The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

by Stephen Graham Jones

“I suppose most of his blood did leak out when he were skinned like a hump,” Thomlinsen said for them all, glaring me down as if challenging one so pure of heart to picture something

Now that we’ve shared private and extended discussion over things so fabulous as to themselves be fables, I can speak better as to his reasoning, his reasons, but, reciting my service that first and this Sunday, I confess to having been mainly agitated about whether or not he was only here for a meal.

The dog, once it caught this delectable scent as I guiltily had myself, set to at first licking that grease off whilst growling, lest one of us intercede, but then, catching the meaty scent of the meal waiting under, it bit in as well, bit in and pulled, and we turned our backs so as to not have to remember this moment any better than we were already going to.

or the state of his teeth are such that he would keep them hidden from these prying eyes.

I don’t mean you, Three-Persons. I mean anyone.

His war bag was in there, and his short pipe, and his tobacco. I pushed away from the tobacco, didn’t know yet that it was only breathing it in straight from the pipe that hurt me, not just touching it, or breathing someone else’s smoke.

“Who was that scout who shot Heavy Runner?” I asked. “The napikwan one,” the boy said, and touched his chin to show that this other scout had a beard.

here. I thought he had remembered the name of that napikwan scout, so I could make him cry and then make him cry some more.

Good Stab knows who I am, and he knows that I know that he knows, never mind that there can be no proof——the guilty letter is long gone from the kindling, probably burned weeks ago in a sherry induced haze of clumsy inattention.

I begin to dimly hypothesize that Good Stab’s visits will persist until he elicits from me the confession he desires.

All the pews that are yet unencumbered behind me as I write this have been propped against the door, and the windows are now sacrilegiously blacked with a paste made from the wetted pages of all the Bibles and hymnals in what used to be my church, but is now a charnel house most foul.

Even Cordelia has abandoned me now, and rightfully so. She can smell what has transpired here. I can as well, Cordelia.

On the third day, the Cat Man coughed and turned his head to the side, threw something up, and I saw that it was a ring with a horn design on it, a ring he had probably been swallowing over and over for almost five hundred winters, to keep from losing it.