Whisper in the Dark by Joseph Bruchac

Author:Joseph Bruchac
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2005-08-16T04:00:00+00:00

But, I told Roger, that was not the end of what my dad shared with me.

“What your Grama Delia didn’t tell you,” my father said, “is that the Whisperer in the Dark returned many years later, after the coming of the English during the time of Canonchet. This time that dark spirit didn’t choose to inhabit one of our people. Instead it chose an Englishman. You could say that made sense. None of our monsters were as dangerous as the English. The long-ago monsters just killed a few people every now and then. But the English seemed to want to destroy all the Indians. We discovered that if we wanted to scare our kids into behaving right, it was a lot more effective to tell them the Chauquacock, those English Knife Men, were going to get them, than to say they’d be taken away by a giant bird or some other Indian monster.”

There was, my father explained, one Chauquaco, one Knife Man, in particular. He was the most bloodthirsty of all the English. Even the other Englishmen feared him. He was a soldier who had fought not just our people, but native people in other parts of the world. Asia, Africa, the islands of the Pacific. Wherever he went, he took delight in killing—not just other warriors, but those who were weak, like children and elders. Then he drank their blood because he said it made him stay strong. His hair was white, but he didn’t look old. His eyes were red, and his skin was as pale as something you’d find under a rock. He was fearless in battle, and not just because he wore an armor-plated vest so that spears and arrows just bounced off him. He was huge and powerful. The only thing that he seemed wary of was bright light, and so he always attacked at twilight or in the dark. He had become like an animal, living in the woods apart from the rest of the English. Because he preyed only on the Indians, his own people left him alone.

We Narragansetts had a name for him. It was Chauquaco Wunnicheke, which means “Knife Hand,” because he carried a vicious weapon. It was a five-bladed knife with a handle. When he gripped it, those blades stuck out from his fist like razor-sharp claws.

One night our warriors took Knife Hand captive. They came upon him crouched like a wolf over the body of a young man he had killed. He was drinking the blood. When he looked up, he saw a circle of men. Half of them held torches, while the others kept their arrows pointed at his heart. His red eyes gleamed as he tried to shrink away from the light, but they had encircled him and he couldn’t escape.

Some wanted to execute him right on the spot.

“Nissnissoke,” some of our men said. “Kill him like a dog.”

“A quick end is too good,” others said. “Let him know the long death of many wounds.”

But Canonchet did not agree.

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