Jones presents Good Stab’s downfall as a direct consequence of greed, illustrating how the unchecked desire for power—a corruption directly tied to colonialist endeavors—separates individuals from their cultural traditions. At the start of his narrative, worldly concerns drive Good Stab. Good Stab wants to obtain a repeating firearm to improve his hunting yield and elevate his social status to a level he thinks is worthy of his place in life. The accident with White Teeth drives home the fact of his low status among the Small Robes. During the ascent to Chief Mountain, Hunts-to-the-Side orders around Good Stab like an assistant, despite his age and experience. Good Stab’s resentment compels him to kill the beaver and destroy his lodge, turning his back on nature, which goes against the Pikuni way of life. In telling this story, Good Stab frames this moment as a point-of-no-return: “It was my first step into the darkness, Three-Persons. My first step into this long night I live in now” (64). Because he focuses on killing the beaver and skinning it, he stalls his party, which leads to their massacre by the white soldiers. The long night that Good Stab speaks of refers to his transformation into the creature that Arthur will later refer to as nachzehrer, but it also refers to the curse of living on as the Pikuni world dies around him. This turns Good Stab’s story into a cautionary tale against greed, for which he goes on to live a cursed life.

The consequence of turning his back on nature is that Good Stab becomes perpetually hungry for blood. Jones turns blood into a symbolic material good that represents life itself. For Good Stab to take the blood of others, he must rob them of their lives. He fundamentally becomes a creature that lives off his body’s greed, a trait he inherits from the Cat Man. Although the Cat Man’s true origins are left unknown, Jones specifies that the Cat Man was brought to Montana Territory from Europe. This underscores that Good Stab’s insatiable greed is inextricably tied to the colonialist project. Jones expands on this connection by making the event of Good Stab’s death coincide with the historical Marias Massacre. The violence of mass murder pushes survivors like Good Stab to resort to greed to survive an increasingly harsh world.

Good Stab pushes back against this through his one-man war with the buffalo hunters. He resents the way greed wastes the gifts of their environment, killing the buffalo only for their skin while leaving the rest of their bodies to waste. Nevertheless, in Chapter 18, Good Stab is horrified to learn that the Pikuni have resorted to hunting buffalo the way white hunters do: “I never would have believed Pikuni would do this to the blackhorns. Because it was doing to themselves” (267). The greed that defines the most monstrous aspects of his nature has begun to seep into the Pikuni way of life as an aftereffect of the violence the white colonialists inflicted upon them.

This culminates in the final act of Good Stab’s confession, in which he narrates the Cat Man’s reign of terror over the Small Robes. The Cat Man leverages his power to upset the Small Robes’s cultural practices and indulge his greed. His desire to feed on Kills-in-the-Water ultimately scatters the Small Robes, leading to the end of Good Stab’s band as he knows it. Ironically, the only way Good Stab can defeat the Cat Man is to use his greed against him, poisoning the blood of Kills-in-the-Water after feeding her to the Cat Man. Jones implies that this is the ultimate consequence of Good Stab’s greed. While Good Stab merely wanted to elevate his status in the community, his unchecked ambition and ego drove him to act against his values and morals, which represents a turning point in the history of tensions between the colonial settlers and the Pikuni. At the end of his confession, Good Stab is left to face the world alone.