which explain how these societies came to be instituted, and this
one tells how the Society of Bulls began.


THE BULLS SOCIETY

It was long, long ago, very far back, that this happened. In those
days the people used to kill the buffalo by driving them over a
steep place near the river, down which they fell into a great pen
built at the foot of the cliff, where the buffalo that had not been
killed by the fall were shot with arrows by the men. Then the people
went into the pen and skinned the buffalo and cut them up and
carried the meat away to their camp. This pen they called piskun.

In those days the people had built a great piskun with high, strong
walls. No buffalo could jump over it; not even if a great crowd of
them ran against it, could they push it down.

The young men kept going out, as they always did, to try to bring
the buffalo to the edge of the cliff, but somehow they would not
jump over into the piskun. When they had come almost to the edge,
they would turn off to one side or the other and run down the
sloping hills and away over the prairie. So the people could get no
food, and they began to be hungry, and at last to starve.

Early one morning a young woman, the daughter of a brave man, was
going from her lodge down to the stream to get water, and as she
went along she saw a herd of buffalo feeding on the prairie, close
to the edge of the cliff above the great piskun.