Treat Them as Buffalo

by Blair Palmer Yoxall

Genres: Action & Adventure; Westerns

Synopsis

An electrifying anti-Western from an exciting new Indigenous writer. As teenage boys begin to disappear from a great plains Métis community, a young man attempts to uncover the evil force lurking out of sight.

In 1885, Nikosis “Niko” Eriksen spends his days playing buffalo hunter, even though it’s been many years since a member of his tribe has actually seen one of the once-ubiquitous animals. But when beloved Cousin goes missing, things start to fall apart. With law enforcement failing—indeed refusing—to investigate the disappearance, the community members take matters into their own hands, rallying around the leadership of a sawn-off shotgun-slinging rancher named Kate McCannon.

The resultant women-led coalition of freedom fighters strikes back against the Mounted Police as they investigate the boys’ disappearance and take their futures into their own hands. But violence continues to haunt Niko, and boys continue to disappear. As he leaves his boyhood behind and draws closer to finding Cousin, Niko’s investigation points to a harrowing revelation about his own heritage, which heels closer to violence that any boy would wish to know.

Written with the pace and punch of Outlawed and the inventiveness of The Only Good Indians, Treat Them as Buffalo delivers a gripping portrait of a young man coming of age before his time. 

Release date: May 5, 2026

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 224

Sample

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18, 1885. LAC-AUX-TROIS-PISTOLES, DISTRICT OF SASKATCHEWAN.

Everything turned to shit when Cousin got took. It all happened like this: I rode Pony bareback, Cousin marched beside me. We was walking the trail from the burn scar in the forest back to the homestead after playing buffalo hunters. Me and him was making chit-chat about how good of buffalo hunters we would’ve made. Then I seen a coyote startle in the bush.

“Cousin! A coyote!”

I looked to Cousin beside me. He was gone. Me and Pony spun around and around looking for him. Couldn’t see him nowhere. Couldn’t even find his tracks in the snow.

“Niko! Run!” Cousin yelled from deep in the bush. A hand smothered his mouth.

I tangled my fingers into Pony’s mane, clicked my tongue, and clapped my heels against her sides. I held on for dear life. We raced home.

I led Pony straight to the corral where Nimama watered and fed Auntie’s horse and our mule with help from our three-legged mutt, Barney. Pony trotted with her hooves high to not squish the squirrels scrambling beneath her.

“Whoa! Where’s Guille?” Nimama stabbed a pile of hay with a pitchfork. Her springtime breath cast swirly shadows on the mud.

“Cousin’s gone!”

“Gone? Where?”

I slipped off Pony’s back and splashed the not-as-froze-as-it-looked mud all over my moccasins.

“Me and Cousin was playing buffalo hunters in the burn scar and I was riding Pony and Cousin was walking beside me and I seen a coyote but Cousin wasn’t there then I heard him scream but I couldn’t find him, it’s not my fault, I’m sorry, it was all on accident!”

“Whoa… Niko…” Nimama grabbed my arms. She looked me square with them bright eyes of hers. Blue as my own. She calls our blue eyes “Desjarlaises” even though me and her is Eriksens by last name. I don’t get why she won’t call them Eriksen Eyes. Only Chapan’s last name is Desjarlais. And Chapan’s peepers ain’t even blue.

“Take a breath. Tell me what happened.”

I took a big inhale and outhaled slow. A hunk of heartache blew up in my throat.

Nimama bent closer to my height. I’m pretty small for a twelve-year-old—not much over four feet tall.

“I was riding Pony and Cousin was walking beside me. We was coming home from the burn scar. We was talking the whole time. Then I seen a coyote in the bush. I went to tell Cousin. But he was gone. Then he yelled for us to run. So me and Pony raced home.”

Nimama tugged me into her. I wiped my nose all over the shoulder of her tweed jacket she’d won at the Fleury Hotel and Saloon playing faro. “Is Guille okay?”

I tried to say something. Harder than I ever tried saying anything before. But nothing came out my mouth. I tried breathing through my gagging heartache. But my lungs jammed shut.

I buried my face into Nimama’s burn scarred neck. I cried until nothing was left. Someone stole Cousin.

Nimama grabbed my hand and dragged me to the homestead. I stumbled over my feet.

“Joséphine!” Nimama called to Auntie. “Kokum!” she called to Chapan. “Get out here!”

“What’s going on?” Chapan stepped onto the boardwalk of our two-story, white-like-angel-wings homestead. Félix the cat and Miss Kitty scurried out from between Chapan’s legs and bounced into the bush. The homestead has “circus windows,” we call them—windowpanes so droopy, everything looks melty and gooey through them.

“You need to take Nikosis.” Nimama pushed me toward Chapan with her palm. Soft like a breeze. I waded into Chapan’s bosom and wrapped my arms around her. “Guillaume disappeared not five minutes ago. I’m getting my sister. We’re headed to the burn scar. Niko stays with you until we all come home.”

“I still don’t know what’s going on.” Chapan looked terrified.

“Look after Niko until we get back.” Nimama burned past us into the house. She cussed to herself as she lifted the Winchester repeating rifle off the mantel—a family heirloom, she calls it, even though the rifle’s same age as me and Cousin. She stuffed her pockets with bullets. “I’ll be back with Guille and Josey.”

Nimama ran off with the gun to the old cabin near the corral where Chapan lived before the homestead got built. Auntie uses it as her workshop nowadays. It’s where she hides with her beads and books and sewing kits. She paints there too.

Chapan led me to the table. Before I could sit down, I heard Auntie scream from inside her workshop. I ran to the window and watched Auntie crash out the old cabin with the door swinging behind. Barney raced after her. Auntie tripped in the snow and mud and bounded into the corral. She leapfrogged over her horse’s rump and gave him three solid kicks to the belly. She held his mane. He zipped up the trail. His hooves hurled waves of slush behind. Nimama mounted Pony and clambered after them with the rifle slung over her back.

Arf! arf! arf!

Barney raced after them.

“What’s happening…” I said to the window.

Chapan hopped outside and closed the corral gate before Huckleberry the mule could take off. I pulled a chair at the table and sat down in front of a cup of elderberry tea Chapan had made for herself.

I leaned over the steamy tea. I thought about how them dried elderberries turn my tongue blue. How them seeds crack! between my teeth. How someone stole Cousin.

Hard as I tried distracting myself, Cousin was all I could think about. Tea was useless.

Who’s to say we won’t find Cousin? Auntie and Nimama will scour everywhere for him—even if the bush is endless from Lac-aux-Trois-Pistoles to Buffalo Narrows to Fort Battleford.

My thoughts felt heavier than lead. I looked around the homestead. Smelled wood everywhere. Wood boxes nailed to wood walls to make wood cabinets. Wood staircase to the wood upstairs with wood beds. Wood bookcases chock-full of maps, letters, newspapers.

Almost every nook and cranny in the homestead is stuffed full of books and maps and letters and everything papery in between. Everyone calls the homestead “la bibliothèque” because we got so much to read and share. La bibliothèque always smells woody and lived-in at the same time. Like Maman Earth, smudge, lumber, and old paper breathing together. On the walls, Chapan nailed old snowshoes for decoration, newspaper headlines, whitetail and muley antlers, medicines for drying, lots of old paintings of prairies and people and everything pretty.

“Pray a cigarette never falls from your lips,” one of Nimama’s guests once said. “Or this place’ll be razed.”

Ever since forever ago, Chapan’s been the one trusted to use fire to change the forest. Burning them spots here to make better blueberry bushes. Burning them spots there so there ain’t no fuel nearby for when the Big Fire happens. When lots of other half-breed people from this place called Red River moved to Lac-aux-Trois-Pistoles in the 1860s and ’70s, they hired Chapan to clear land along the Beaver River or in the bush near the lake so they can live like they did back home on the open prairie.

Most farmers didn’t have no money to pay Chapan. So a few years before me and Cousin was born, Monsieur Xavier Fleury got everyone in L-T-P together to build Chapan one of the nicest homesteads in all the North-West—a proper two-story house big enough for her whole family. They fund-raised to buy Chapan pretty things like glass windows and a stove. Even built a bazillion bookshelves for Chapan, giving her proper space to store her library.

People didn’t leave Red River because they wanted to. They left because buffalo was disappearing and lots of folks from Out East was settling the prairies. New Canadian law said our land in Red River didn’t belong to Indians or half-breeds no more because Canada bought all the North-West from the Hudson’s Bay Company. Ottawa wanted to fill the prairies with European farmers. Indians and half-breeds had to go.

It started a big uprising before Christmas in 1869. This guy called Louis Riel took over Fort Garry and made a government for half-breeds in Red River to keep our land. They even executed a guy from Ontario. Everything was bad. No one knew what would happen next.

Then Ottawa got involved. Agreed to turn Red River into the Province of Manitoba when it all ended in 1870. But Manitoba became dangerous for Indians and half-breeds. Posses of vigilante soldiers from Ontario got violent. Men was murdered. Women and girls too. Chapan even framed an old newspaper article all the way from Minnesota calling it a “reign of terror.”

So lots of Indian and Métis people moved from Red River to all over the North-West where their ancestors worked and lived—Fort Benton, Pembina, St. Paul, Qu’Appelle, Batoche, Lac-aux-Trois-Pistoles, Île-à-la-Crosse, Fort McMurray, Fort Edmonton—to build new homesteads, to meet new people who looked and talked like them, to reconnect with old family, to marry new family, to trap in the bush, to farm riverlots. Nowadays there’s about a hundred or so people living within ten miles of Lac-aux-Trois-Pistoles in cabins and homesteads in the bush, then another hundred-fiftyish people living on riverlots along the Beaver River. We live in the bush just east of town. Chapan’s lived in L-T-P damn near all her life.

Since the uprising ended, Lac-aux-Trois-Pistoles has become one of the biggest towns in the whole District of Saskatchewan. So big that the North-West Mounted Police started converting the abandoned fort on the north side of the lake into a police outpost last fall.

Chapan misses olden days when Lac-aux-Trois-Pistoles was nothing more than traplines, the lake, and the fort. But she also adores how much town has grown up with her. Nowadays there is lots of French-speaking families, Cree-speaking families, English-speaking families, many-language-speaking families, trapper families, horse-boarder families, trader families, farmer families, freighter families, devout families, traditional families, Catholic families, Protestant families—even a few “Not-estant” families.

“Kate McCannon calls me a Not-estant,” Chapan once said. I ain’t never understood. Chapan comes to Mass and ceremony. Smudges and prays. Goes through all the motions. But, in secret, she don’t believe in God. “But don’t ever say that in front of Père Brisson. Okay?”

Cousin couldn’t’ve disappeared at a worser time. No siree. Chapan says she didn’t hear of no family in all Lac-aux-Trois-Pistoles who didn’t lose at least a third their crops or gardens to drought and frost last year. There was even less game than Nimama’d ever seen. Chapan’s been cooking up ham hock soup all week because that’s all that’s left of our poor pig, Percy.

We got a fancy root cellar in the homestead—a latch in the floor covered with a bearskin rug so nobody trips on it. Usually the cellar is stocked full of potatoes, sacks of flour and sugar, bottles of vinegar, seeds, dried berries and meats, pork pemmican, bear grease, duck fat, pickled eggs and carrots and onions and cucumbers. But there ain’t much food this year. To make it worser, half our in-the-ground carrots was spoiled by rabbits this summer, half our in-the-cellar potatoes was spoiled by a family of rats Cousin discovered around Christmastime, and half the in-the-sack pork pemmican was spoiled by the same rats who made babies we didn’t know about.

Chapan used to say no animals in the house. But after them rats broke her rule, she started keeping the cats inside. Problem is Félix and Miss Kitty always sneak outside whenever Chapan opens a window or door.

We finished building the church two springs ago. Nimama says the church got finished right when we needed it most. Life’s got awful dark for us in the North-West. The church gives us a place to be together. Gives us a symbol of hope.

Chapan says them buffalo hunts was a time for all half-breeds to be together for a few months on the prairie. Even for us bush-breeds in Lac-aux-Trois-Pistoles, there ain’t enough coyotes or martens to make good money selling furs to feed everyone without meat from buffalo hunts. Me and Cousin ain’t never even ate buffalo meat before. We was little kids when the buffalo died in Saskatchewan forever. Chapan says when we lost the buffalo, we lost a family member.

Chapan’s afraid we’ll have another death in the family soon. She says the North-West is real sick. We need each other more than ever.

For one thing, nobody’s sure how they feel about Louis Riel being back in Batoche. There’s talk he’ll lead another uprising. Bigger this time. Holier. Some folk say he’s a saint. Others say he’s insane. It’s like half the families in Lac-aux-Trois-Pistoles think Riel’s come to save us from tyranny like Jesus Hisself; the other half think he’s bound to damn us all to Hell.

Like I said: Cousin disappeared at the worst time ever.

I opened my eyes. Chapan rubbed my tight neck muscles. I cupped my tea like a fledgling. Brung the porcelain to my lips. Devoured a mouthful of elderberries. Each and every seed crick-crack!ed between my teeth.

A few minutes passed like this—me sipping tea and Chapan massaging my shoulders like they carried the weight of the world. It was peaceful. Almost like Cousin never got took. Like he was napping upstairs.

I would’ve stayed like that forever. God as my witness.

When all the tea was drunk and them elderberries was in my belly, I left the table and hankered upstairs to the loft where most the beds is. Me and Cousin sleep in bunk beds: me on the top bunk and him on the bottom. My bunk begged me to crawl up the ladder and cuddle myself in the blankets. But I was too dang tired. So I tumbled into Cousin’s bed instead.

Sometime in the night, when I lay trapped under Cousin’s stinky blanket, I heard the door downstairs open and Nimama and Auntie hop inside. Nimama told Chapan they searched well past sundown. Even recruited some of the neighbours to help. She said all the footprints in the bush got so tangled together, the snow looked like a marching ground. There was no doubt Cousin got stole. But no sign of his kidnapper.

I got out of bed and snuck down a couple stairs, careful to hide in shadows. Nimama, Auntie, and Chapan sat around the candlelit kitchen table with numb faces. When I seen Auntie’s dark eyes sunk in deeper than two wells to Hell, I knew she was going to be bonkers forever—or at least until we bring Cousin home.

THURSDAY, MARCH 19, 1885.

In the morning, I eavesdropped on Nimama and Auntie from the stairs while they talked to Chapan and sipped their coffees. A plate of bannock and a pot of lard and saskatoon berry pudding goop steamed in the middle of the table. Two sloppy cigarettes rested on an ashy saucer next to two burned braids of sweetgrass and sage. Chapan must have prayed with Nimama and Auntie—them to God, but Lord knows who Chapan prayed to.

Auntie shook her hair out its bun. Her hollow eyes examined the tips in the sunlight. She snipped the split ends with her nails.

Nimama pulled one of the cigarettes off the saucer. She lit a match. Smoke flowed out her nostrils. The paper looked extra white on her radishy skin.

Even though they’s a tad sunburned looking all the time, both Auntie and Nimama got milky skin compared to Chapan’s. In the summertime, the skin on Nimama’s hands drinks up sunlight, making her brown and raspberry-like come August. Auntie’d look like that too, but she prefers hiding from the sun in her workshop. She likes to say she got dark white skin. But Chapan says her and Nimama is both creamy brown.

I don’t know what Nimama thinks about the way she looks. Maybe it’s because them flaming blue eyes make her look kind of Europeanish. But the sun don’t scare Nimama like it scares Auntie. Out in public, Auntie’s careful to keep her bun pulled tight so no one can see she got “wily half-breed hair,” she calls it—a mess of blackish-brown curls that feels more like a fistful of moose fur than anything else. Nimama though, she braids her hair, then mats the fuzzy top down with Oncle’s Stetson hat. Oncle—my kokum’s older brother who disappeared just before me and Cousin was born—gave it to Nimama for an Easter present.

It’s pretty neat: me and Cousin was born not two weeks apart after New Year 1873. But we ain’t got no clue who our papas could be. Ain’t even allowed to ask about them. Nimama and Auntie don’t like talking about being so young and pregnant. They don’t even talk much about their own papa. All me and Cousin know is their papa was some Norwegian fur trader with the surname Eriksen.

But I know Nimama and Auntie grew up in Dakota Territory with their papa and maman until their house burned down. They was just kids then. Chapan says that my kokum died in the fire. But Nimama says that’s a lie. She says my kokum got so angry at the world she burned the house down and ran away when everyone else was sleeping inside.

After the fire, Oncle invited Nimama and Auntie and their papa to live with him on his farm in Red River. He needed a new business partner.

When they got to Red River, Oncle and my grandpapa farmed and traded furs together. That meant Nimama and Auntie went to be schooled at th. . .