Predator: Big Game: Novel Plot & Lore
Predator: Big Game is a 1999 novel by Sandy Schofield, published by Bantam Spectra in February 1999 in the Dark Horse Science Fiction Novels line. It followed Navajo corporal Enoch Nakai after a hunter landed near Cole Army Base in New Mexico, the captured ship destroyed the post, and Nakai tracked the hunter into the lava of El Malpais. Schofield novelized John Arcudi's 1991 Dark Horse comic.
Plot Summary
The Hunter Lands In New Mexico
A hunter ship passed low over high desert near Cole Army Base on a dark New Mexico night. A puma was watching wild boar at the base of a mesa when the overflight scattered the pack. An armored figure then appeared on the ridgeline, downwind of the cat, with a flat-topped helmet, claws, snakelike hair, and a bone necklace. A blue bolt killed one boar. The hunter took the head and left the cat, then turned toward the humans at the base.
Two miles due east, Cole Army Base filled a round valley. Late that night Corporal Enoch Nakai stood in Sergeant Coates's overheated office while Coates canceled a three-day leave requested three weeks earlier and put him on tank duty at sunrise. Nakai had promised the leave to Alda, who worked days at Cindy's Hotel and Restaurant in Agate and came into Ben's Saloon after that shift. He called her from the mess before lights-out. He had been sober nine months because of her, after a childhood on the reservation with his grandfather.
Dietl At The Tank
At sunrise Nakai and Private Dietl had tank duty. Dietl was a short Californian, hungover from the night, and Nakai's only friend on the base after six months. Nakai smelled rotting boar and heard movement in trees he could not see. Dietl raised his rifle. Three aiming dots locked on him from a shimmer in the trees, and a blue bolt killed him through the chest. Nakai fired at empty air and ran.
Cole Captures The Ship
Corporal David Winford picked Nakai up in a Humvee on the way to a reported landing and took him to a circle of trucks around a red-and-brown circular craft. The one-person ship was not much bigger than a pickup, with fins on one side and a cockpit in the center, and it almost matched the desert rock. Colonel Athelry and Coates had been treating the landing as a possible spy craft. Coates yelled at Nakai for leaving his post. Nakai reported that he had met the occupant and that the occupant was not a spy.
The Skinned Bodies At The Tank
That evening Private Nathaniel Clowes and Corporal Ryan were sent to the unmanned tank. Coates had pulled Clowes aside with the belief that Dietl had been killed. They found dried blood on the tank and a trail into the trees, where Dietl hung by a rope around his feet, every inch of skin peeled off, heart and lungs gone, and the skull removed.
The cloaked hunter lifted Ryan and killed him. Clowes fired through Ryan's body, hit the shimmer twice, and was killed by a blue bolt through the back. From the barracks Nakai heard the distant gunfire. Private Kroft and Corporal Danken baited him about Dietl and the funny-looking plane until Nakai knocked Kroft out and broke Danken's nose. Coates took him to a storage closet in empty D barracks, where Athelry and Coates treated the ship as a hostile combat vessel. They pushed through Nakai's three-day pass for the next morning and planned to put him on a bus, because he was the only man who had seen how the thing fought.
The Cole Base Destroyed
That night the hunter waited near the base with three human skulls and the boar skull on its belt. Before dawn Corporal Benson drove Nakai to a Greyhound stop in a nearby town. An hour later Benson was in the hangar, where men in white coats had the craft on a flatbed. Dr. Richards, flown in after the find, told Athelry it was a spacecraft whose deep-space radioactivity had almost gone. Sergeant Redman reported the hung, skinned, headless bodies near the tank.
A technician then reported activity on the craft. A row of red lights on the side and top began going out one by one. Benson called it a countdown, and Athelry ordered everyone down. The last light went out, and the ship destroyed the entire base. Benson, Coates, Athelry, and about a thousand other personnel were vaporized. The hunter watched from three miles away. Nakai was on a Greyhound about forty miles out, short of Agate.
Nakai's Dream In Agate
Television later put the blast at 7:04 that morning and treated the size as leaving no survivors. The army would not name a cause. Agate felt the ground shake and heard a rolling boom. Radiation at the later crater was very low, and the sand had fused into glass globules.
Nakai reached Agate and spent about twelve hours in Ben's Saloon with a bottle of Jack Daniel's. Alda found him after her Cindy's shift, and she and Ben got him to her house. In a dream his grandfather, the tribe's medicine man, told him to face the hunt with his dead brother. Alda woke him and confirmed that his twin had been stillborn and that his mother had died in that birth. She forbade more drinking. He understood the captured ship had destroyed Cole, asked for her car, and refused to take her along.
The Nadire Sheep Ranch
West of the reservation outside Agate, wool buyer Dan Bonney was working a dozen small farms with third-generation sheep herder Robert Nadire. Two of Robert's sheep were missing. They found gutted, beheaded sheep on the roof, one of them half-eaten. The cloaked hunter ripped another sheep in half, killed Robert with a chest bolt, and beheaded Dan. Robert's six-year-old son Billy watched from the house.
Sheriff Bogle And Dr. Ellison
Sheriff Bogle stayed after his county emptied in a traffic jam and picked up Dr. Ellison, the county's only doctor for fifteen years, a former professional golfer everyone called Pro. The army had announced that the earlier shock was Cole's destruction in the next county, and Bogle took Ellison to the Nadire ranch after Billy spoke of blue fire and Walking Dove was found in shock. Behind the house, Robert and Dan had been blown apart. A wrapping red weapon bound Pro's chest, turned blue, and burned him to death.
Bogle fired his .357 Magnum at a heat-shimmer and hit the hunter in the arm. Green blood sprayed, and the hunter dropped its camouflage. A blue bolt then killed Bogle. The three hits had torn armor and skin enough to slow the hunter later. The hunter cut off Bogle's head with a wristblade and left with it on its belt. Walking Dove Nadire later drove into town, told people to lock doors, and left Agate with her children.
Nakai Sees The Unmasked Hunter
An army and state-police roadblock turned Nakai back. He called Alda from Rosalita's Diner at the intersection with Highway 36, told her to take her Ford convertible into Arizona to her sister in Phoenix, and walked into the desert around the roadblocks. He covered about eight miles in a long afternoon, swinging at least three miles wide of the checkpoint, while helicopters and planes flew search patterns. By about ten at night he could see lights of a temporary army camp outside the Cole crater.
He found a trophy camp with Sheriff Bogle's head on a rock, hat and sunglasses on, Dr. Ellison's head beside it, and other heads including Dietl's. The hunter sat unmasked across the fire, working on a damaged forearm panel, with an antlike face, inward mandibles, and thick beaded hair. A puma on the same ridge attacked it. They fought until the hunter killed the cat with blue fire. Nakai ran for the army camp. The fight showed him the hunter could bleed.
The Temporary Camp At The Crater
Nakai slipped past two perimeter guards and walked into an unnamed bald colonel's tent during a radiation debate. He identified himself as Corporal Enoch Nakai, permanently stationed at Cole until the day before, with a three-day pass, and he had seen the craft and the pilot. They talked more than two hours. Washington faxes arrived, last-night reports from Cole signed by Coates and Athelry, and the colonel learned that the specialists sent to study the craft had arrived and died in the blast. He believed Nakai and ordered Major Lee to lead a tracking party with him.
The hunter's camp was cold. The puma lay broken and skinned. Bogle's head had been left on a rock. False trails covered the real one south toward Agate, about twenty miles. Nakai wanted to wait for night because the thing could vanish in daylight and could see in the dark. They hid Humvees behind Henry Barber's locked gas station.
The Street Fight In Agate
After dark a red sports car entered the abandoned town. Jay Newport, a television reporter hunting a Cole story, and cameraman Scott Richards had driven from Phoenix. The hunter stepped in front of the car. Jay hit a light pole, and the hunter pulled him onto the hood and cut off his head. Nakai's Humvees arrived. Nakai fired an antitank missile that missed, wrecked a hardware store, and rolled the sports car. The hunter threw Jay's head through a Humvee windshield and escaped over a roof. Scott survived with a head cut and was evacuated.
The unnamed colonel called the hunter the target, ordered thirty more men airlifted for night action, and sent Major Lee, Mayhew, Chaney, and Corales to check the trail. The hunter, at least seven feet tall, took Chaney's M-16, beheaded him, and used the rifle to kill Mayhew. Lee treated the M-16 kill as proof the hunter understood their weapons. The trail headed toward a volcanic ridgeline about ten miles away.
The Hunt Into El Malpais
While Nakai and Private Tilden, who was Zuni, patrolled west to an abandoned railway warehouse, Nakai remembered telling his grandfather he was joining the army, about three years earlier. The tribe had considered the old man Yataali, the medicine man. He had sat over a dirt drawing of Nayenezgani, the monster slayer of Navajo song, and of Tobadjishchini, the twin who distracts the monster while his brother kills it. Grandfather taught that both twins mattered in the night way, and that without both, evil could not be banished. Nakai left for boot camp the next day. Three weeks later Grandfather died sitting above that drawing.
Nakai convinced the colonel that the hunter stalked, took souvenirs, dressed kills, doubled back, used camouflage, and ran when outnumbered. Nakai treated the desert, the base, and a lava camp as the hunter's chosen ground, and he believed the hunter had come alone. The lava fields covered about two hundred square miles of northern New Mexico. The Spanish name is El Malpais, the Bad Country. Grandfather had brought young Nakai there and told the myth of the monster slayer and his twin in those black rocks, where the giant's blood hardened into the stone. About twenty-six men left Agate after the colonel promised a fourteen-man commando unit and a helicopter gunship.
The Gunship Fight In The Valley
The hunter waited on a lava-slope ledge in El Malpais. A gunship lit the slope with flares and fired four rockets. The hunter took cover in a cave behind the ledge, then destroyed the gunship, which crashed on the valley floor. Shoulder-cannon fire killed five commandos in the opening exchange, wrecked both Humvees, and killed more troops before the hunter left over the ridge.
Of some thirty soldiers and commandos, fewer than ten remained, and there were no wounded. Major Lee died from a bolt to the face. This was the colonel's first live combat. Nakai named the hunter Adikgashii to Tilden, then claimed the monster-slayer name for himself. The colonel made Nakai second in command. Radios were wrecked. Tilden volunteered to hike back to Agate to call for tanks, more gunships, and air strikes. If this next fight failed, Washington would take over.
The Trap In The Hidden Valley
Nakai went onto the lava alone with a two-hour deadline. Green blood covered the ledge. He nearly fell through a thin lava-dome roof into a hole about sixty feet down, caught the rim, and lived. He found a hidden green valley, about ten football fields by ten, where old lava had forked around a pocket of trees. Bogle's head sat on a stump. The hunter lay among other human heads, covered in its own green blood and not moving. Nakai went in to finish it and tripped a thin cord. A spiked branch ripped his right shoulder, tearing muscle and tendon. The hunter had been resting, not dead, and had set a trap.
Tilden got permission to follow for half an hour. When the hunter came at Nakai, he fired one-handed, missed, and emptied the rifle before the hunter yanked it away and smashed it. A rotten limb broke, the hunter fell on its back spraying green blood, then limped back to camp and lay down again by Bogle's head. Nakai slung his ruined right arm with his shirt. He had a knife, binoculars, an army pistol with at least seven rounds, and matches. He covered a lava-dome hole with brush, then circled the valley lighting dry brush, leaving only the ground under the pit open. The fire drove the hunter toward that gap.
The Final Kill
The hunter climbed the lava toward Nakai. Nakai drew it from the trees into the brush-covered hole, and it fell through the lava-dome roof. It climbed out, threw Nakai on his back, and extended wrist blades. Tilden saw this through binoculars from a distant ridge, too far for a useful shot.
The book's spirit chapters treat Nakai's stillborn twin as the one who cannot touch the living world except through Enoch's things. A fresh wind drove flame into Nakai's broken ammunition belt in the burning valley, and the heat cooked off the shells. The hunter turned toward the fire. Nakai shot with his left hand, hitting the soft area above the eyes, the mouth, the right eye, and then the forehead. The hunter fell. Tilden took the empty pistol and told him he truly was Nayenezgani. Nakai thanked Grandfather.
He later told the colonel he had found the camp about five miles away, burned it out after the fight in El Malpais, and engaged after being ordered not to. He held up the hunter's head. The colonel called it well done. Tilden helped the injured Nakai down the ridge, right arm in a sling. The colonel had been staging two tanks and four gunships and no longer needed that attack. The ship was already gone. It had destroyed itself and Cole days earlier, and nothing remained of that craft but the crater.
The Hunters
Soldiers and civilians called the visitor a monster, alien, hunter, occupant, or target. Nakai once named it Adikgashii to Tilden. It stood at least seven feet, with hidelike skin, an antlike unmasked face, inward mandibles, nearly human eyes, and thick beaded hair. Green blood marked wounds. Armor covered knees, thighs, arms, shoulders, and a removable flat-topped helmet. A bone necklace hung on the chest. Boots left ridged tracks.
A shoulder weapon painted three red dots and fired blue bolts. Wrist blades snapped from the forearm. A wrapping red-to-blue burning rope killed Dr. Ellison. A forearm metal panel took damage after Bogle's shots. Camouflage turned the hunter into a shimmer, then dropped when it chose to be seen. The one-person circular ship blended with desert rock, sat in a Cole hangar, ran a red-light countdown, and vaporized the base while the hunter watched from three miles away. There was no second hunter and no later ship. The nest of heads and the messy animal kills later marked it as a bad blood, even though it waited, honored the puma's skill, set traps, picked defensive ground, and rested when wounded.
Confirmed Kills
The hunter's first trophy was a wild boar, then Dietl at the tank, then Ryan and Clowes when they found the body. At the Nadire pen it killed sheep, Robert Nadire, and Dan Bonney. Dr. Ellison died in the burning wrap, and Sheriff Bogle died after wounding the hunter. Jay Newport was beheaded in Agate. Chaney was beheaded on the trail, and Mayhew was shot with Chaney's M-16. The puma wounded the hunter and was later found broken and skinned.
The ship's destruction of Cole killed Athelry, Coates, Benson, Richards, Redman, Winford, and about a thousand other base personnel. The lava-valley fight destroyed a gunship and both Humvees and left fewer than ten survivors of about thirty soldiers and commandos, including Major Lee. Corporal Enoch Nakai kills the hunter with a left-hand pistol, then takes the head to the colonel. Alda, Ben, Walking Dove, Billy, Scott Richards, Tilden, the second colonel, and Major Sowel live. Alda was last sent to Phoenix, and the book does not bring her back onstage.
Key Characters
- Enoch Nakai was a Navajo corporal on tank duty at Cole, raised by his grandfather after his mother died in childbirth and his father drank himself to death. He relapsed after the base vanished, tracked the hunter into El Malpais, killed it with a pistol, and lived with a wrecked right arm.
- Tobadjishchini was the stillborn twin who narrated some chapters from the world of the ancestors. The spirit chapters treated him as the one who distracts the monster. Enoch did not know him in life.
- Grandfather was the unnamed tribal medicine man. He taught tracking and how to lure a monster, died three weeks after Enoch left for boot camp, and is thanked at the end.
- Alda was Nakai's partner, later called Zuni in the book. She pulled him out of Ben's, sent him toward the hunt by promising to go to her sister in Phoenix, and is not shown again.
- Sergeant Coates canceled Nakai's leave, then helped exile him on a bus. He died when Cole was vaporized.
- Colonel Athelry commanded Cole, seized the ship, and died in the hangar countdown.
- Private Dietl was Nakai's only friend on the base and the first human kill, later hung, skinned, and beheaded.
- Sheriff Bogle wounded the hunter with a .357 and died for it. His head marked later camps, hat and sunglasses left on.
- Dr. Ellison was the county doctor and a former golfer. The wrapping weapon burned him to death, and his head was taken with the golf hat left on.
- The second colonel was never named. He believed Nakai after Cole, kept him in town after the missile in Agate, then used him again on the lava and accepted the hunter's head.
- Major Lee led the tracking force and died in the lava valley when a bolt destroyed his face.
- Private Tilden was Zuni. He hiked for reinforcements, followed Nakai onto the lava, witnessed the kill, and lived.
- Jay Newport drove from Phoenix for a Cole television story and was beheaded in Agate. Scott Richards survived the crash.
Place In The Books
Bantam sold the novel as the third of three Predator paperbacks, after Nathan Archer's Concrete Jungle in 1995 and Cold War in 1997. It is a comic expansion, not a film book, and it does not continue Schaefer, Rasche, or Philips. The hunt is self-contained: one hunter, one ship, New Mexico, and Nakai. The book never prints Val Verde, OWLF, or a calendar year. Oklahoma City is spoken of as a past bombing, so the present is after April 1995, in summer heat.
Predator: Blood on Two-Witch Mesa later sent his family history into the Old West. Dark Horse's Predator: Hunters then brought Enoch Nakai back onto a team of people who had killed hunters. Those comics are not this novel. In this book Grandfather was dead before the hunt, and he helped only as a spirit. Titan later bound Big Game with Concrete Jungle and Cold War in The Complete Predator Omnibus.
Editions
Bantam Spectra released the first American mass-market paperback in February 1999 in the Dark Horse Science Fiction Novels line. Catalog listings give 226 pages. The painted cover is a gold-masked hunter with a spear on a pile of skulls, credited to John Bolton.
Titan Books reprinted the text in The Complete Predator Omnibus on 30 January 2018, bound with Concrete Jungle and Cold War. Titan lists that paperback at 672 pages. There is no separate modern standalone of this book.
Behind The Scenes
Sandy Schofield is the pen name of husband-and-wife writers Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. They chose the name because their six names would not fit a cover. Under that name they had already written a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine novel, a Quantum Leap novel, and the Aliens novel Rogue. Rusch had edited a long-running science-fiction magazine and won a Hugo for that work. Smith edited Pulphouse projects and later Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
Dark Horse asked Nathan Archer for another Predator novelization after Concrete Jungle. He turned this Southwest story down because he did not know the country and did not like the plot, then wrote Cold War instead. Bantam's third Dark Horse Science Fiction paperback became Schofield's New Mexico book in 1999, eight years after Arcudi's four-issue comic, which Evan Dorkin pencilled and Armando Gil inked. The novel keeps Cole, Agate, Nakai, Alda, and the lava finish, and it adds the twin's first-person chapters and more of Nakai's drinking and family. The second colonel is never named, and the wrapping weapon is never called bolas.
Conclusion
Predator: Big Game is Sandy Schofield's 1999 Bantam novel of John Arcudi's Dark Horse comic. It takes Corporal Enoch Nakai from a canceled leave at Cole Army Base through the ship's destruction of that post and a hunt across Agate into El Malpais. The book ends with the hunter dead, its head in Nakai's pack, the ship already gone in the Cole crater, and Nakai accepting the monster-slayer role as the novel frames it.
External Sources
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