Trigger warning for graphic descriptions of violence towards people and animals, and very brief sexual violence.
There are a lot of things I didn’t learn about my country’s history until I got to college. One of these things was the decades-long efforts by the US Army to hunt the American bison to extinction, as part of the larger war on Indigenous peoples conducted by the American government. The idea—schemed up by General William Sherman and General Philip Sheridan—was to cut off the primary source of food and supplies for Plains tribes to make them more “amenable” to being forced onto reservations. That I’ve been able to see bison on my visits to Yellowstone National Park is a miracle. American bison are a glorious animal and the fact that we almost lost them, that they were hunted, skinned, and left with their meat poisoned turns my stomach. All of this is to say that, even though I shouldn’t cheer on the efforts of Good Stab in Stephen Graham Jones’s excellent new novel, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, I couldn’t help applauding the extermination of some white buffalo hunters.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is built up of many layers of story-tellers. First, Etsy Beaucarne receives word of a very fragile journal purportedly written by one of her ancestors. The journal has to be handled incredibly carefully because even the gentlest touch will cause it to disintegrate, due to burn through from the iron gall ink used to write it. Through Etsy, we get to read the words of Arthur Beaucarne, a Lutheran pastor who lived and worked in Miles City, Montana before the First World War. And through the elder Beaucarne, we hear the incredible story of Good Stab. (The layers get even deeper when Good Stab recounts stories from others.)
For reasons of his own, Good Stab arrives in Miles City in 1912 to tell his story to Beaucarne. It’s hard not to be skeptical of what Good Stab says, initially. For starters, he claims to have been born in the 1830s, although he’s far too young-looking and spry to be that old. Good Stab claims to have been attacked by a monster he calls the Cat Man—a creature those familiar with Dracula will recognize. He tells Beaucarne that he’s still walking around even though he’s been fatally wounded many times. Good Stab doesn’t drink water and even candlelight hurts his eyes. Beaucarne is swept up by Good Stab’s story—how could he not?—though he grows very uneasy when Good Stab starts to drop hints about an 1870s massacre of Blackfeet by the US Army.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a slow burn of a novel, punctuated by scenes of gristly violence as Good Stab fights his shadow war against enemies of the Blackfeet and the buffalo. Graham Jones is a master of blending real history with supernatural horror. And, just as he does in his Indian Lake trilogy, Graham Jones is so good at describing his wild settings that you can smell the pine and the bite of a prairie winter wind. He’s even better at creating morally complicated figures that, while I can understand (some) of their motivations, I would never want to meet on a dark night (or ever). I worry a bit that all of these superlatives might be too much hype but The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is an astounding novel.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.