Good Stab and three companions find a caged, feral white-skinned man in a wagon abandoned after an ambush on the Backbone.

Good Stab kills a beaver and destroys its lodge for the pelt, later calling this act his first step into moral darkness.

US soldiers ambush Good Stab's party on the Backbone and a dying Peasy releases the Cat Man from his cage.

A soldier destroys the Cat Man with a cannon shot and fatally shoots Good Stab as the Cat Man's blood pours over him.

Good Stab reawakens with vampiric abilities and superhuman senses after soldiers attempt to cremate the bodies on the Backbone.

Good Stab stumbles upon a field of skinned buffalo carcasses and vows to wage a one-man war against the white hunters.

Napi appears to Good Stab disguised as an old trapper and warns him that he is beginning to resemble a white man.

Good Stab reunites with his father Wolf Calf, but smoking the sacred pipe incapacitates him for two years.

Good Stab is framed for Yellow Kidney's murder after discovering the Cat Man killed the boy and destroyed his buffalo herd.

The Cat Man traps Good Stab in a frozen ice tunnel and feeds him captives to keep him alive as a prisoner.

Good Stab escapes the ice tunnel and discovers the Cat Man has installed himself as Small Robes chief under the name Walks Twice.

Good Stab allows the Cat Man to feed on Kills-in-the-Water, then bites the girl himself, poisoning the Cat Man with their mixed blood.

Good Stab attends Arthur Beaucarne's Lutheran service in Miles City and approaches the pastor to begin a series of confessions.

Good Stab ties Arthur to the chapel cross and displays the corpses of his Miles City victims on the pews before him.

On the anniversary of the Marias Massacre, Etsy dismembers Arthur at the massacre site as Good Stab watches from the memorial riders.

Good Stab, a Pikuni warrior, is killed during a soldier ambush and reawakens as a vampiric creature after the blood of a supernatural being mixes with his own. Transformed and exiled from his people, he wages a one-man war against the white buffalo hunters who are devastating the Pikuni way of life. After years of vigilante violence, he is nearly destroyed by the same creature that made him, and must sacrifice a Pikuni girl to finally defeat his monstrous rival. With the Pikuni bands forced onto reservations, Good Stab turns his immortal life toward seeking justice for the Marias Massacre, tracking down and killing the descendants of the Lutheran pastor who helped start it. His final reckoning with that pastor unfolds across a series of confessions in Miles City, and the resolution of his century-long quest passes to the pastor's own descendant in the modern day.

The rise and fall of Good Stab's vampiric crusade for justice.

Good Stab earns his adult name by killing a captive soldier who freed himself from his bonds and tried to strangle him.

Tall Dog deduces that the wagon train ambush was staged by soldiers to frame the Pikuni for further violence against them.

Good Stab drives a dead soldier's knife into himself after his transformation, but his wounds heal instantly, confirming his undead nature.

Good Stab rescues a white buffalo calf during his war against the hunters and names it Weasel Plume after his own childhood name.

Good Stab realizes he has inadvertently killed White Teeth, the same Pikuni boy he previously injured with his old gun.

Good Stab kills a camp of buffalo hunters, skins them, and paints their faces yellow and black as they did to the buffalo.

Good Stab feeds on Yellow-on-Top Woman, Tall Dog's dying mother, at the Small Robes camp after their brief reunion.

Yellow Kidney recounts witnessing the Marias Massacre to Good Stab, describing a tall soldier who urged the scout to shoot Chief Heavy Runner.

Good Stab feeds on Yellow Kidney's dying sister to sustain his Pikuni appearance, and the Rabbit Men then attack and scalp him.

The Cat Man forces Good Stab to participate in an out-of-season Sun Dance, piercing him with chest pegs for two days.

Skinned corpses with faces painted yellow and black are discovered outside Miles City, prompting locals to suspect an Indigenous American killer.

Pinkerton detective Dove arrives in Miles City and reveals that both murder victims belonged to a prominent San Francisco newspaper family.

Dove is found dead on the railroad tracks, and Livinius Clarkson is later discovered skinned outside Miles City.

Arthur attempts to flee Miles City but Good Stab intercepts him at the river, bites him, and returns him to the chapel.

Etsy's tenure committee rejects her research as fiction, and she begins burning her journal copies before spotting Good Stab watching her.

Before his transformation, Good Stab was a low-status warrior whose identity was bound up in small acts of pride and consequence, including the accident that injured a boy named White Teeth and the greed that drove him to kill a beaver. His second life forced him to navigate an existence of exile, feeding on enemies and allies alike while waging his vigilante campaign against the hunters destroying the Pikuni world. In Miles City, the escalating body count puts Arthur Beaucarne under mounting pressure as his allies are killed one by one and the evidence against his mysterious confessor grows. The arrival of a Pinkerton detective briefly threatens to expose Good Stab's agenda before that threat is also eliminated. Etsy's parallel story ends not in the triumph she hoped for but in the collapse of her academic ambitions, leaving her open to the truth that Good Stab has been preparing to deliver.

The smaller moments that shaped Good Stab's long, cursed life.

Good Stab keeps two brass buttons from a dead soldier's coat hidden in his moccasin during the journey to Chief Mountain.

Good Stab's party tries repeatedly to kill the Cat Man with arrows and bullets, but he survives every wound.

Good Stab feeds on the soldier who killed him and then vomits, realizing he has transformed into a creature like the Cat Man.

Good Stab discovers that feeding on elk causes horn nubs to grow from his head, revealing the full danger of his condition.

Good Stab feeds on white trappers to shed his growing horn nubs and restore a human appearance before returning to Pikuni territory.

Good Stab saves a young Pikuni boy named Happy from a forest fire at Two Medicine Lodges and leaves a black feather on him.

Happy confronts Good Stab, accuses him of killing Yellow Kidney's sister, and reveals that Wolf Calf has been searching for him.

Good Stab euthanizes Weasel Plume after the Cat Man leaves the white buffalo calf skinned but still alive among the destroyed herd.

Good Stab feeds the defeated Cat Man only fish for four winters, gradually transforming him into one, then releases him into a lake.

Good Stab learns Arthur Beaucarne's name from the Pikuni wife of scout Joe Cobell and resolves to seek justice for the massacre.

Arthur discovers two brass buttons left in his chapel offering plate after Good Stab's first confession, shaking his composure.

Arthur retrieves an incriminating letter he had hidden for years and burns it in his fireplace after Good Stab's first visit unsettles him.

Good Stab hides disguised as the chapel's altar crucifix statue and reveals himself when Arthur lights cigarettes to smoke out an intruder.

Good Stab reveals that Benjamin Flowers, the first murder victim, was Arthur's illegitimate son born the night after the Marias Massacre.

Etsy reads Arthur's hidden letter proving he urged Joe Cobell to fire on Heavy Runner, then destroys the journal and drives to Montana.

The novel's most pivotal moments lie in the small choices and devastating discoveries that redirect its characters' fates across generations. For Good Stab, a single act of greed on a mountainside spirals into a centuries-long curse, and each discovery about his transformed body forces him to revise his moral code at great cost to those around him. His defeat of the Cat Man requires him to commit the very sin he came to confess, and his knowledge of Arthur's guilt is gathered slowly and painfully before he can act on it. In Arthur's narrative, mounting evidence from Good Stab's confession closes around him like a trap of his own making, culminating in the exposure of crimes he spent decades burying. Etsy's transformation from skeptical academic to instrument of justice is sealed by a single letter hidden across generations, proving that the past cannot be permanently suppressed.