Napi teaches how to use a buffalo jump
George Grinnell, Blackfoot Indian Stories, 1913.
It is told also that the creator made people and animals at another place and in another way. At the Porcupine Mountains, he made other earthen images of people and blew breath on the images, and they became people. They were men and women. After a time they asked him, “What are we to eat?” Then he took more earth and made many images in the form of buffalo, and when he had blown on them they stood up, and he made signs to them and they started to run. He said to the people, “There is your food.”
“Well, now,” they replied; “we have those animals, how are we to kill them?”
“I will show you,” he said.
He took them to the edge of a cliff and showed them how to heap up piles of stone, running back from the cliff-like, with the point of the V toward the cliff. He said to the people, “Now, do you hide behind these piles of stones, and when I lead the buffalo this way, as they get opposite to you, stand up.”
Then he went on toward a herd of buffalo and began to call them, and the buffalo started toward him and followed him until they were inside the arms of the V. Then he ran to one side and hid, and as the people rose up the buffalo ran on in a straight line and jumped over the cliff and some of them were killed by the fall.
“There,” he said, “go and take the flesh of those animals.” Then the people tried to do so. They tried to tear the limbs apart, but they could not. They tried to bite pieces out of the bodies, but they could not do that. Old Man went to the edge of the cliff and broke some pieces of stone with sharp edges, and showed them how to cut the flesh with these. Of the buffalo that went over the cliff, some were not dead but were hurt, so they could not run away. The people cut strips of green hide and tied stones in the middle, and with these hammers broke in the skulls of the buffalo and killed them.
When they had taken the skins from these animals, they set up poles and put the hides over them, and so made a shelter to sleep under.