The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

by Stephen Graham Jones

It’s as if he’s a face from either the past or my past, it’s hard to decide which he might unintentionally represent.

I wanted to go back to those days. I hadn’t watched them with the right eyes, when they were happening.

I speak as if all that experience I would mine for the benefit of others wasn’t in fact a labyrinth I had to hack my way out of over the course of decades,

But that’s how it is with Napi, I think. Probably all Pikuni talk to him at some point, but it goes flat in our heads and we remember it in ways that make sense, and the blanket flap of his dugout is just rock again, and we never know we can walk through it.