Choosing Your Words Carefully: Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Part 2) - Reactor

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 3-4 of Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. The book was first published in 2025. Spoilers ahead!

The Nachzehrer’s Dark Gospel, March 31, 1912: Good Stab was born “the year the stars fell,” to Wolf Calf of the Black-Patched Moccasins and Curly Hair Woman of the Small Robes. His mother died birthing him. In his fourth winter, smallpox plagued the Pikuni; he has the scars to prove he survived the “white scabs.” He had two wives and three children, but they died in a raid by the Black Paint People.

The next time the white scabs came, white soldiers killed elders, women, and children as they lay sick at Heavy Runner’s camp. Good Stab wasn’t there, nor was he at Mountain Chief’s camp, the soldiers’ actual target; they thought the Owl Child had run to Mountain Chief after killing the napikwan (white) rancher Malcolm Clarke.

No, Good Stab was in the Backbone of the World, dragging an iron cage to the sacred Chief Mountain.

By now Pastor Beaucarne, Three-Persons, knows that Good Stab is claiming to be nearly 80 years old. In the end, he’ll even believe this claim.

The day of the massacre, Good Stab and his hunting comrade Tall Dog are with Hunts-to-the-Side and Peasy, who play a role similar to Three-Person’s police. If Good Stab knew what was coming, he’d have looked back at camp one last time to appreciate the normal life of children playing, kettles boiling, women carrying water.

His party’s job is to clean up the site of a wagon train attack, before napikwan soldiers discover it and grow even more hostile toward the Pikuni. They find three wagons, two burned, one intact. The wagon drivers and their big-ears (mules) are all dead. There are also dead attackers, not Pikuni but white men dressed in Pikuni garb, and horses with their iron shoes removed. Obvious proofs of an attempt to frame the Pikuni, along with the clumsily counterfeited arrows littering the site. Also strange: no women and children among the wagon train victims.

Surreptitiously, Good Stab cuts two brass buttons from the tell-tale blue jacket of a slain false-Pikuni.

Then Good Stab and his companions discover what’s hidden inside the unburned wagon: an iron cage festooned with crucifixes, occupied by the whitest man they’ve ever seen, not entirely human. Its mouth is a fanged snout, its fingers claws, and it hisses and shrinks from sunlight. Good Stab names the thing Cat Man.

They try killing Cat Man, but neither arrows nor bullets have a lasting effect—godlike, it keeps reviving. Maybe Cat Man is the Great White God foretold to crumble Chief Mountain, opening the way to a napikwan-free Pikuni homeland. They decide to try bringing it up the mountain—if that doesn’t work, they can always kill it after.

On their way up the Backbone, however, Good Stab kills a beaver, hoping to supplement the pelts in the wagon and purchase a gun. But killing beavers is bad medicine. They meet a detachment of napikwan soldiers who kill Tall Dog, Hunts-to-the-Side, and Peasy. As his last act, Peasy releases Cat Man. Wounded, Good Stab watches the creature kill the soldiers and drink their blood. Before napikwan cannon fire tears it in half, it bites Good Stab’s shoulder. Himself now fatally shot, Good Stab feels Cat Man’s blood stream into his mouth. He sucks it deep into his throat, “like breath.”

That was how Good Stab died. This is the end of his telling for the day, for “the pipe is empty.”

* * *

The Absolution of Three-Persons, April 3, 1912: Beaucarne finds Good Stab’s “mixing and matching of [English and Blackfeet] terms and vocabulary “…intensely interesting.” Good Stab strikes him as canny, intelligent, humorous. To confirm details of his “history lesson,” Beaucarne digs up a letter he wrote home in his “distant youth,” which was returned to him unopened due to the intended recipient’s death. He knows that any sins documented in the letter have been “washed away in [Christ’s] blood.” They should be forgotten, even denied. Beaucarne is weak to “flagellate” himself with the letter, but “such is guilt.”

Good Stab’s description of the 1870 Marias River massacre seems accurate, but Beaucarne has doubts about the simultaneous massacre on the Backbone, in which Good Stab “died.” He needs to keep his head in “this century” and his parish, where another murder victim’s been found.

Beaucarne rides out to view the body with Miles City sheriff Lacy Doyle and postmaster Livinius Clarkson, who remembers similar murders from decades ago. The dead man’s back and chest have been skinned, his face painted half-black and half-yellow. His blood was drained somewhere else, or the grass under him would be soaked. A stray dog is induced to gnaw the corpse’s flayed buttock. It dies, poisoned like predators of old when they’d eat the strychnine-dusted flesh of buffalo flayed for their hides.

Beaucarne makes a last entry about the Sunday of Good Stab’s visit, when he was shocked to find two brass buttons among the scanty coins in the collection plate.

What’s Cyclopean?: Most of Good Stab’s words for animals are descriptive: little big-mouth, swift runner, sharp-back. Horses and elk and beavers, though, are translated to the English terms.

The Degenerate Dutch: It’s fine that we broke treaties, says Arthur, that the Blackfeet/Pikuni “surely would have also broken themselves, if given the opportunity”. Also, shooting buffalo makes them yours, and Indians then taking them is “seeking handouts instead of bending their backs to the plow.” But “the savage” does have a human soul, even if “his allegiance be to the dusky past.”

Weirdbuilding: We’re getting a sense of what rules Jones’ vampires play by: vulnerable to the sun but not instantly destroyed or sent into death-like sleep, healing swiftly, draining blood—and making new vampires (deliberately or otherwise) with their own blood.

Anne’s Commentary

Before Good Stab begins his account of the Marias Massacre of January 23, 1870, he tells Beaucarne “I can see your lips counting.” What Beaucarne’s mental arithmetic will have led him to is the incredible conclusion that the thirtyish-looking Pikuni before him is nearly eighty years old. I tried replicating this arithmetic. So from 1912, subtract 79. That would make 1833 the year of Good Stab’s birth.

A quick internet inquiry revealed that November 12-13, 1833, is known as “the night the stars fell.” More precisely, it was meteors that were falling, perhaps as many as 100,000 per hour at the peak of the great Leonid meteor storm. In her preface to The Year the Stars Fell: Lakota Winter Counts at the Smithsonian, Candace S. Greene writes:

Among the many eyewitness “luminaries” to remark on the “storm of stars” was the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, who wrote in his journal:

Unprecedented in contemporary memory, such celestial fireworks were bound to be read as omens, joyful or dire, according to the individual soothsayer. Christ didn’t return, to my knowledge. Nor did Satan, unless Good Stab counts as an adequate substitute for His Infernal Majesty, at least as far as his buffalo hunter prey and Arthur Beaucarne may be concerned.

Good Stab, I confidently predict, will be as much devil as any buffalo hunter or other enemy need fear. What exactly he’ll be for Beaucarne remains in the narrative future.

As Etsy Beaucarne transcribes Arthur’s journal, his visitor is a “Nachzehrer” with a “Dark Gospel” to promulgate. It will turn out that Beaucarne didn’t originally head the Good Stab sections of his log with this title as he wrote them, nor his own sections with “The Absolution of Three-Persons.” It’s not until April 23 that he changes the headings in light of what he’s learned from his parishioner, Frieda Zimmerman, and realized about his own part in the “confession” game.

Frieda remembers well “the superstitious ways of the Old Country, even when they by their nature refuse to reconcile with the Faith.” After performing certain “tests,” she mutters: “Nachzehrer.” Arthur “dimly” knows what the German word means. The Nachzehrer is a creature that “rises nightly from the grave to subsist on the lives of the living, and it does so until stopped.”

We of the weird know he’s describing a vampire. Close, Arthur, but not quite according to my vampire bible, John Blair’s Killing the Undead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World. Nachzehrer translates roughly to “after-consumer” or “after-drainer.” It applies specifically to the passive undead also known as “shroud-eaters.” They remain in their coffins, gradually devouring their grave-clothes and sometimes their own flesh. According to Blair, they’re “linked almost exclusively to [bubonic] plague deaths… The corpse is normally female, and seems to embody an impersonal energy: its activities after death spread the plague.” They are often conveniently loud feeders, so that their “lip-smacking” or Schmatzen der Toten can be heard above ground, tipping off the alert sexton or Nachzehrer hunter.

According to this stricter definition, Good Stab is much too active to qualify as a Nachzehrer, and he consumes flesh and blood, not linen. Still, as Arthur eventually reasons, “Nachzehrer is more fitting [a name] for the language spoken [in his church] on Sundays.”

Speaking of Pastor Beaucarne’s church, Blair documents an intriguing connection between the Nachzehrer and the Lutheran faith. Lutherans mainly reported grave-bound undead, while Catholics were bothered by the more mobile variety. Martin Luther, famous for “holding forth” while enjoying a hearty feed with friends, had hundreds of his observations and mini-sermons recorded in the compendium Table Talk. At one meal, he addressed a problem posed by a pastor in Saxony. This fellow was perplexed on how to deal with a dead woman who was devouring herself in her grave, causing much death in her village. Said Luther, there could be no soul or ghost in the corpse because that had departed at death. No, it was the Devil up to his usual trick of playing on the delusions of the superstitious. The people just needed to cast off their ignorance, and then the Devil couldn’t use it against them.

Maybe Beaucarne should take Luther’s advice should his visitor prove to be uncanny. If, with Luther, he can cry, “Eat, Devil! You’re a fraud,” he won’t be taken in by Good Stab. That’s if taking in is what Good Stab’s up to, as Arthur semi-suspects.

Or as he’d like to suspect, for reasons probably contained in that never-delivered letter he wrote decades ago, and has never opened. Until now.

Until Good Stab.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

Talking with someone from a privileged dialect culture involves constant choices. For me at 50, this is relatively automatic —except for holding back on the collaborative interruptions; that’s still hard, even when I remember to try at all—though it took long time to figure out why I got along so much better with the kids at Jewish Day Camp than my waspy school. The stakes go up when violence is an immediately likelihood, when you’re talking to someone who sees your whole culture as a disposable inconvenience or a threat. Even if Good Stab doesn’t worry for his own skin, the local pastor influences how local natives are treated. Talk like the oppressor, and you lose a part of who you are. You tell your story wrong. But your own speech may be less legible, or raise old fears, or make your truths easier to dismiss.

Listening to someone else’s dialect—or failing to listen—is also a choice. Privilege means that for Arthur, it doesn’t need to be a conscious choice. He can treat Good Stab’s literal translations as deliberate manipulation, or indications of a primitive worldview. He can treat the obviously unbelievable parts of the story as a puzzle to be solved, obfuscation over whatever Good Stab feels guilty about. And Arthur would know, wouldn’t he?

As a reader separated in culture, time, and context, I’m in yet another position. I miss more of Good Stab’s meaning—Arthur, for example, knows that “dirty-faces” are mice, which I missed. But he thinks these “ancient constructions” are “a form of pitching intellectual woo,” whereas I assume that Good Stab is talking in the way that makes the most sense to him (with allowances for English translation). And Jones, presumably, expects readers who either share his background or are more open-minded than Arthur—or, if nothing else, who know they’re reading a vampire story. So that’s yet another level of communication choice.

Arthur suffers from the unthinking bigotry with which he was raised, but he also protests too much about the finicky details of other people’s stories. Even in a journal that he thinks is between him and G-d, he perennially justifies not only his people’s violence but his personal choices. He feels guilty about enjoying sweets, but it’s more important to avoid such minor sins under witness. Being “reborn” means he ought not to confess his unspoken past sins, regardless of what harm they may have done. But he knows, at some level, that his sins and Good Stab’s are tied together.

They have, in fact, a lot in common. Both are led on missions by higher-status people who don’t share all the details. Both don’t quite live up to their culture’s ideals, and struggle for respect. Both are distracted by petty, selfish goals, for which they both invoke thin moral justifications. And both mean well for their communities.

Good Stab has paid dramatically for his failures. And Arthur, I suspect, is soon to do so.

We don’t hear from Etsy Beaucarne this week. Does this pattern extend to her? We already know that she doesn’t meet her family’s expectations, or academia’s. What failures, what sins, are hidden beneath her fascination with Arthur? And what price will she pay for resurrecting what—following Arthur’s logic—should have remained buried?

Next week, you’re unfortunately stuck with us in beside That Guy in Carmen Maria Machado’s “Observations About Eggs From the Man Sitting Next to Me on a Flight from Chicago, Illinois to Cedar Rapids, Iowa.”