The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, child death, animal cruelty and death, death, and racism.



Robes are a motif for Identity as a Product of Moral Action and Memory, representing the identities that people project to give other people an idea of who they are. The narrative first references the motif of the robe in Chapter 1 when Etsy reads an old news article that discusses the practice of killing buffalo calves by disguising a bull in a buffalo robe.

As a Lutheran pastor, Arthur Beaucarne is easily recognizable to his neighbors because of his robes, which emphasize his role as the moral authority of Miles City, and the narrative emphasizes this as early as Chapter 1. When Good Stab first appears in Chapter 2, he surprises Arthur by wearing black robes of his own. Arthur is immediately skeptical about the identity that Good Stab projects, which belies his bias against Indigenous American people. Though he is right about Good Stab’s disguise, Arthur’s skepticism also hints at the fact that he uses the clerical robes as a smokescreen for his own buried identity.