Books Reading the Weird What Skins Are For: Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Part 5) Good Stab enacts revenge on the buffalo hunters, and Arthur proves to be a terrible liar… By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on April 15, 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 9-10 of Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. The book was first published in 2025. Spoilers ahead! The Absolution of Three-Persons, April 14, 1912. Arthur Beaucarne wants to record his encounter with the Pinkerton man, hoping the act will keep it from festering in his memory like a tendrilled mushroom. On the fourth try, he manages to stop pacing and settle down to write. He knows that under the pretense of casual conversation, Dove was interrogating him. They strolled around Miles City, Arthur still carrying the cathouse cat. Eventually, in “strictest confidence,” Dove shared some information about his case. A man of “middling high society,” and substantial expectations from his family’s newspaper wealth, disappeared after being seen with a black-robed man. Never fear, the black-robe was younger than Arthur, and darker skinned, and wore sunglasses. Arthur asks if the missing heir was the first flayed man they buried. Dove nods. He will have the corpse exhumed for return to San Francisco. Dove is briefly distracted by the ladies on the cathouse porch, to whom Arthur doesn’t yet return their surprisingly-complacent mouser. Recalled to business, Dove adds that the heir’s three sons went missing right after their father did. He shows Arthur a photograph of the youngest son, whom Arthur recognizes as the second flayed man. No need for Arthur to bury him; a San Francisco grave awaits him as well. Arthur asks how he can assist in Dove’s investigation. Arthur’s “position in the community” could help, Dove says, then asks if Arthur’s sect practices confession. It does, but the Lutheran Seal of the Confessional forbids disclosing anything confided to him. However, he will relay to Dove any permissible information. Perhaps “too eagerly,” he suggests that the murderer may be an Indian. Dove neither rejects nor pursues the possibility. He asks the distance to Fort Benton. He’s obliged to telegraph from there any information he might uncover about a long-missing transport. Six Pinkertons and the “large package” they were conveying west went missing in Montana in 1870. Inadvertently, Arthur drops some hints that he knows about Cat Man. For a third Sunday, Good Stab attends church services and stays behind to continue his “confession.” He notices the cat that Arthur still hasn’t returned to the town brothel, and which he’s named Cordelia. Good Stab approves of the animal as an adept hunter, like himself. Arthur prompts him to pick up his tale. The Nachzehrer’s Dark Gospel, April 14, 1912. Shot through the shoulder, bleeding out the sustenance he’s just taken from his fellow Pikuni, White Teeth, Good Stab falls against a bull that’s skinned but not quite dead. He digresses from his tale to tell an old Pikuni legend about Kills-for-Nothing, whose face was torn away by a similarly not-quite-dead bull. She ran to the Backbone and leapt in a lake there, where she still lives with the underwater people. The skin she lost was placed in a powerful medicine bundle whose keepers all died of smallpox. If ever that skin reaches Kills-For-Nothing’s lake, she can reclaim it and walk again on land. But no one tells such stories anymore, so Good Stab returns to his own. He clawed his way into the bull’s body to hide and drink its still-living blood. He fell into his post-feeding sleep and woke up the next day. The napikwans had overlooked him and gone away. Naked, caked with his savior’s gore, he wandered among the buffalo corpses. Calves, left alive as too worthless to spend bullets on, followed him, crying for food and comfort. Their plight is what drove Good Stab to declare personal war against the napikwans. He raised a fist and, for the first time, he hissed like the Cat Man. The stink of the napikwan hunters led him, and the calves, to their camp. They carried a new kind of rifles he named “long-shooters”; this explained how they could have hit him from far off. They feasted noisily on buffalo tongues until they noticed the calves and began luring them with cow butter and cutting their throats. The soldiers who attacked Heavy Runner’s camp during the Marias River Massacre had similarly killed the Pikuni with knives and axes and rifle butts to spare their bullets. Enraged by the memory, Good Stab first terrorized the camp with his supernatural stealth and speed, then returned to choke two to death with the slaughtered calves’ blood. A tomahawk to the back left his legs useless, and he prepared to die yet again. But a last unslaughtered calf found him and licked his face, asking for protection. Knowing the pursuing napikwans would kill it along with him, he rallied and with great effort wrenched the tomahawk from his back. He used it to fell the first napikwan, then drained his blood to the last living drop. It was deep irony that the next napikwan’s shot saved him from the post-feeding sleep that would have left him helpless, draining the excess blood. He managed to get to his feet within a circle of would-be captors. They screamed, not knowing what he was. What he was was “the Indian who can’t die,” the “worst dream America ever had.” Before the napikwans could react, Good Stab dodged away and ran for the Backbone. Bullets hailed, but he paused to scoop up the last buffalo calf, the one who had licked his face. When morning came, he would see it was a white one. And now, he tells Arthur, his heart is empty, and so is his pipe. What’s Cyclopean: Arthur gets more vocabulistic as he gets more stressed. “Maychance I bring my own perturbations into this fraught interrogation.” Big mood, Pastor. Big mood. The Degenerate Dutch: Native Americans have “an inbuilt sense to avoid anyone in uniform, or with credentials granting them authority.” Gee, I wonder why they might develop such a tendency. Hmmm. It is a mystery. Libronomicon: Arthur compares the Pinkerton’s interrogation style to “the stinging couplet at the end of a sonnet, which is where the fatal turn resides.” There’s tragedy happening here, he suspects, or at least awful, flaw-driven inevitability. All the world is “if not a stage then at least a farce,” and so he plays his part. Anne’s Commentary Agent Dove is a sharp customer. As his conversation with Arthur Beaucarne progresses, it “smells” more and more like an informal interrogation. More unnervingly, Dove doesn’t seem to be on a random clue-fishing trip, with the town preacher just one more Miles City resident to cross off his list before he can move on to those more interesting ladies on the brothel porch. No, Dove has already gleaned enough info-grains to make Arthur a subject of special interest. He draws Arthur in by disclosing select particulars of his case, in “strictest confidence.” This is flattering—he must view Arthur as trustworthy. Missing newspaper heir from San Francisco, what could he have to do with our pastor? Then Dove dangles a bit of bait: The suspected abductor is a “man in black robes.” Arthur swallows the bait. Surely Dove doesn’t think that he—? Dove grins as if “proceedings are proceeding his way.” Why would Arthur react anxiously to so broad a description as a “man in black robes” unless he feels guilty about something? In fact, the San Francisco black-robe was too young and dark to be our pastor. Before Arthur can relax, Dove drops a second bait: Arthur doesn’t “have any of those sunglasses either now, does [he]?” Arthur blinks and swallows, then confusedly nods yes before self-correcting with a too emphatic headshake. Dove has now described Good Stab, and Arthur has reacted as if he has indeed seen a younger, darker, black-robed and sunglasses-wearing man, right here in Miles City. After viewing a photo (taken in better times) of the second victim, son of the first, Arthur nerves himself to ask outright how he can help Dove’s investigation. Dove’s next hook is double-baited. Arthur might help because he’s the town minister, yes? Arthur nods, after too lengthy a pause. And what might one of his duties be but to hear confessions? Arthur must “regretfully inform” Dove that he’s “bound by Luther’s Small Catechism” concerning confession. He apparently assumes that Dove knows a Lutheran confessor is bound never to reveal what a penitent tells him. So, regretfully, with regards to any confession, he can’t help Dove. Also, regretfully, he’s doubtless wondering whether Dove has learned that a man fitting the black-robe’s description has lingered in the church with Arthur two Sundays running. It doesn’t help that Arthur “too eagerly” hints that Indians might be involved in the murders. You know, Mr. Agent, because of how violent the killings were. Because, you know, Indians “place a low value on human life.” Dove shrugs. He chuckles that the “woolier days” of yore, which Arthur mentions, bring to mind “a buffalo hide, yes?” Then he seems to drop back into casual conversation by inquiring about Fort Benton. Arthur asks about his business there, giving Dove the opportunity to mention the disappearance of a Pinkerton transport, oh, back in 1870, two wagons, six agents. It’s standing orders for any agent to telegraph headquarters if he chances on information about the cold case. He offers no more details, leaving Arthur to bumble once more by implying he knows the transport was carrying something other than the usual money, and that it disappeared in winter. The coup de grace comes with Dove’s parting non sequitur: “There was no horse.” No horse where? Why, where the two San Francisco men were found. No hoofprints. No footprints, either. So Arthur should ask parishioners if they know anything about a killer who could carry and dump grown men without leaving any mark of his passage. Arthur’s left to fret on whether Dove knows about Good Stab, by his weird nature if not by name, and how much he could know about Arthur’s dealings with the Nachzehrer. Good Stab’s third confession delivers the first big climax of his villain/hero’s origin story. He’s been despairing about his utter disconnection from his people and from any Pikuni-worthy purpose. The wanton waste of a buffalo herd is horrific enough. What damns the napikwans even deeper is how they class the calves unworthy of the expenditure of bullets, like soldiers did the Pikuni in Heavy Runner’s camp, whom they massacred with economically reusable weapons. The hunters in Chapter Ten only deign to kill calves when they can do so for cheap fun, luring them to the knife with white-horn butter, the same napikwan nourishment that made young Good Stab so sick. From the transgressor who killed the beaver-chief, from the undead leech on his own people, Good Stab becomes the undying Indian, America’s worst dream. Running for refuge, he takes the last living calf with him, and in the morning sunlight, he sees it is a white buffalo, a rare birth of deep spiritual significance to Native American tribes of the Plains, including the Blackfeet. Its appearance heralds hope, renewal, the promise of better times to come. It’s hard to imagine a more propitious omen for Good Stab to bear away from the carnage of Chapter Ten. Ruthanna’s Commentary Adding to my initial impression of What Kind of Vampire Is This, poor Good Stab is definitely The Gross Kind of Vampire. This is not someone who can have sexy fun at nightclubs. This is hunger that can’t be controlled, even when you really, really want to control it. Bit one of your own people? Too late. Interrupted by guys with guns? You’re gonna get shot. Literally full to bursting? Grossness abounds. Arthur’s gluttony for cake is only a pale reflection. Unfortunately for Arthur, said gluttony is also the least of his problems. The Pinkerton detective clearly doesn’t believe that A’s guilty conscience is solely due to his religion. And it isn’t—A either knows who the missing heir is or has a strong suspicion. (He’s also a terrible liar.) My own strong suspicion is that said heir shares A’s own dark, secret past. He certainly shares A’s long meetings with a man in black robes. So will he also share A’s fate? It doesn’t stop Arthur from continuing the meetings. The privilege of the confessional doesn’t (I think) require taking confession from someone you suspect will murder you, so… again, guilty conscience. Arthur’s not convinced that his looming fate isn’t just. Good Stab’s confession, this week, gets to the point of explaining the book title. He’s failed his people multiple times—by killing the beaver, by killing White Teeth, by losing his ability to live safely in community. He’s neither human nor animal, and the worst of both. But now he claims a purpose that, if not fully Pikuni, is at least connects with their values: to take revenge for disrespectful Napikwan slaughter of the buffalo, and of the buffalos’ people. “Blackhorns are always there for the Pikuni,” and even if he can only protect orphaned calves for a few hours, Good Stab finds a way to be there for the blackhorns. Flaying and skins are an ongoing image through all this. (Gah. Almost as bad as eye horror.) The buffalo are skinned; so are the bodies found outside of town. Good Stab hides inside buffalo skins; his own fails as a vessel for their blood. Legendary hunters sleep inside such skins. Old campfire stories tell of Kills-for-Nothing, who lost her face on a blackhorn horn, and lives underwater to avoid the sun burning her skinless face. (Ewwww. Also a familiar problem for Good stab.) Skin is protection and point of failure, and the thing off of which you can’t scrub guilty blood. The thing without which your guilt is made plain. Meanwhile, Arthur reports, Chance Aubrey remains tremblingly enthused about the “titanic hull” wending toward America. He’s “gambled all he has, including his happiness, on this crossing.” The readers know, of course, that this will turn out to be a bad gamble, and somehow symbolic other “infectious” obsessions. I’m put in mind of Ragtime—I haven’t actually read E.L. Doctorow’s book, but have enjoyed the musical. One central thread is the parasocial relationships that ordinary people have with the celebrities who, to them, represent the relationships they want to have with the modern world: Emma Goldman’s radical inspiration, Harry Houdini’s ability to escape from anything, Evelyn Nesbit’s glamour. Chance’s obsession seems of a piece: you can care deeply about Progress, but Progress will never care about you and has no obligation to follow your scripts. People (and ships), however famous, will always be people (or ships) first and symbols second. You can’t control them. The same holds for Arthur’s trembling relationship with Good Stab, and I think with the Pinkerton detective. To him, they are heralds, perhaps sent by G-d (or some other power) to hound him as he knows he secretly deserves. To him, American Indians are likewise symbolic—sharing instincts and characteristics that serve as instruction or mystery for White Men. To themselves, these people are people. Or, in Good Stab’s case, perhaps something else. Next week, we wrap up National Poetry Month with Linda D. Addison and Jamal Hodge’s Stoker-nominated chapbook, Everything Endless.[end-mark] The post What Skins Are For: Stephen Graham Jones’ <i>The Buffalo Hunter Hunter</i> (Part 5) appeared first on Reactor.