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 15-16 of Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. The book was first published in 2025. Spoilers ahead!
The Absolution of Three-Persons, April 25, 1912. For the first (and, as he assumes) the last time, Arthur Beaucarne cancels Sunday mass. It may be the Feast of St. Mark, but the pastor fears he himself may be the feast. Instead of transubstantiating the wine, he will himself be “sublimated into a meal of blood.”
That meal must be Good Stab’s ultimate aim. So far his interaction with Arthur could be considered counting coup. His “breed,” after all, is known for touching the enemy as a “show of power over him before finally striking the mortal blow, thus not only killing him, but shaming him en route to that eventuality.”
To escape the mortal blow, Arthur needs to convince Sheriff Doyle of Good Stab’s existence and that he’s the one who has murdered postmaster Clarkson, Pinkerton man Dove, and several members of a prominent San Francisco family.
He locks the cat Cordelia in a closet as before, to keep her from returning to her former home at the brothel. He’d leave her a candle in the darkness except that he’s afraid it would set the church on fire. Returning to the conflagration, Arthur might simply step into the flames and shut the door behind him.
The Absolution of Three-Persons, April 26, 1912. Arthur waits in the church for what must come after failing convince Sheriff Doyle that there’s trouble right here in Miles City. He’s alone, for when he released Cordelia from the closet, she “screeched” past him as if fleeing from some monster. But Arthur sees nothing in the closet but emptiness.
He still feels “distinctly observed,” without his emotional support cat and her sharper eyes and ears, and he wonders whether the afternoon’s “sally,” will have been his last walk around town.
* * *
Earlier: Doyle isn’t in his office. Arthur heads for the lodging house and its gossipy porchsitters, but he’s stopped by the sight of a bobbing bowler hat. Has another Pinkerton come in search of Dove? He follows the bowler wearer into a local saloon. As the man heads for the “jakes” (privy) out back, he glances toward Arthur, who’s disappointed to see it’s only Early Tate, still sporting Dove’s hat. But Sheriff Doyle sits at a table, “holding court” with two business owners who depart at Arthur’s approach. Immediately Arthur plunges into his appeal. The Indian he told Doyle about earlier has returned, and admitted responsibility for the “previous humps” Clarkson told them about—whole camps of buffalo hunters he skinned like the recent victims.
Doyle scoffs. Just one man?
The Indian claims to be more than that, Arthur answers. He turns down the offer of a drink. Doyle has to stop Good Stab, who still has one of the San Fransciscans imprisoned in a dugout somewhere!
And would Arthur swear to this on the Bible?
Arthur would, and so would his congregation. He leaves Doyle to infer that his congregants are also voters. To the plea that Doyle at least look for the dugout, the sheriff answers neither yes or no, but he heads out with his bottle when Arthur offers to “settle up” with the barkeeper.
While waiting to have this expense added to his tab, Arthur notices the saloon chandelier, made from Sharps rifles fire-joined at the barrels in a haystack shape. Outside, he spots his Indian “informant,” Amos Short Ribs, washing his shirt at a horse trough. He puts another bottle on his tab and carries it to Amos. He also snatches a greasy black feather from the passing Early Tate’s bowler, which he licks and presses to his forehead. The feather reminds Amos of a renowned medicine man named Happy. In the mountains on a vision quest, the boy Happy met the Morning Star and his spirit buffalo. The Morning Star, grieving for the fate of his people, past and to come, was so full of tears they spilled from him as blood, which was why the Blackfeet named him The Fullblood.
Arthur asks Amos if the Fullblood of the Blackfeet takes no scalps. Amos says, “Two different people,” obviously meaning one is a divinity, the other a monster.
Arthur doesn’t correct him.
* * *
Seven Deadly Sins and Counting: Violating the seal of the confessional beats out gluttony any day, even if it’s not in the official septet.
The Degenerate Dutch: Are we still playing “his breed is prone to this behavior,” Arthur? Could we stop?
Weirdbuilding: The parallels between vampiric bloodsucking and communion are forever hard to resist, in any story containing both vamps and Christians.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
Two short chapters this week, but there’s a lot going on in Arthur’s fevered brain. He believes Good Stab now. He has his story from the other side, as years-past mythohistory from Amos Short Ribs. The tale confirms both his power and his age. And with that, it also confirms Arthur’s anticipated fate.
For a long time, Arthur has been treating Good Stab as divine judgement, a response to some unspoken guilt from his youth. But finally believing in his supernatural nature, ironically, leads to treating him as a more mundane threat. Good Stab is no longer a symbolic shadow, but an “enemy.” Perhaps it’s only fear of death that works this change. Earlier, Arthur tried to point the sheriff at his visitor without violating the seal of the confessional. There was guilt there, too, for the Pinkerton Man’s death, but also obligation to his church and god. Now he simply violates the seal. Good Stab told him about the murders, told the reverend where he might be found. And Arthur tells the sheriff.
My own tradition, with a couple of exceptions, follows the principle of pikuach nefesh: any rule can be broken to save a life. As far as I know—though it’s far from my expertise—this guidance doesn’t appear in Luther’s Small Catechism. The point of the confessional is to prioritize soul-saving over earthly consequences. Sins which someone fears mentioning to a priest will go un-penanced, and remain on the ledger for the afterlife.
Does it matter, though, if you realize that the person confessing is uninterested in penance? Certainly Arthur hasn’t been assigning prayers or suggesting routes toward redemption. He’s known, at some level, that they would be neither welcome nor appropriate to what they’re actually doing. Does it matter if the person confessing may not die at all, or alternatively has already done so? Does it matter if they’re a nachzehrer? Good Stab is already punished for decisions made in life, one might argue, and can get no benefit from a rite designed for the living. Nor is breaking his facade of “confession” likely to discourage regular congregants from admitting their ordinary peccadillos.
But I don’t think Arthur is following any of this logic. If he did, he’d record it as diligently as he does his excuses for eating cake. I don’t think he’s even motivated by further “humps.” I think he’s scared for his own skin. Which is fair. He’s never been saintly or pretended to it. He eats his cake, falls off the wagon, is judgy and bigoted, and generally admits to being a fallible mortal. Not wanting to be eaten and skinned by a vampire is pretty damn fair, regardless. I also would not want this thing.
But Good Stab’s not the only one who counts coup. As we follow Arthur around his little community, we see what they’ve counted: the buffalo heads that everywhere remind Native visitors of what’s been stolen. The bar full of tarnished guns, perhaps abandoned when their owners lost fights with the local napikwan. They boast of surplus firepower turned into interior decoration—not likely to please someone who lost everything trying to purchase a single rifle.
Wanting revenge for this destruction is also pretty damn fair—justice and prevention not being on offer. Good Stab can’t live with his people, can’t even count himself as one of them anymore. So he has his buffalo, and his accounting of those who killed them.
Does he know the other side of his story, the one that Arthur hears? He plays a role, as Fullblood, in the origin of a beloved medicine man—one named for his happiness. Good Stab gave something that he can no longer reach himself. And he’s known as two people, “one a divinity, the other a monster.” Arthur doesn’t correct this belief. Doing so would raise a lot of questions, for one thing, but it’s also not entirely wrong. For someone who defines self in relation to community, having two relationships (and two names) means having two selves, doesn’t it? The only way to be whole is to live among your own, where you can be known and your contradictions reconciled.
Good Stab doesn’t have that any more. And despite living among his ostensible own, no one sees Arthur whole either.
Anne’s Commentary
This week I emulated Arthur’s gourmandism by fixing on particularly-intriguing bits of the text-meal left on my doorstep.
Arthur Beaucarne feels himself unfortunate in his surname, it seems. Way back in Chapter 1, he writes that however frequent his “protestations about having any immediate French ancestry,” his parishioners persist in casting “aspersions about their good pastor’s Gallic name.” He’s German, of “old country” stock, and he never even met his French grandfather! In Chapter 15, he asserts that Good Stab’s “breed” is known for “counting coup,” but before he goes on to worry that a coup count is exactly what Good Stab’s inflicting on him, he frets that the “French derivation [of the phrase is] another jibe having to do with my surname.” Actually, it’s a jibe Arthur inflicts on himself.
I wondered whether it was the sheer Frenchness of Beaucarne that irritates Arthur, or whether it’s how the name translates to English. Beau is simple enough: It’s the masculine form for beautiful, handsome, fine. It can also refer to a boyfriend or fop, but I doubt Arthur would consider himself either, or suspect others of doing so. Carne, in Spanish and Italian, is simply meat. In French, la carne has more specific, and derogatory, meaning. It denotes meat that’s leathery, tough, of poor quality. Put together the two translated syllables, and you get something like “handsome if low grade dog food.” Or maybe “fine-ish flesh.”
Or “beautiful carrion?”
I like that last one. Calling dibs on it for a dark romantasy. As for Arthur, being “beaucarne” could suggest a once strong character deadened and deteriorating alive. Because Arthur would have to be alive to attract Good Stab, who eats nothing absolutely dead.
About Arthur telling Sheriff Doyle that Good Stab so frequently mentions dugouts during their conversations, this may be a clue to his whereabouts. My whole-novel search for “dugout” rounded up nothing so suggestive. The dugouts mentioned mostly belong to hide-hunters that Good Stab’s stalking, or refer to the demigod Napi’s bluff-side digs. A “dugout” hit in later chapters suggests that Arthur deliberately misled Doyle into looking for the killer in an “imaginary” dugout lair to get him out of town, and maybe even into danger’s way.
A quick search suggests that firearms were not a common decoration on Old West saloon walls, certainly not working ones—the saloon keeper would be keeping those for his own use in dealing with robbers and rowdy customers. But Mose’s guns are indeed “trophies of yesteryear,” hardware that “riders of the range find nearly daily out in the grass, rusting into the earth,” all aesthetics, no utility. The plot-crucial item in Mose’s collection is the chandelier made of rifles someone melded together in a fire into a sort of haystack-pyramid. Arthur immediately identifies this prime bit of tavern decor as the rifles Good Stab says he destroyed in that fashion, solid proof his “dark gospel” is a true one.
What’s with the black feather Arthur spit-glues to his forehead to get Amos Short Ribs to talk to him? He does this “by instinct, not planning,” he writes. I guess he semi-consciously remembers another “chapter” in Good Stab’s gospel, concerning the vision questing boy he rescues and returns to his camp. Urged on by the liquor Arthur gifts him, Amos tells a story about “the before days,” when Happy, a boy who would become a medicine man, went to the mountains on his vision quest. There he met Morning Star, the celestial god associated astronomically with Venus, who was fathered by the Sun and born of the Moon. Morning Star is associated with beginnings and guidance; he serves as the link between Sky and Earth, the spiritual and human realms. When he appears to Happy, he has a spirit buffalo by his side, first sign of his uncanniness. Second sign, he puts his hand in their campfire with little injury. Third sign, he is so full of grief for what his people have suffered that he cries blood. Fourth sign, when Morning Star sets fire to the Backbone, he rescues Happy and flies with him to Happy’s own home camp. There he leaves Happy a single raven feather as reassurance that he’ll never be alone.
Oh, and Amos says, a name for Morning Star among the Blackfeet is The Fullblood, because of the excess of blood that spilled from his eyes.
My searches didn’t find that the actual Blackfeet call Morning Star The Fullblood. In fact, they linked this name for the god directly to The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, indicating it’s Graham Jones’ twist on traditional lore.
The twist is necessary for him to so fascinatingly conflate Good Stab with Morning Star. Happy’s story precisely parallels the one Good Stab relates in his dark gospel of April 22, 1912 (Chapter 13.) Happy’s spirit buffalo was Weasel Plume. Happy’s Morning Star enacts Good Stab’s deeds of hand-burning, blood-weeping, accidental fire-setting, and rescue of the questing boy. The black feather Good Stab left spit-pasted to his boy’s forehead came from the raven spirit-guide earned on the boy’s vision quest, his lifelong guard against loneliness and misdirection.
That Amos recognizes the significance of the feather on Arthur’s forehead strongly suggests that Amos was the boy Good Stab encountered at the Backbone, the one who finally told him the full story of the massacre at Heavy Runner’s winter camp. This is a killer turn in the novel!
Arthur double-checks that “Happy’s” Morning Star was really Good Stab by asking Amos if The Fullblood god “takes no scalps.” Amos replies, “Two different people.” In his tale, Morning Star is the divine stand-in for the true Fullblood and Taker-of-No-Scalps who stalks the pastor.
It’s unclear that it’s Amos who clarifies that the “two different people” are one a god, the other a monster. I think that it’s Arthur who makes that distinction.
Yeah, my bet’s on Arthur.
Next week, the most startling things remain unknown, but one is revealed in Donald A. Wollheim’s “Mimic.” You can find it in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Weird.
