The time is ten thousand years ago and the place is the shores of Lake
Champlain, a land inhabited by Abenaki communities who hunt, gather, and follow the cycles of their unspoiled natural world in relative harmony. Joseph Bruchac, a nationally renowned storyteller and writer of Native
American tales, uses this setting not just to spin a compelling
adventure yarn but also to re-create with grace, fullness, and clarity
the cultural, social, and spiritual systems of these pre-contact Native
Americans.
In this third novel of his trilogy about the "people
of the dawnland," the lake they call Petonbowk – "the waters between"
Vermont's Green Mountains and New York's Adirondacks – holds both
sustenance and danger, and Young Hunter, the "young, broad-shouldered
man whose heart was good for all the people," is called upon to confront a dual menace. A "deepseer" or shaman, he must use his full powers
first to comprehend the threats and then to defeat them.
The
lake, it seems, holds a huge water-snake monster that makes it
impossible to reap the waters' bountiful harvest of fish and game. And,
worse, a tortured outcast, Watches Darkness, has turned against his
tribe and is using his deepseer's knowledge to perpetrate horrible acts
of senseless evil: he destroys whole villages out of sheer malevolence;
he literally eats his victims' hearts to absorb their powers; he kills
his own grandmother without remorse. As the tension between hunter and
hunted mounts, Bruchac seamlessly weaves stories within the story, the
lore that connects the people to each other and to their heritage, so
that the novel becomes not just an archetypal battle of good versus evil but a vivid depiction of traditional New England Indian culture in
pre-Columbian times.
Richly atmospheric, resonant with Native
American spirituality, melodious with the rhythms of the Abenaki
language, The Waters Between paints both an epic quest and a colorful
portrait of "the lives of people living as human beings were told to
live by the Talker. Never perfect, often failing, but always growing,
always part of something larger than themselves, their varied heartbeats meshing together to make the one great, healthy heartbeat which was the Only People."
