When the crops were ripe the hunters returned with a little dried meat, some tanned hides, and rawhides. They harvested the crops, put them in storage, and went off again on the long fall hunt, taking everyone along. Now the cows were in prime condition, with their hides covered with thick, fine wool, almost a fur. Their meat was the best, and the carcasses yielded plenty of fat, especially the two fine strips of back fat so prized by all the hunting tribes. A few of the bulls might be killed in the fall hunts too, but frequently they were feeding at a distance from the cows and were ignored by the hunters. The calves were killed though, for they were very good to eat and their thin hides were needed for clothes.
Back from the hunt, the village prepared for winter, bringing in firewood and patching the dirt covering of the lodges. When the storms came they stayed close to the lodges, although between storms, especially during a chinook (a warm winter wind from the west), the hunters went out for a few miles in all directions looking for fresh meat of any kind.
If a herd of buffalo had chosen the same valley for their winter range, the hunters fared well, taking fresh meat back to the village. In times of poor hunting everyone subsisted on the food reserves. Although they seldom were in serious want, they called this the "starving time."
Throughout the year it was a comparatively easy task for a hunter to find buffalo on the well-stocked plains, but killing one of these large, tough animals was not so easy. The crude spear of the early hunter could inflict a fatal wound only if he was close to his quarry and able to choose his point of attack, and it was difficult to approach the animal on the open plain, for it lived and fed in small, closely knit groups, each led by an alert old cow. And if the hunter did manage a close approach, the buffalo could easily move out of reach or might even turn and kill him. In either case there was no meat for the families.
A single thrust of the clumsy spear, with its heavy, crude point, could kill a buffalo quickly if it pierced the rib cage and struck either the heart or the lungs, or if it entered the throat, severing the jugular vein or windpipe, but these blows could not be struck unless the spear was held firmly in both hands and aimed carefully. Such an attack could be made only against a trapped or crippled animal.
A large target, and one vulnerable to a thrown spear, was the paunch. Here a wound could produce internal bleeding, which might cause death in a few hours. If the spear could be driven forward beneath the ribs to pierce the diaphragm, the lungs collapsed and death came in minutes. The hunter's best chance for such a blow required him to get within a few feet of his victim, and this could best be done by allowing the buffalo to come to him. Each day the buffalo approached the watering places to drink, usually along well-trodden trails. The hunter hid in the tall grass near the trail and a few feet downwind so that his scent would not be detected. When the buffalo filed by, a well-thrown spear could inflict a fatal wound on one of them, preferably a young cow near the end of the line.
A lone hunter could also be successful if he found an animal trapped in a bog or mudhole, or crippled by a fall. Often when a large herd stampeded, it left several dead or crippled in its wake as the herd in its mad rush encountered obstacles in its path. While the cripples were easy to kill, the hunter had to find them before the wolves did. But the people could not depend on such chance finds; they needed a reliable source of meat, resulting from a planned course of action.
The fire drives were of this sort. A fire could be used on the plains almost any day from midsummer to late fall, but it required a brisk favoring breeze and a herd of buffalo in position upwind from some obstacle, such as a rimrock or a steep ravine. The hunters formed a line several hundred yards farther upwind and set a row of fires in a wide arc reaching halfway around the herd. As the frightened animals dashed in terror from the wall of wind-driven flame, they left a heap of dead and crippled animals at the foot of the cliff or in the bottom of the ravine, ready for the butchering crew.
When winter storms drove the snow across the plains, often the higher ground was left bare while deep, soft drifts formed in the hollows. When the buffalo sought the bare ridges with the exposed grass, they might be stampeded into the drifts, where they floundered helplessly in the deep snow as hunters on snowshoes speared them.
Smooth ice on a lake or river was deadly to buffalo. They sprawled around, unable to regain their footing. If the ice was thin, the whole herd might break through and drown, to be harvested in due time by the hunters.
Here is an eyewitness account of a buffalo kill on smooth ice: "The slipperiness of the ice was turned to good account the other day by the Indians, as they drove a band of buffalo cows so that they had to go out on the ice of the lake, where of course they fell and stumbled, and could make no progress, while their pursuers, approaching on foot, with ease killed the whole, to the number of fourteen."
At another time, along the Missouri, Charles Mackenzie reported that the buffalo broke through the river ice:
At times the Indians would congregate in great numbers and continue to drive large herds to the banks of the Missouri, and by gradual approaches, confine them into a narrow space where the ice was weakest, until by their weight and pressure, large squares of ice, some of fifty yards, would give way and vast numbers of the animals were plunged into the river and carried under the solid ice to a mare (opening) a little below, where they again emerged, floated and were received by crowds of women and children, provided with the proper hooks and instruments to haul them on the ice, which, in a short time, became strewn with dead carcasses.
Each year large numbers of dead buffalo were carried down the rivers by the spring floods. Some had broken through the ice during the winter and drowned, others had been swept away while trying to swim the flooded streams. One man, John McDonnell, on May 18, 1795, counted over 7,360 dead buffalo along a stretch of the Saskatchewan.
When the carcasses came floating down on the flood, some of them were rather ripe, but the early hunters probably thought the carcasses both tender and nourishing even though they had turned green. In later years fur traders reported, with some revulsion, seeing Indians harvesting and feasting on drowned buffalo along the Missouri.
After the first hunters had been on the plains for 20,000 years or so, new waves of migrants from Asia brought in a new hunting weapon, the atlatl, sometimes called the spear thrower. With this instrument a skilled hunter could throw a stone-tipped dart some four to six feet long to a distance of 150 yards, and use it with some accuracy at 50 yards. The atlatl dart, with its finely chipped point, penetrated much deeper than the old spears, and opened up new styles of hunting.
Two or three hunters would take their atlatls and darts, disguise themselves with wolf skins, and creep up on a band of feeding buffalo. The animals paid little attention to them, seemingly unafraid of a few wolves skulking nearby. When the hunters were within range, they rose up and threw their darts, dropping quickly to the ground in hopes that the other buffalo would not start to run but would continue grazing while the wounded animals slowly died.
In the fall hunts, when the hunters needed to make a big kill, they used the surround, which needed fifty or more people for best results. Women and older children could help in this method. The group would fan out and slowly approach a small band of buffalo feeding on the edge of the main herd, and quietly surround it, keeping a hundred yards or so away. This had to be done on a windless day lest the buffalo become alarmed by the scent. During this season the bulls usually grazed in separate bands a few miles away from the cows and calves.