The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“The depravity of man’s heart knows no floor, and everyone in this hard country has a sordid chapter in the story of their life, that they’re trying either to atone for, or stay ahead of. It’s what binds us one to the other.”

In this passage, Arthur subtly hints at the backstory that defines his moral character. He will use similar phrasing at the end of the letter that Etsy reads in Chapter 24. Here, however, he distracts one from considering what his sins might be by emphasizing that sin is a universal experience. He absolves himself by making sin feel common, even when the magnitude of his sin is grossly distinct.

“I was holding my breath, too—I was making a connection with someone actually in my blood. Being the lone daughter of a father with no siblings, my family tree has been more struggling vine than anything branching into a generations-wide canopy, so finding this unexpected relative has been nothing short of wondrous.”

Jones uses this passage to explicate Etsy’s motivating interest in Arthur’s accounts. The emphasis she places on her blood lineage to Arthur underscores her assumption that she can find a greater emotional connection as she learns more about her ancestor. This is because her family tree has been a “struggling vine” rather than “a generations-wide canopy,” a metaphor that depicts her familial legacy as struggling rather than flourishing. This sets up the irony of Etsy’s later situation, where she finds herself further isolated from Arthur as she learns about his racism. At the same time, this passage drives her later connection with Good Stab, who similarly finds himself alone in his world as an exile from the Pikuni.

“But I didn’t know to turn my horse to the side and watch for as long as I could, I thought it would never end, would always be the same, so all I have instead are hundreds of other days I have to steal that day rider from, and that woman carrying water, and those children, the dogs.”

This passage marks the last time that Good Stab sees the community life he knows and takes for granted, leading to his death, transformation, and self-imposed exile from the Small Robes. The latter part of the passage foreshadows his transformation into a vampire by using the word “steal.” This highlights that he can never have the life he used to have by natural means again; he must violently wrest it from his people, which he accomplishes by feeding.

“It was because I had turned my back on it, I know now, because I was turning my back on all Pikuni. We aren’t supposed to kill the wood-biters. It’s bad medicine to not just let them pass, and do what they’re doing. But I didn’t know how else to get a many-shots gun and be a man again, not a boy, so that was how I told myself this was all right, this one time.

It was my first step into the darkness, Three-Persons. My first step into this long night I live in now.”

This passage depicts the point of no return for Good Stab’s character. Although it does not directly cause the events that result in his vampiric transformation, Good Stab sees it as the moment he condemned his soul because he chose to act against the traditions of his community to satisfy his ambitions. Thematically, it represents the moment that he begins to act like a white colonialist rather than abide by the Pikuni values. Good Stab’s commentary on the moment shows How Greed Corrupts the Soul.

“Self-denial is fine and well when public approbation looms, but in the absence of such watchfulness, well. It’s a very good cake, is more than an old man such as myself might deserve here in his solitary dotage. I’ll let it rest there. And if I end up eating it with more haste and abandon than intended, it’s only to insure that the mice don’t steal bites in the night, the little thieves.”

Arthur’s gluttony characterizes him, as evidenced in this passage. Arthur tries to downplay the severity of his sin by justifying his indulgence as an act against wastefulness. This undermines his role as a moral authority and suggests that he might try to frame other sins similarly.

“I discovered a weathered old letter I never expected to have been reunited with, a letter I’d mailed back to New Haven in my distant youth, a confession that languished unopened for three and a half decades awaiting my return since the recipient had passed before the missive reached him—a missive written by someone I’m not anymore, a man I hardly even remember, and would never claim relation to.”

This passage marks the first appearance of the letter that records Arthur’s role in the Marias Massacre. Although its contents are unknown at this point in the narrative, this moment underscores its importance to understanding Arthur’s character. He distances himself from the man he was in the letter, implying that its contents are deplorable.

“In all humbleness, I hope only to record Good Stab’s tale, as I feel it my duty as an American to attempt to capture these last exhalations of a people who won’t be seen again in the world.

[…]

What use me preserving them in the privacy of this log, I know. But neither can I just let them drift past, not without attempting to stab the nib of a pen down through them. Had no one written the Gospels down, what would the world have lost then?”

In this passage, Arthur explains that his reasons for recording Good Stab’s confession are humanitarian. He operates under the assumption that the Pikuni are destined for extinction, which betrays his racist view that US white populations are meant to replace the Indigenous American populations. Ironically, the record that Arthur compiles for posterity helps to prove the opposite of what he hoped to show: he is one of history’s villains, thriving off the Pikunis’ suffering.

“[T]hat became who I was, Good Stab. I was the first of my age to get his warrior name.

It carried a responsibility with it, I knew. To show I understood, I shared that tongue with the other boys who had been brought along, and one of those boys was Tall Dog, but we didn’t know each other yet, and I didn’t remember him there, but he remembered me that day.”

Part of Good Stab’s backstory includes the origin of the name he identifies with throughout his adult life. While the name speaks to his ability for honorable violence, it also carries the subtext of responsibility to his community. Good Stab is expected to use his strength and bravery to serve his community and the world they belong to, which he turns against when he kills the beaver for its pelt.

“Also, there was a taste in my nose, which I know you can think means I was smelling, but it was more than that. I’d never tasted with my nose before. Not where every taste turned into a picture of itself. I could tell that a long-legs had passed here, and that a real-bear was sleeping there, and that a family of dirty-faces were living over there in a hole under a thick root. It made me dizzy and have to shake my head from having to know so much all at once.”

Jones deploys synesthesia in this passage to develop Good Stab’s vampiric abilities. Good Stab figuratively uses the senses of sight and taste to describe how his transformation has affected his sense of smell. This provides a more vivid understanding of Good Stab’s perspective and establishes how scent becomes an essential tool for Good Stab to navigate the world.

“I’ve heard our elders and many-faces men and even chiefs say that it’s the napikwans who are ruining the world, but napikwans are just what happens when we forget we’re Pikuni. When we think a many-shots gun is more important than beaver medicine.”

In this passage, Good Stab explicitly ties the influence of the white colonialist settlers to the loss of his Pikuni identity. He drives Identity as a Product of Moral Action and Memory home by underscoring that being a napikwan (white) person is less about physical or genetic appearance than it is about embodying cultural values.

“To be a Pikuni and be alone is to not be a person anymore.”

Good Stab foreshadows the end of his confession by commenting on what it means to be isolated from his community. Coming to Miles City and living in contemporary times, Good Stab isn’t just an exile from his people; he also feels exiled from all of humanity. This sense of alienation extends as Good Stab lives on, further away from his time and place.

“‘You’re still Blackfeet,’ I assured him. ‘Blackfeet is in here’—I opened my hand on my own chest—‘not…in all the trappings.’

He neither accepted nor denied this. What he did do, I had to note, was force himself to stare directly into the white hot flame of the guttering candle, until he had to snap his face away all at once.”

This exchange between Arthur and Good Stab reflects a subtle display of their respective values. Arthur tries to assure Good Stab that his cultural identity remains intact despite his actions. This resonates with Arthur’s tendency to absolve himself of his sins and renew himself in the purity of a new form. In response, Good Stab quietly punishes himself by staring into the light of a flame, highlighting that no form of penance can convince him to abandon the guilt he feels for his actions.

“I didn’t mean to name that buffalo calf [Weasel Plume], but once I said it I couldn’t take it back. But Wolf Calf told me when I was young that a real Pikuni gives away what’s closest to him, and my childhood name was the one thing the Cat Man and the soldiers hadn’t been able to touch. So I had to give it away.”

This passage drives the symbolic role that Weasel Plume plays in Good Stab’s life. White buffalo traditionally represent hope. Weasel Plume’s name adds to this meaning by externalizing the parts of Good Stab’s identity that he wishes to preserve from the colonialist settlers’ hostility. This will drive the thematic subtext around Weasel Plume’s murder later in the narrative.

“I had been drinking the blood of so many hairy napikwans that I was turning into them. Soon I would be like that first soldier I killed, who had forgot he was a two-legged.”

As Good Stab continues to hunt down the buffalo hunters, he starts to resemble them, which drives Good Stab’s moral quandary of feeding on Pikuni people to maintain his Pikuni identity. Good Stab’s predicament underscores Identity as a Product of Moral Action and Memory by challenging him to consider whether his self-perception is more important than the Pikuni lives.

“‘I don’t know what I am,’ I said, and he might not have even heard.

He clapped his hand on my wrist like a hug and held it there, and I shook my head no, not to cry out Yellow-on-Top Woman’s last blood, but some of it slipped out anyway.

No Pikuni had touched me like I was a person for five winters, now.”

This passage marks a significant moment for Good Stab, who has seen himself as an exile from the Pikuni ever since his transformation—evident in the fact that no Pikuni had touched Good Stab like he was “a person for five winters, now.” Wolf Calf’s gesture recognizes the humanity within his son, moving Good Stab to look past his guilt and self-hatred for the first time in the narrative.

“You put your reminders of pain on the wall and pray to them. We still hurt, so we don’t need that reminder.”

In this passage, Good Stab offers a critique of the Christian religion and how it functions within the ideological framework of colonialism. Good Stab believes that the colonialists pray to Jesus Christ as a “reminder” of pain because they willfully forget the pain they have experienced and caused. For Good Stab, that pain is not historical. Rather, it is a present reality that carries the weight of the past and intensifies his guilt.

“‘If you ask why I hate myself,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you it’s because, by taking the lives of the elders, I’m stealing wisdom from the Pikuni. They’re the only ones who remember the old days, and the old ways.’”

Good Stab finds a loophole in his quest to retain his Pikuni identity when he realizes he can feed on the Pikuni who are already dying. This passage provides a counterargument to this loophole, emphasizing that it is merely another form of exploitation that displays How Greed Corrupts the Soul. Good Stab lives but at the cost of the traditions that define Pikuni culture.

“I had to wait for you to come back to Nittowsinan. That means Our Place, Pikuni territory, where we’ve always lived and always will live. Now you have that word inside you like a bee, but because it’s Pikuni, it probably will sting you the whole way in, until it dies from it. You can write the word in your paper book like the rest of this if you want, that book you keep in that square of skin I left you, but I only know how Nittowsinan feels in my mouth and my ear, not how it looks in a book.”

Throughout the novel, Good Stab regularly deploys Blackfeet terms throughout his confession. In this passage, he comments on the way this practice helps to sustain his culture and his identity. By carrying his language with him, Good Stab preserves a way of seeing and being in the world that those from other cultures can’t carry, even if they learned the language themselves.

“‘Just because they put a fence up and call it theirs doesn’t mean it is,’ he said back with a shrug. ‘They don’t belong to it.’

‘We do,’ I said. All Pikuni know this.”

In this passage, Good Stab and Napi contrast between the colonialist and Pikuni ways of seeing the environment. For the colonialists, the world is a store of resources to be claimed and privatized. The Pikuni see themselves differently, occupying a place in the environment that puts them on equal footing with the animals they hunt and nurture. They do not see the world as their exclusive dominion.

“‘If it wasn’t us, it would have been another regiment,’ I said, calmer again. ‘You can’t stop a country from happening, Good Stab.’

‘But we were already a nation,’ he said up to me. ‘We didn’t ask you to come.’

‘Didn’t you?’ I said back. ‘Did you not want our rifles, our kettles, our—our horses?’

‘We just wanted to live,’ Good Stab said.”

In this exchange between Good Stab and Arthur, Arthur tries to rationalize the colonialist endeavor as an outcome that the Pikuni desired: the birth of a new nation. Good Stab argues that no such desire ever existed. Any expression to the contrary—such as a desire for firearms and tools—merely reflected the influence of the colonialist endeavor, which weaponized desire to its advantage.

“If they’d never started coming over, then he never would have either.

It made me wish the Pikuni had been there when those first boats landed, waiting on the shore of that ocean with its great toothed fish swimming in it.

But we wouldn’t have known, would we? We would have wanted the iron kettles like you said. And it just would have been one boatload of you, so what would that even matter? Except now your shiny-wheels are cutting the land up into smaller and smaller pieces.”

Continuing the debate from the previous passage on his own, Good Stab concedes to the inevitability of settler colonialism. He ties this to the arrival of the Cat Man, who at this point has become a metaphor for the infiltration of colonialist values into Pikuni communities. When Good Stab realizes it is better to refuse the colonialists’ offerings than to accept them, it is already too late.

“He explained that he was making a count of how many Pikuni were left on the reservation.

This was the first time I heard that word, Three-Persons.

We used to call our home Nittowsinan.

Now we don’t.”

This passage recalls the importance of language in sustaining human cultures. Good Stab laments the loss of the word “Nittowsinan,” which marks the victory of the colonialist endeavor. The world as Good Stab knew it no longer exists. Now his people are forced to live in a colonialist construct: the reservation.

“Better I accrue a debt I can never pay than that a second Blackfeet come to tell me his story. They are a cursed people, and the quicker they become tillers of the soil and tenders of cattle, the better, not only for Montana, but for the sanity and sanctity of this old man, who longs only to till the soil of his parishioners’ hopes and fears, and tend after their souls in whatsoever manner I best can.”

This passage marks Arthur’s inability to change, indicating that he is no different from the man he was on the day of the Marias Massacre. Despite his role as a moral authority, Arthur excludes the Blackfeet from the blessings he dispenses. Instead, he sees the Blackfeet as being inherently cursed, a perspective that underscores his racist views.