. Their target was Kehua in the remote Bunting Islands of the South Pacific, where shipwrecked fishermen had been caged and hunted by the Exiles.
Amelia Island
The Durga approached the islands posing as a science vessel, and Dr. Henry Bunting welcomed the team to Amelia Island as honored guests. Over a beachside feast, Bunting claimed that nobody had set foot on neighboring Kehua in years because of its venomous snakes. That night the ship's drones found a towering shrine of bones and bloody skulls in the Kehua jungle. The strike team put on black armor fitted with cooling units that hid its body heat from the creatures' thermal vision, and Soames ordered Nakai to stay at the back as the soldiers rowed ashore in the dark.
The Raid On Kehua
As the team waded up a creek toward the waterfall, a tiger leapt out of the jungle, and Nakai fought it off. An Exile killed several soldiers before the team brought it down, and in its camp Nakai freed a caged prisoner, an old man who warned that three more of the creatures were on the island. During the retreat, a grenade blast stunned Mandy, and when she told Nakai that she had to die there, he dragged her to the boats. Herrera was left behind. Later, Nakai told Mandy that he had lost friends to a Predator himself and asked for her help in wiping the creatures out.
Hunted On Kehua
The freed prisoner turned out to be the islanders' pet, and Bunting seized the Durga with explosives fixed to its hull. His masked colonists had captured the last stranded Exiles generations earlier and released them on Kehua, handing uninvited visitors to the hunt as a family tradition. They put Nakai, Soames, Mandy, Swain and the old man ashore with a few weapons and a short head start. Nakai proposed that the team split up so that at least one of them might reach the ship, and he killed a colonist with a machete. Two Exiles then chased him through the jungle and cornered him on a rocky ledge above a waterfall.
Swain charged into the fight with a war cry of Afghanistan and drove one of the Exiles off the ledge with a spear, and gunfire from the Durga's helicopter cut down the other. Soames had retaken her ship almost alone, and she spared the last Exile, dropping it a bag of gear from the vault. Bunting and his hunters died on the beach. Asked how he was holding up, Nakai answered that for the first time in a long time he felt alive.
The Afghanistan Video
After the losses in the islands, much of Soames's crew resigned, but Nakai stayed with her smaller team. He watched footage from a secure CIA server showing insurgents in eastern Afghanistan cut down one by one, and the hunters flew out to assess the creature responsible, the Djinn Predator. On the ground, Soames revealed that the American black ops team Stargazer was also searching for the hunter in order to harvest its technology. When a village boy named Atal offered to lead them to its lair, Nakai doubted the boy's story, while Swain believed him and volunteered to follow.
The Djinn's Lair
Atal led the hunters to an old Taliban cave complex, where they found a hidden Predator ship and a vast chamber of skulls and wrecked vehicles. Soames told Nakai to set more charges, and the team took positions above the cave to bury the hunter when it returned. Pinned down in a firefight, they blew the cave and escaped through a minefield that Atal had marked. Swain lured the creature onto a mine and died of his wounds on a mountain ledge. At his cairn, Nakai asked Mandy why they spent their lives trying to fix something in the past that could never change, and she replied that it was because they were stupid.
Doubts About Herrera
Herrera later turned up alive at Soames's home with a bandaged head and his arm in a sling. Nakai suspected that whoever had found him on Tehua had made a deal with him to spy on the hunters, but Mandy told him that he was still the new guy and had no right to question anyone. Soames admitted that his suspicion was reasonable. The team traveled to Belize to join John Schaefer, the brother of Dutch Schaefer, in a race against Colonel Valentina Ligachev's Russian soldiers to reach two Predators hiding beneath a Mayan pyramid. On the road, Nakai mocked Herrera's knowledge of the Bible.
The Flooded Caverns
<Schaefer led the team to a flooded cave system that connected to a cenote at a Mayan dig. Nakai, who had grown up in the desert, admitted that the only diving he had ever done was in a motel pool, yet he swam with the others through forests of stone columns. When gunfire broke out near the temple, Schaefer went to help Ligachev's soldiers and took Jaya and Nakai with him, while Mandy and Herrera held the ambush. On the summit of the pyramid, one Predator killed its wounded companion, and a clan ship carried both away. Afterward, as Soames planned to return for the creatures' gear, Nakai begged for no more diving.
A Toast To Atonement
In a bar in Belize, Schaefer warned the hunters to keep an eye on Herrera, saying that he could smell a snitch a mile away. Mandy objected, but Herrera admitted that Nakai had been right all along. Stargazer had nursed him back to health on Tehua and released him on condition that he report on the team, but after a lifetime of deceit he could not go through with it. He chose to stay behind in Belize and disappear while he searched for a way to atone, and Nakai raised a toast to atonement. Soames's team had lost another member.
Personality And Traits
Nakai was a quiet man whose calm the other soldiers mistook for an act, and Dietl joked that he never seemed to grit his teeth. Beneath that surface he struggled with drink, self-pity and the sense of belonging fully to neither the Navajo nor the white world. His upbringing as a hunter gave him the means to survive, from reading the land by smell to turning El Malpais itself into a trap. He was not a flawless hunter, since his grandstanding with the bazooka warned his prey, but he learned from his mistakes and refused to quit after fear drove him into hiding.
Years after the hunt, Nakai remained blunt and suspicious, with a dry sense of humor. He squared up to Swain over his racist taunts, joked about marrying Mandy and doubted both Atal and Herrera, the second time with good reason. His loyalty showed when he dragged Mandy back to the boats on Kehua and later asked for her help in wiping out the creatures. He shared the team's drive to fight them, yet he also questioned why they kept trying to fix a past that could never change. The hunt on Kehua made him feel alive for the first time in years.
Weapons And Equipment
As a soldier, Nakai fought the hunter with the army's own weapons. In Agate he fired a bazooka from the back of a jeep, and at El Malpais he carried an M60 machine gun that wounded the creature in the jungle. The same gun saved his life when the fire on the island cooked off its ammunition belt, and he finished the hunter with three shots from his pistol. He found its camp with binoculars and set the island ablaze with Major Amblin's lighter. On Jaya Soames's team, he wore black armor with cooling units on Kehua, killed a colonist with a machete and set explosive charges in the Djinn's cave.
Behind The Scenes
Enoch Nakai first appeared in Predator: Big Game #1, written by John Arcudi and penciled by Evan Dorkin, with inks by Armando Gil and covers by Chris Warner. Dark Horse published the four issues from March to June 1991. Arcudi built Nakai's story around Navajo belief, including the adilgashii witches, the Night Way chant and the myth of the Hero Twins behind El Malpais. Bantam Spectra published the novel adaptation in 1999, written by Sandy Schofield, the joint pen name of Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch.
The novel followed the comic closely but expanded Nakai's past. Interludes narrated by the spirit of his stillborn twin, Tobadjishchini, cast Enoch as Nayenezgani, the Monster Slayer, and the twin as the brother who distracted the monster. In the novelization, his father drank himself to death instead of abandoning him, and his grandfather died three weeks after Nakai left for boot camp, sitting above the drawing of the Monster Slayer. His grandfather's lessons in tracking, hiding and reading smells, his childhood visit to El Malpais and the name of Private Kroft also came from the book.
Several supporting roles changed as well. The colonel in the novel agreed to Nakai's plan and sent him out with Major Lee in place of Major Amblin, and after Lee died he made Nakai his second in command. Private Tilden followed Nakai onto the lava, watched the final fight from half a mile away and stood beside him when he presented the head. Instead of a bitter retort, the novel ended with the two soldiers joking through their report until the colonel answered with a curt word of praise.
Nakai returned in Predator: Blood on Two-Witch Mesa, a two-part story by writer Terry LaBan and artist Howard Cobb in Dark Horse Comics #20 and #21 in 1994, with a painted cover by Brom. Its living grandfather contradicted the novel's account of his death, and its quiet discharge differed from the version Nakai later gave in Hunters. Chris Warner brought Nakai back in Predator: Hunters in 2017, drawn by Francisco Ruiz Velasco, followed by Hunters II with Agustin Padilla in 2018 and Hunters III with Brian Thies in 2020.
Appearances
- Predator: Big Game #1–4 (Dark Horse Comics, March to June 1991)
- Dark Horse Comics #20–21, Predator: Blood on Two-Witch Mesa (Dark Horse Comics, April to May 1994)
- Predator: Big Game, novel by Sandy Schofield (Bantam, 1999)
- Predator: Hunters #1–5 (Dark Horse Comics, May to September 2017)
- Predator: Hunters II #1–4 (Dark Horse Comics, August 2018 to January 2019)
- Predator: Hunters III #1–2 (Dark Horse Comics, February to March 2020)
- Predator: Hunters III trade paperback, completing the story (Dark Horse Comics, November 2020)
External Sources
- Predator: Big Game #1 at Dark Horse
- Predator: Hunters #1 at Dark Horse
- Predator: Hunters II TPB at Dark Horse
- Predator: Hunters III TPB at Dark Horse
Tag Categories: Predator Universe Characters | Predator Lore | Predator Hunt Survivors
