During the ceremony the spectators eat and smoke; the candidates take nothing, and, like the partisans, are covered all over with white clay. The latter, when they dance during the ceremony, remain near their pits, and then move on the same spot, holding in their hands their medicines, a buffalo tail, a feather, or the like. None but the candidates dance, and the only music is striking a dried buffalo hide with willow rods. There have been instances of fathers subjecting their children, only 6 or 7 years of age, to these tortures. We ourselves saw one suspended by the muscles of the back, after having been compelled to fast four days. No application whatever is subsequently made for the cure of the wounds, which leave large swollen weals, and are much more conspicuous among the Hidatsa than among the Mandan. Most of the Hidatsa have three or four of these weals in parallel semicircular lines almost an inch thick, which cover the entire breast. There are similar transverse and longitudinal lines on the arms. Referring to Maximilian’s description just given, Matthews observes: At this time, the Hidatsa call the Mandan ceremony akupi (of which word probably akupehi is an old form); but they apply no such term to their own festival. Maximilian did not spend a summer among those Indians, and, therefore, knew of both ceremonies only from description.[228] If the Minnetaree festival to which he referred was, as is most likely, the Naḣpike, he is, to some extent, in error. The rites resemble one another only in their appalling fasts and tortures. In allegory, they seem to be radically different. CULT OF THE YONI. § 320. An account of the great buffalo medicine feast of the Hidatsa (“instituted by the women”) has been recorded by Maximilian. Prayers are made for success in hunting and in battle. When the feast had continued two hours, the women began to act the part, which bore a slight resemblance to what Herodotus tells of the women in the temple of Mylitta.[229] When the dance of the half-shorn head was sold by its Mandan possessors, they received in part payment the temporary use of the wives of the purchasers, each woman having the right to choose her consort.[230] Lewis and Clarke have given accounts of two of the Mandan dances, the buffalo dance and the medicine dance, at the conclusion of which were rites that astonished the travelers, but they were told that in the medicine dance only virgins or young unmarried females took part.[231] ABSAROKA FEAR OF A WHITE BUFFALO COW.