removed as one. This allowed for the tough meat to be dried and made into pemmican. Castaneda saw Indigenous women butchering bison with a flint fixed in a short stick. He admired how quickly they completed the task. Blood to drink was filled in emptied guts, which were carried around the neck. A Crow historian has related a number of ways to get bison. By the help of songs, hazers, drive lines of stones and a medicine man pointing down the line with a pair of hindquarters in his hands, the Crows drove many bison over a cliff. A successful drive could give 700 animals. During winter, Chief One Heart's camp would maneuver the game out on slick ice, where it was easier to kill with hunting weapons. Henry Kelsey described a hunt on the northern plains in 1691. First, the tribe surrounded a herd. Then they would "gather themselves into a smaller Compass Keeping ye Beast still in ye middle". The hunters killed as many as they could before the animals broke through the human ring. In the dog days, the women of a Blackfoot camp made a curved fence of travois' tied together, front end up. Runners drove the game towards the enclosure, where hunters waited with lances as well as bows and arrows. The Hidatsa near Missouri River confined the buffalo on the weakest ice at the end of winter. When it cracked, the current swept the animals down under thicker ice. The people hauled the drowned animals ashore, when they emerged downstream. Although not hunted in a strict sense, the nearby Mandan secured bison, drowned by chance, when the ice broke. A trader observed the young men "in the drift ice leap from piece to piece, often falling between, plunging under, darting up elsewhere and securing themselves upon very slippery flakes" before they brought the carcasses to land. Religion also plays a big role in Native American bison hunting. Plains tribes generally believe that successful hunts required certain rituals. The Omaha tribe had to approach a herd in four legs. At each stop the chiefs and the leader of the hunt would sit down and smoke and offer prayers for success. The Pawnee performed the purifying Big Washing Ceremony before each tribal summer hunt to avoid scaring the bison. To Plains tribes, the buffalo is one of the most sacred animals, and they feel obligated to