Perhaps it can be explained by the cultural baggage around the slaughter of the animals. Herein one of the novel’s looming questions: What, besides karmic payback, has wrought this level of wrath? The vengeful apparition doesn’t seem to be guided by a clear moral or legal compass innocent women in the men’s lives also endure brutal assaults - collateral damage in something like a total war. She will be their last prize, because their penalty for the slaughter is a 10-year hunting ban - a decade that will end with more severe, supernatural retribution.Įlk Head Woman takes increasingly perverse pleasure in doling out extreme psychological violence before the men meet their ends. These unintended casualties change the tone of the kill from victorious to disgraceful: The game warden catches them and forces them to forfeit their plunder - except for the cow. With Thanksgiving around the corner, they grow giddy with triumph: “Thanksgiving was going to be an Indian holiday this year, with the four of them bringing in a haul like this.” But their joy is short-lived transporting this much weight in meat through the deep snow will be impossible.Īmong the small herd is a pregnant cow who fights courageously to save her calf, but to no avail. Triggered by a vision of an injured elk in his living room, Lewis takes us back to the ill-fated event: A stroke of dumb luck leads the venturesome youths to an encounter with a sitting target, a cluster of elk bulls. The transgression is revealed 10 years after the fact, after Lewis, Gabe, Rick and Cass have settled into adulthood. For centuries, the fertile forestlands helped preserve a rich hunting and fishing culture that sets the stage for Stephen Graham Jones’ latest horror novel, “The Only Good Indians.” In this stark page-turner, four Native American men get their comeuppance after disrespecting the sacredness of an elk kill. Though it was formally established by the Treaty of 1896, the Blackfeet thrived on this territory long before its encroachment by British traders and American settlers. The Blackfeet Nation, one of the largest Native American tribes in the U.S., resides on a 1.5-million-acre reservation in northwest Montana.
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