Books Reading the Weird If NOT CAT Then NOT VAMPIRE: Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Part 4) By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on April 1, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share 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 7-8 of Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. The book was first published in 2025. Spoilers ahead! The Absolution of Three-Persons—April 11, 1912: It’s been four days since Good Stab stabbed Arthur Beaucarne “to the quick” with his tale. The pastor has spent this time dissecting the Blackfeet’s story, studying each piece, then trying to “puzzle them all together again into a narrative [he] can begin to accept.” Arthur’s “provisional conjecture” discounts “the more fantastic elements.” Perhaps Good Stab suffered some “catastrophic loss” related to the Marias River massacre which forced him to winter alone in the wilderness. This isolation and privation could have brought on delusions that, to Good Stab, rendered “the impossible… unassailable fact.” Arthur catalogs the delusions. Good Stab was infected with a curse by a “Cat Man.” He’d henceforth subsist by drinking blood, enabled by senses beyond both human and animal ken. He’d be resilient to disease, accidental injuries, and intentional attacks, healing quickly from lesser wounds, dying only temporarily from mortal ones. Monstrous gluttony forced him to drain each victim to the last drop of living blood; if he persisted past the victim’s last heartbeat, the remaining blood would sicken him. The way that Good Stab gradually takes on “four-foot” characteristics if he eats animals reminds Arthur of “some ancient lay… complete with justice and chivalry,” of which he’s forgotten the details. On the liability side, Good Stab claims to be hypersensitive to sunlight, and can ingest no solid foods or liquids apart from blood. Another liability, Arthur considers not necessarily supernatural or evil. Good Stab deplores succumbing to deep torpor after feeding. Some mortals, including Arthur, find “extreme satiation” a welcome numbing of thought, allowing for “communion with Creation that speaks ineluctably of wholeness.” Not that Arthur doesn’t regret it when he stumbles drunkenly around the church blubbering apologies to the crucified Jesus, or when he stuffs himself with parishioner-donated food until he’s ill. The first Sunday, Arthur observed that dogs dislike Good Stab. This last Sunday, he observed something more troubling. Instead of swallowing the Host, Good Stab must have hidden it in his sleeve, because later he dropped it in the street. Whether he did this in disrespect for the white man’s religion or because the Host was solid food doesn’t matter—the sacrilege is Arthur’s fault. He should never have let someone not of the Faith participate in communion. On Tuesday, the first murdered man is buried. Arthur struggles through the aftermath of a food binge to officiate at the funeral. Twenty townspeople attend, drawn by curiosity rather than grief. Good Stab is not there, but another stranger is: a neatly dressed and shaven man holding a bowler hat. He departs with Sheriff Doyle after a nod to Arthur. As penance for his latest gluttony, Arthur remains while the gravediggers finish their work. From the top of the town “boot hill,” he looks out across the prairie. He imagines how Good Stab must have crossed it the night he walked into Miles City, and he wishes he could have seen his approach—and “scurried away.” April 13, 1912: Arthur learns from the boarding house porch-sitters that there’s a Blackfeet man living on the outskirts of town. He buys a thick rasher of bacon, that universally-desirable food, and visits a dingy tent before which the aged Amos Short Ribs huddles over a dung fire. The bacon accepted and cooking, Arthur tries to learn whether Amos has ever seen a domestic cat—one small doubt he has about Good Stab’s story is that back in 1870, a Blackfeet shouldn’t have known what a such a feline was, much less name his monster Cat Man. Getting nowhere with mere descriptions, the embarrassed but desperate Arthur borrows the brothel’s orange mouser. Amos’ reverent fascination with the animal proves it is new to him. As Arthur’s about to depart, Amos asks after “the Fullblood” he’s seen exiting the church. Amos had thought the man dead, killed for what he did to the buffalo hunters. Asked just what the Fullblood did, Amos points with lips and chin to the prairie. Thinking of the flayed corpses found near town, Arthur asks if the Fullblood is the one painting— But Amos suddenly disappears into his tent. The stranger from the funeral walks up. He introduces himself as Dove. Just Dove. He’s come by coach from San Francisco, and he produces credentials naming him a Pinkerton of the famous detective agency. Arthur may be able to help him with his current case. A San Francisco family has set him on the trail of… he can’t say what. But various clues have led him to believe “they” are now in or around Miles City. Dove then looks Arthur in the eye, watching for his reaction, and adds: “Parts of them anyway, Father. I can’t say for certain where their skin is.” The Degenerate Dutch: Beaucarne is continually surprised by Native Americans being “rhetorically capable,” or indeed speaking English. Madness Takes Its Toll: Obviously Good Stab became delusional while lost in the wilderness, confusing his hallucinations with what he actually did for survival. Something something narratives, something something cats. Seven Deadly Sins and Counting: The main metric that Beaucarne tracks is his own sins, with a preference for those falling into easy categories over the ones he’d prefer not to think about. This week there’s gluttony (drunkenness and binge-eating), despair (subsequent to the drinking), and vanity (looking at his teeth in a mirror). Ruthanna’s Commentary Motivated reasoning, it preys upon the mind—The more you think things through with it, the less of truth you’ll find!You lay out all your logic with conclusions picked already,And if you logic vampires you’ll surely end up deady.It works like this: he’s heard of cats, and therefore it’s a lie.These savage people have no pets, and thus you question whyGood Stab would make confession with a Cat Man at the heart;If no cats then no bloodsuckers, quod erat, you’re so smart!Methinks you doth protest so much, like gnomes with underpants:You have step one, you have step three; you have no evidenceTo fill that middle question-mark and get what you desire.Good Stab knows what you won’t admit—it’s your own pants on fire. Sorry, this is what happens when our whole weekly reading involves Arthur Beaucarne trying to disprove scary stories. We still don’t know why Good Stab’s story is so scary to him, except that it clearly has something to do with skinned buffalo, and skinned buffalo hunters, and old sins that Beaucarne doesn’t want to think about. So instead he’s borrowing cats from the local cathouse. And misquoting Shakespeare so as to emphasize the unbridgeable barrier between civilized White Man and savage. To contrast with Beaucarne’s amateur investigation, a Pinkerton shows up. During the U.S. Civil War, the Pinkerton Agency did espionage work for the Union; by this time they’re both the largest private law enforcement agency in the world and primarily known for strikebreaking. They also did a certain amount of tracking western outlaws, so it makes sense that they would be on the trail of a serial killer in Miles City. Ruthless, competent, and eager to support the status quo, they may be a problem for Good Stab. And if they know more about the situation than the reader, they may be a problem for Beaucarne as well. Meanwhile, Chance Aubrey is hanging around the telegraph office, obsessing over the Titanic. That’s not symbolic at all. Beaucarne considers it “hubris for the creations of men,” though he manages to avoid preaching over sausages. Hubris is, of course, a very civilized sin. Beaucarne values hard work to get the most (by European definitions) from what G-d has given you. Avoid exploiting land until you’ve extracted all possible resources, and you don’t deserve to keep it at all. Railroads and telegraphs prove Manifest Destiny. So where’s the line? Is it just how much you invoke G-d in your excitement? It’s Kipling-ish, this confidence in one’s own cultural superiority bolstered by a purely religious humility that requires no mortal-world questioning of assumptions: If, drunk with sight of power, we loose   Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,Such boastings as the Gentiles use,   Or lesser breeds without the Law—Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,Lest we forget—lest we forget! Respect the divine, kneel in church, and doubt any word from the “lesser breeds”—what else do you need to stay ahead in life? Beaucarne, I hope, is soon to find out. Anne’s Commentary If weird narrative has a core feature, a hard-beating heart, it’s the protagonistic impulse to explain away the inexplicable until compelled to acknowledge its existence. After struggles protracted or sharp, characters have to reconfigure their worldview to include the new aspect of reality, whether they thereafter accept it, flee it, or fight to drive it out of their immediate breathing space, their minute acre of the universe. In Old West parlance, they could tell the Weird this town ain’t big enough for the two of us, so git or draw. Problem with the latter alternative is that the Weird’s generally packing the bigger gun and quicker trigger appendage. In this week’s chapter, Graham Jones does a superb job of harrying Arthur Beaucarne through the incredulous phase. Arthur takes a firmly rational approach to Good Stab’s confession. His “provisional conjecture” is that the fantastic elements of his story are just that, fantastical. He’s generous enough to provisionally entertain the possibility that, rather than perpetrating deliberate fraud, Good Stab suffers from a posttraumatic delusion. Arthur can expose this by picking apart the confession and “[puzzling the pieces] back together again into a narrative [he] can begin to accept.” Arthur has little trouble constructing a situation dire enough to have overset Good Stab’s reason. Whether or not he was alive as far back as the Marias Massacre (unlikely), Major Baker’s actions against the Blackfeet could have personally injured Good Stab. When forced for whatever reason to spend a winter alone near the Massacre site, he might have confounded his trial with that of his forebears, weaving a tortuous story to explain how he, who looks too young for it, was actually an adult in 1870. One of the boarding house porchsitters might diagnose Good Stab as crazy like a loon. Arthur also allows he could be crazy like a fox, a boldly deceptive trickster out to con an old white man, or at least to torment him with a tale too closely paralleling the pastor’s guilty history. At the same time, Arthur recognizes he may be “arranging angels on the head of a pin” by concocting possible inconsistencies in Good Stab’s confession, as niggling as whether a Blackfoot would have known about domestic cats in 1870. That doesn’t stop him from hunting up a kitty to amaze old Amos Short Ribs. Arthur remembers a story similar to Good Stab’s about becoming what he eats, “some ancient lay or another I read, complete with justice and chivalry, but can no longer conjure the precise details of.” Naturally, I had to hunt for narratives about the consequences of overconsumption. It’s not surprisingly a common theme in world myth and folklore. As far as “ancient lays” go, there’s the Saga of Hrolf Kraki, which goes back at least to the 1400s in Iceland. In it, a prince is enchanted to walk by day as a bear. When the bear-prince is killed, his pregnant lover is forced to eat his flesh. She subsequently delivers one son with elk features, another with dog features, and a third who can shape-shift into a spirit-bear during battle. I think it’s more likely Arthur knew two other stories. The first concerns a character ironically similar to Arthur in his gluttony. Erysichthon of ancient Greek legend was a king so rapacious in his greed that he cut down a grove sacred to Demeter to build a magnificent banquet hall. The highly annoyed goddess cursed him with an insatiable hunger, to feed which he depleted his entire fortune and even sold his daughter, Mestra, into slavery. When his larder was at last empty, madness drove him to devour his own flesh until nothing remained of him. Arthur might have read a detailed account of this compulsive overeater in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book VIII, Fable VII. Luckily, Arthur doesn’t have Erysichthon’s means and so can only stuff himself when parishioners bring edible offerings. He can food-obsess full-time, though, as when he brings old Amos bacon or wonders how Good Stab can be so intent on proving his monstrous nature that he doesn’t scarf down Arthur’s stew. The second story, widespread in Native American folklore from its Algonquian origins, pertains more to Good Stab’s condition. It’s the legend of the Wendigo, a ravenous spirit associated with harsh Northern winters during which people might be driven to cannibalism, the utmost expression of insatiable greed and antisocial selfishness. Such moral failure could doom cannibals to become the monstrous incarnations of what they ate: emaciated corpses often grown to gigantic proportions, emitting a foul stench, their hearts turned to ice. Good Stab is no Wendigo in that his transformation was not due to personal greed or gluttony, certainly not to cannibalism. He does, however, accuse himself of moral failure in his killing of the beaver patriarch, all so he could have enough pelts to buy a new rifle. And now a stranger has ridden the stage coach into town to complicate Arthur’s life, and thicken the “hump” murders subplot. Welcome to Miles City, Pinkerton man Dove, and watch your well-clad back. Weird business is afoot here. Next week, we celebrate National Poetry Month by exploring Stoker Award nominees, starting with a set of Maxwell Gold’s cosmic horror poems on The Horror Zine.[end-mark] The post If NOT CAT Then NOT VAMPIRE: Stephen Graham Jones’ <i>The Buffalo Hunter Hunter</i> (Part 4) appeared first on Reactor.