One night a war party breaks in upon a village of the grain-growers, rushing over the dykes and killing the owners of the fields. A few escape, and scatter in all directions. See! There is one whole family, stealing away through the woods to the west—a man and woman, with deerskins thrown over their shoulders and tied [a]The First Plainsmen] with rawhide thongs around the waist; two naked children trotting behind, and a dog at their heels. They stop when tired out, snatch a few hours’ sleep, and flee on again. Day after day they hurry on. Their old hunting ground is left behind, and they slacken the pace, but still they press on to the west. The woods get thinner and thinner, till there is only a fringe of trees in a valley, sheltered from the wind of the plain above. The fugitives keep close to the rivers, where they can be sure of fish and birds and berries to eat.
At last they come to a place where two rivers meet. The narrow valley here spreads out wide; its banks slope more gently, and are covered with brush; but a mile farther on both valleys are narrow again, and almost bare. “This place looks good to me,” says the man; “stay here by the river while I go exploring.” Climbing through the brush and out of the valley, he stands on the edge of a bare and boundless plain. He shades his keen eyes to see the end of it,—in vain. The gentle waves of turf stretch away—surely to the edge of the world!
“If we go farther,” the man says, coming back to his wife, “we shall find nothing to catch; if we go back, we may be caught ourselves. We shall camp here.” He takes his bow and arrows to shoot a few rabbits for supper; his wife with a sharp stone axe cuts down branches for a shelter,—and that is the first prairie home.
Time passes. More families come straggling up and join them. There is not enough food for all, and they often go hungry. There are coyotes on the plain, but they run like the wind; and antelopes, but they run like the cyclone. One day, the children climb up to the plain with their little bows and arrows to shoot gophers, but come running down again. They have seen monstrous [a]Learning to Hunt Buffalo] animals up there, they say. Their father goes up with a spear. Sure enough, there is a herd of shaggy brown beasts grazing on the turf, with huge heads, fierce eyes, short horns and woolly manes. He has been used to hunting deer and moose in the woods, where he could creep silently from tree to tree until he got within easy range. It is quite another matter to attack a herd of fierce-looking buffalo, out on the bare plain where no shelter is. But the temptation is greater than the risk, when other game is scarce or small or hard to catch.
“Let us go boldly out and attack the buffalo in the open,” says the brave man. He shouts down to his friends in the valley camp. Two other hunters climb up to where he stands, and together they glide over the prairie, slower and slower as they near the herd, till you can hardly tell they are moving. The buffalo stop grazing, lift their heads, and stare at these two-legged creatures they have never seen before. The men come close, and fling their spears. One spear goes home, and brings down a beast; but the rest of the herd wheel round and thunder away over the sounding turf, carrying two spears with them.
That troubles the hunters, for a good spear-head of sharpened bone or antler takes long to make. Next time, they use bows and arrows, and shoot from a distance; but now all the buffalo get away, with arrows sticking in their tough hides. Many spears and arrows are lost, and every now and then a hunter is killed, for sometimes the desperate animals rush at the men who have attacked them, instead of rushing the other way.
“If we can drive the buffalo off the prairie into the brush,” says a thoughtful Indian at last, “they can’t run away so fast; and if they run at us we can get behind [a]Blackfoot and Cree Arrive] trees.” So the hunters do that. Still, most of the hunted animals get out of the wood again, and escape.
Presently another clever Indian thinks of a better plan. “Let us build a corral in the brush, and drive the beasts into it,” he says. So the men cut down trees and make a rough stockade of upright logs, leaving a wide entrance. They manage to drive a herd of buffalo into the corral, and there the poor beasts are crowded together and rush round and round while the hunters behind the trees shoot them down by the score.
There is plenty of food now; too much, in fact. So the Indians just cut out with stone knives the tenderest parts of the meat, the hump and the tongue, and leave the rest to be eaten by coyotes. Some of the lean meat is dried and beaten into powder, and mixed with fat and crushed into bags of skin. This is pemmican, and it keeps a long time, so the tribe has a store of meat to use without hunting.