The narrator and unifying element in the stories is eighteen-year-old Silas Ermineskin, who studies tractor repair at the Wetaskiwin Tech School but who is also apprenticed to Mad Etta, the reservation's four-hundred-pound medicine lady. In this sense, Silas has ties to both worlds, the white technological world and the Indians' old way of life. Silas's loyalty is, however, to his red world, and when the two worlds collide, Silas makes his stand.

In "The Ballad of the Public Trustee," old Buffalo Joe dies and leaves his farm to Silas, but because there is no will, Silas loses the land to a computerfarming conglomerate through legal and bureaucratic shenanigans. Realizing that he cannot fight an impersonal bureaucracy and win, Silas steals a bulldozer and razes Joe Buffalo's cabin, corral, barn and granaries. In "Where the Wild Things Are," Silas, urged and aided by trickster Frank Fencepost, poses as certified...