Why do you think people first began to make fences and walls?
How do you think they used them?
Why do we have fences? What do we use them for?
How Things were Made to Do the Work of Men
When the clans returned to their own hunting grounds, they could not surround the large herds. There were not enough men in one cave to hunt in this way. Sometimes they partly surrounded a herd and drove the animals over a cliff, but unless the herd was near the cliff, there were not enough men to drive them.
And so the men tried to coax the animals to the edge of the cliff. Sometimes they did it by imitating the cries the animals made. Sometimes they did it by dressing so as to look like the animals themselves. But even then they often failed to get the animals into their trap.
It was when Fleetfoot saw a bison frightened by a feather that he thought of making things do the work of live men.
The greater part of the day the bison fed some distance from the cliff. Fleetfoot wanted to find a way of driving them up to the very edge. The bison drive which he invented was the way he succeeded in doing it.
It was shaped like a letter V with the point cut off. The sides were piles of brush, or stones, or vines stretched from tree to tree. At the edge of the cliff where they started, the sides were only a short distance apart. But the farther out they extended, the farther they were apart.
Men, women, and children joined in making the bison drive. They piled stones and heaped up brush, and they hunted for long vines. Then they hunted for feathers and bits of fur, which they tied along the lines.