The Master Butcher's Singing Club

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THANK YOU Diane Reverand, Andrew Wylie, Trent Duffy, Terry Karten, Lisa Record, Jen Mundt — and most of all, Ralph Erdrich, my dad.

In the oral history of the massacre at Wounded Knee it is said two people from the north, Cree or Ojibwe, died with Bigfoot’s people. I have always wondered about them.

The picture of the young butcher on the cover of this book is of my grandfather Ludwig Erdrich. He fought in the trenches on the German side in World War I. His sons served on the American side in World War II. This book is fiction except for snout salad, the bull’s pizzle, and my grandmother’s short stint as a human table in a vaudeville act.