“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 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. The buffalo-hunting tribes increase, and spread out over the southern plains. Some of them have never been anything but hunters, in the woods; and whether they have once grown corn or not, they come to despise the corn-growers. The buffalo is their only crop.