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

Etsy Beaucarne is a junior communication and journalism professor vying for tenure at the University of Wyoming. She entered this field against the wishes of her estranged father, a reputable chemistry professor who is now in hospice care in Denver, Colorado.

A librarian at Montana State University named Lydia Ackerman contacts Etsy, who informs her that a worker recently excavated a journal wrapped in buckskin from the wall of a parsonage. The journal was labeled “Arthur Beaucarne,” the name of Etsy’s great-great-great-grandfather. Etsy travels to Wyoming to examine the journal and finds that she has more in common with Arthur than with her father.

Etsy presents a news article from 1912, the year Arthur mysteriously disappeared from Miles City. The article reports the discovery of a male corpse near the Yellowstone River. Because the corpse was skinned, Miles City locals suspected that the murderer was an Indigenous American. Postal clerk Livinius Clarkson recalled a grisly massacre from 40 years earlier, though the report clarified that Clarkson was misremembering an event in which the city men killed buffalo calves to stop them from disturbing the city’s peace.