The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Grahame Jones

Book review

Hey, Book Worms! 🏹🦬

· 2.5/5 🍿🍿🌽

There are three levels to this book, three points of view that woven together to tell the overall story. There is Etsy, who is in the “present day” (for this book, the present day is 2012), and she has gotten copies of journal entries from her great-great-great-grandfather.

She starts reading the journal entries, trying to figure out who he was and what his life was like, and as she starts reading, her grandfather (whose name was Arthur) takes over, and we get his POV from 1912. He is a Lutheran minister in Montana, and his “voice” kind of makes me picture him as Ichabod Craine.

One day, a Blackfeet man comes to service, and he stays after to start speaking with Arthur. He finds out that the Blackfeet man’s name is Good Shot (but he is also called by other names), and Good Shot starts telling Arthur about his own life and what happened to turn him into the creature that he was.

The majority of the book goes back and forth between what is told by Arthur (who is soon called Three Persons by Good Shot) and by Good Shot. Etsy’s POV seems to work as bookends for the story.

We find out pretty soon that years ago, Good Shot had an encounter with someone he calls the “Catman,” but this man is much more like what we might think of as a vampire. After his encounter with this man, Good Shot is turned into something very similar. Sunlight does not harm him, but it does bother his eyes, and he is forced to wear sunglasses everywhere (even in rooms that would seem dim to humans), and he is forced to start drinking blood to survive.

Good Shot encounters buffalo hunters on more than one occasion, and he ends up hunting some of the men who have been hunting the buffalo, taking their skins and tongues, and leaving the calves and rotting bodies behind.

In 1912, in the town that Arthur lives in, there have been a bunch of killings, and the bodies have been left skinned, in a field not far from town. The authorities do not know what is going on, but it does not take long for Arthur to figure out who is killing people . . . but it is a long time before he finds out why Good Shot is telling him about how he became what he is (and what his life has become). And yes, there is a very significant reason.

This is the second book by Jones that I have read, and I do not know that I will attempt to give anything more by him a try; his writing style does not really do it for me. I do not know for sure if it is his own, personal writing style that I am not vibing with, or if there is a cultural way of telling stories (among the Blackfeet) that I am not vibing with.

It is possible that I just do not have enough exposure to Native American and First Nations storytelling, but I sometimes get confused by what he is talking about. There are times that he will not be clear about what is happening, and there are times in this one specifically that he uses names for animals that makes it hard to know what animal he is talking about.

If I were more fluent in writing and storytelling styles of native cultures, this might not be an issue. If I were more fluent, I might like his writing much more than I do.

This is not to say that the idea behind this book was not a good one, because it is a good one, it just did not hit me the right way.

GoodReads: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter