Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Chapters 12-13 of Stephen Graham Jones’ Buffalo Hunter Hunter. The book was first published in 2025. Spoilers ahead! Content warning for child rape and an extraordinary amount of blood.
The Nachzehrer’s Dark Gospel, April 22, 1912. Four winters later, Good Stab learns what happened at Heavy Runner’s camp. He’s been watching a Pikuni boy make his vision quest, fasting-thinned and fireless. Leading the white buffalo Weasel Plume, he brings the boy a horn full of embers. The boy makes a smoky greenwood fire. Wanting to know whether his people remember him, he names relations. The boy tells how Good Stab’s cousin New Breast survived the Marias Massacre because he was away hunting. But in response, New Breast rode into a fort wearing his medicine shirt and singing his death song. It took six soldiers to bring him down. Good Stab weeps blood-tears, and the boy flees. Good Stab dashes apart the fire, setting dry grass aflame. He sends Weasel Plume back to his herd and finds the boy collapsed from smoke inhalation. A raven’s perched on his back, the boy’s newly-gained guide. He carries the boy back to his band and leaves unseen.
One morning, Good Stab finds an old napikwan trapper sitting among his buffalo, undaunted by Good Stab’s hostility. After all, he’s lived in the Backbone longer than Good Stab, who realizes this trapper’s no ordinary napikwan. Not another Cat Man: The trapper smells only of earth and snow. Good Stab follows the trapper down a previously invisible mountain fold to a dugout shelter. Good Stab realizes his host is the creator and trickster demigod Napi. Napi calls him Bear Dreamer because Good Stab overwinters with bears, also Tender of the Dead. No, not Pikuni dead, but the living hide-hunters whom Good Stab imprisons until he needs another feed. And, because Good Stab has eaten so many napikwans, he’s begun to grow a napikwan’s beard!
What Good Stab must do, Napi explains, is to overwinter with him, not bears—that is, after Good Stab has hunted one more time.
When Good Stab leaves the dugout, he finds its entrance has disappeared into the bluff. He heads for his usual hunting grounds, torn by his dilemma: He can’t keep eating napikwans, nor can he revert to animals, or he’ll lose his Pikuni identity. But how can he eat Pikuni?
He finds a huge herd of slaughtered and semi-flayed buffalo. While tracking their napikwan killers, he discovers a band of White Clay People cooking poisoned buffalo meat. One has already devoured a raw piece and staggered off to die. Good Stab feeds on him. The rest of the White Clays pursue him and trap him in his buffalo-carcass hiding place. He claws his way out and tracks down the hide-hunters. He lurks in their dugout, kills two hunters who enter to rape a skinner boy, then dispatches the rest. With the blood of only one White Clay, he’s started becoming Indian again, undulled, strong!
He fights the urge to feed on slaughtered napikwan, and any more White Clay People. His attack on some wolf-hunters leaves him wounded, desperate for healing blood as he returns to the Backbone. He ends up near a too-familiar camp, his own Small Robes. He skirts it, but finds an isolated lodge in which an old woman has gone to die: Yellow-on-Top Woman, Tall Dog’s mother. He tells her how bravely Tall Dog died, then, as she’s sinking, drinks from her. Finishing, he realizes someone’s sitting vigil outside. It’s his father, Wolf Calf. Their inevitable meeting ends in reconciliation, but one shared puff from his father’s pipe makes Good Stab choke. His father gets him away from the camp and back to Napi, whose breath revives him.
Good Stab won’t cry in front of Three-Persons. And his pipe is empty.
The Absolution of Three-Persons, April 23, 1912. The morning after Good Stab’s confession, Frieda Zimmerman pays her weekly visit to Arthur, but refuses to step inside the church. She asks him to bring out the eggs Erna left him. Arthur fetches them to the porch, dropping one between pews along the way. Frieda holds the cloth-wrapped eggs while she describes the mystery of the milk her husband brought to church to soothe his chronically unsettled stomach. It was perfectly fresh when put in his flask, but when he took a sip, it was curdled.
She proceeds to drop eggs off the church stoop. Four break to reveal untainted contents, quickly lapped up by stray dogs. Frieda seems relieved. But a dog snatches the fifth egg from the air, then spits it out. Both yolk and whites are an oily black. “Nachzehrer,” Frieda mutters. It’s a word he’d heard in his own mother’s folk tales: a creature that rises nightly from the grave to feed on the living, and goes on doing so until stopped.
Frieda rushes off as from a place “infested,” and Arthur asks if he can still “subscribe to a secular understanding of Good Stab’s tale.” Is it not instead “a dark gospel?”
Arthur goes back through his log to retitle Good Stab’s portions. He also scratches his name off the front. In the church, the cat Cordelia laps up the dropped egg and mews for more, but there’s none left.
“All we have left here,” Arthur concludes, “is rot and decay.”
The Degenerate Dutch: Good Stab is horrified to discover that he’s growing a napikwan-style beard. Arthur is horrified to discover himself using the language of “savages.” And lest we regret Good Stab’s bloody destruction of the hide-hunter camp, they demonstrate their puppy-kicking nastiness by raping one of their own boys.
Weirdbuilding: Nachzehrers, in German folklore, drain life force from the living. Like Good Stab, they’re drawn to those they loved in life, and want desperately what they can no longer have.
Seven Deadly Sins and Counting: Arthur continues to seek solutions to his own gluttony, while Good Stab does the same more dramatically. Both envy what they can no longer have, and cling to pride in their fading identities.
Anne’s Commentary
In Chapter Thirteen, Good Stab describes a series of encounters four years after beginning his career of buffalo hunter hunting. The first is with a Pikuni boy self-isolating on a vision quest. The third is with his own father, back at the Small Robes camp. The in-between narrative swirls with napikwan clashes. But at its center is the second encounter, with no less than a legendary legend of a demigod.
Good Stab finds that not even his makeshift family of rescued buffalo is safe from napikwan intrusion, in the person of an old trapper who has the gall to speak Pikuni, and to claim a longer acquaintance with both Weasel Plume and the Backbone than Good Stab himself. I immediately pictured this character as Walter Huston in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and I’m sticking with the impression. Only the trapper doesn’t smell remotely like other napikwan, nor like the Cat Man or Good Stab (“broken open ceramic”!) He smells like “the dirt up here that never has any shade” and “the snow that doesn’t melt.” Distill that scent into a perfume, and I’ll buy it.
The trader turns out to have a hidden dugout pied-à-terre, and casually reveals that he knows Good Stab’s father Wolf Calf and anecdotes about his son Weasel Plume, first of that name. These things, and more compellingly the way the trader’s eyes gleam with a joker’s delight, make Good Stab realize he’s the Blackfeet demigod Napi in Walter Huston drag.
I had a nodding acquaintance with the Native American trickster figures Kokopelli, Coyote, and Raven, but I hadn’t met Napi until now. In his compilation of traditional Blackfeet stories, Hugh A. Dempsey describes him thus:
Napi is a creature of legend, a figure that appears prominently in mythology, sometimes as a quasi-creator, sometimes a fool, and sometimes a brutal murderer. He was generally considered to appear in the image of man. He personified strength through his supernatural powers, but his power was not reined in by reason. He was a trickster, deceiving everyone he came in contact with, frustrating them, confusing them, and even killing them. I learned that Napi was credited with creating the earth and everything on it, but he was not a hero figure. Rather, he possessed all the weaknesses and strengths of man but in a supernatural way…He was never considered to be god-like… Napi was superhuman and could do miraculous things, but he was never revered… Anthropologists have called him a trickster/creator, which is probably as good an expression as any. He was man personified, for in almost any Napi story one can see a real counterpart in human form.
Storyteller Carl Brave Rock of the Kainai Nation in Southern Alberta offers his version of the Napi creation story here.
With little preamble, Napi throws a lot of heavy shit at Good Stab—he’s obviously been keeping tabs on him for a long time, since even before Good Stab’s existence-altering meeting with the Cat Man. He knows what Good Stab has become because he knows exactly what Good Stab eats, and how, and why. In fact, he knows more than Good Stab knows, or more than Good Stab was willing to see for himself. Good Stab has been on a diet of two-legs to retain his own two-legged appearance. Given he can only consume so much blood at once, and not from the dead, he’s solved the problem of wasting most of his quarry by cave-corralling some live napikwans for future meals. Nothing wrong with this, he maintains. His livestock aren’t “even men.” Napi’s not buying this excuse. “They’re man enough,” he says, but conventional morality aside, Good Stab needs to own what his diet and supernatural nature are doing to him. He shape-shifts with precision: By sparing his own people, he starts to lose them in himself. To become the enemy, at least on the surface, and who knows how deep the taint may go?
As if identity loss wasn’t enough, Napi foresees that Good Stab will inevitably, for all his efforts, lose his buffalo herd, all the buffalo herds, while the Blackfeet will inevitably lose all their lands, their Backbone included. Meanwhile, Napi is Napi. He cares and creates and teaches. He shrugs and jokes and wreaks havoc. He’s Napi. He is the mirror of his creation, Man, or Man is the mirror of Napi, making them mirrors facing across a hall, each multiplying the other in infinite regression.
But at least Napi can house Good Stab for the winter, so the bears on whom he’s been imposing his dreams can retain their ursineness. Bears count, too. Side benefit: Unencumbered with human longings, they’ll stop trying to take up residence in the Pikuni camps. Another side benefit: No Good Stab-started grass fires for Napi to put out. Grass, too, counts.
On the Arthur front: Confronted with such evidence of supernatural shenanigans as curdled milk and spoiled eggs, the pastor finally wonders if he can continue clinging to “a secular understanding of Good Stab’s tale.”
For Arthur, things are getting serious when food starts going bad.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
The idea of a “taint in the blood” flows, self-referentially, through the family tree of weird fiction and horror. It’s racist at its core, and made more horrific by the effects of racism: There’s the philosophically-tainted fear of impurity, and the utterly practical fear of being reclassified as legally sub-human. The same idea loops around to bite its tale in modern American requirements that people prove their right to be classed as Native American tribal members, despite many of those nations having historically defined membership more permeably—and for far more important reasons than holding shares in casinos.
So we get the literal drops of salt water that let Deep One hybrids claim their horrifying-to-Lovecraft inheritance. So we get the mind-blowing horror of discovering that your ancestors were (sapient, civilization-building) apes. So we get gothic fears of family secrets, the sins and identities of one’s ancestors forcibly changing one’s whole self-image.
Jones is, I think, playing with this idea very deliberately, almost to the point of parody. A Pikuni who drinks blood loses his Pikuni-ness, and becomes whatever the blood makes him. Good Stab would rather drink from animals than humans, a traditional vampiric moral compromise—but that will make him animal rather than human. He’d then rather drink from the napikwan who prey on Pikuni and Blackhorn alike than on his own people—but that will make him napikwan, not only in appearance but in mind and heart. There aren’t going to be enough dying old women to sate him. A live person is what they are because of how they’ve been raised, what they’ve learned, but Good Stab must eventually become whatever is in the blood. He must obsess over purity.
But this has always been his flaw, hasn’t it? He wouldn’t have broken faith with Beaver if he hadn’t been afraid of hunting in an un-Pikuni way, would never have become so dramatically other if he hadn’t fussed about little differences between bands and nations.
The same thing is happening with Three-Persons, but through story instead of blood. He confuses his human flock by using Good Stab’s terminology. He changes his journal headings this week, accepting the name he’s been given, calling Sun Chief by His Pikuni name. In turn, though, he draws from his parishioner’s “superstition” by giving Good Stab the label of “nachzehrer” and calling his confession a “dark gospel.” Why a gospel? Is Good Stab reporting on the actions of a messiah, even a dark one—and not just desperately trying to find meaning in the face of his threatened identity? Or perhaps we’re going back to the older meaning: a “message” that requires you to drop everything in your life and follow. Which leaves us with the question of why Three-Persons hears that in Good Stab’s narrative.
Paper becomes transparent and words show through, “emblematic of the past rising, pushing through, insisting on making itself apparent to all.” I’m torn between confidence that Arthur, when younger, committed some deadly sin against Pikuni and Whitehorn—and wondering if he has some perceived taint in his own blood. If he moves toward talking like a Pikuni, does something in his family history make him Pikuni—by napikwan standards? I’ve been thinking for some time that he protests too much about how “savages” are fading into the past.
Nineteenth-century American race science is a brutal cage of measurement and definition, for everyone involved. Whatever you do, however you act, whoever you protect from yourself and others, history will out. It hardly matters if you heart is weak; your skull shape and the content of your blood admit your capacities. Your appetites and intelligence are predetermined.
Milk curdles, and eggs turn black. Signs seep through greasy paper. Like it or not—and the reader likes it a lot more than the characters—we’re going to learn about all the taints that have lain hidden.
Next week, join us for an early exploration of things man was not meant to know, and the consequences of expanding your perceptions to include them, in Florence McLandburgh’s “The Automaton Ear.”
