The characters of Silas Ermineskin and Frank Fencepost unify the various stories in The Fencepost Chronicles. As in Kinsella's other North American Indian stories, Silas serves as narrator; here, he recounts Frank Fencepost's deadpan trickery and entrepreneurial shenanigans. As Silas says, teaching Frank to read was a mistake because "it opened up to him about a hundred more ways to get into trouble." In "Beef," for example, after learning that the government's Treaty 11 grants the reserve forty bulls and four thousand cattle, Frank forges Father Alphonse's name to a letter requesting the cattle. A government clerk makes a mistake and instead of shipping four hundred cattle a month, four thousand cattle and forty bulls arrive at the same time. The reserve at Hobbema, the closest town, is inundated with cattle. While most of the Indians.....
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