It remains to show that hunting and pastoral tribes, as well as agricultural peoples, have been in the habit of killing their gods. The gods whom hunters and shepherds adore and kill are animals pure and simple, not animals regarded as embodiments of other supernatural beings. Our first example is drawn from the Indians of California, who, living in a fertile country(301) under a serene and temperate sky, nevertheless rank near the bottom of the savage scale. The Acagchemen tribe of San Juan Capistrano adored the great buzzard. Once a year, at a great festival called _Panes_ or bird-feast, they carried one of these birds in procession to their chief temple, which seems to have been merely an unroofed enclosure of stakes. Here they killed the bird without losing a drop of its blood. The skin was removed entire and preserved with the feathers as a relic or for the purpose of making the festal garment or _paelt_. The carcass was buried in a hole in the temple, and the old women gathered round the grave weeping and moaning bitterly, while they threw various kinds of seeds or pieces of food on it, crying out, “Why did you run away? Would you not have been better with us?” and so on. They said that the Panes was a woman who had run off to the mountains and there been changed into a bird by the god Chinigchinich. They believed that though they sacrificed the bird annually, she came to life again and returned to her home in the mountains. Moreover they thought that “as often as the bird was killed, it became multiplied; because every year all the different Capitanes celebrated the same feast of the Panes, and were firm in the opinion that the birds sacrificed were but one and the same female.”(302)