Book dossier

The waters between

by Joseph Bruchac

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 uses this setting not just to spin a compelling adventure yarn but also to re-create 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 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.