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These stone walls are usually weeded perfectly clean at least once each year, generally at the time the sementera is prepared for transplanting. This work falls to the women, who commonly perform it entirely nude. At times a scanty front-and-back apron of leaves is worn tucked under the girdle.
All sementera owners along a waterway, whether it is natural or artificial, meet and agree in regard to the division of the water. If there is an abundance, all open and close their sluice gates when they please. When there is not sufficient water for this, a division is made usually each person takes all the water during a certain period of time.
He delivers the lessee's share of the harvest and retains the other half himself, together with the entire camote crop which is invariably grown immediately after the palay harvest. Unirrigated mountain camote lands are rented outright; the rent is usually paid in pigs. A sementera that produces a yield of 10 cargoes of camotes, valued at about six pesos, is worth a 2-peso pig as annual rental.
Finally a large section of the sementera is prepared, and the toilers form in line abreast and slowly tread back and forth over the plat, making the bed soft and smooth beneath the water for the transplanting. It is a delightful picture in the soil-turning season to see the acres of terraces covered by groups of toilers, relieving their labors with almost constant song.
As the hog enters the sementera, the weight of his body springs the trigger which is covered in the loose dirt before the opening, and the falling timber pins him fast against the lower timber firmly buried in the earth. From half a dozen to twenty wild hogs are annually killed by the people of the pueblo. They are said to be as plentiful as formerly. Bontoc pueblo does not catch many wild fowls.
The most natural, simplest, and undoubtedly the most successful protection of the grain is the presence of a person on the terrace walls of the sementera, whether by day or night. Hundreds of fields are so guarded each day in Bontoc by old people and children, who frequently erect small screens of tall grass to shade and protect themselves from the sun.
The first method is the most common, since the mountains in Igorot land are full of small, usually perpetual, streams. There are practically no streams within reach of suitable pueblo sites which are not exhausted by the Igorot agriculturist. Everywhere small streams are carefully guarded and turned wherever there is a square yard of earth that may be made into a rice sementera.
The sun slid down behind the mountain ridge lying close to the pueblo, and a dozen men armed with digging sticks and dirt baskets filed along the trail some fifteen rods to the last fringe of houses. There they dug a grave in a small, unused sementera plat where only the old, rich men of the pueblo are buried.
Besides these there are three children in and about the sementera; one is a pretty, laughing girl of about 9 years; one is a shy, faded-haired little girl of 3 or 4 years; and the other is a fat chunk of a boy about 5 years. All three are perfectly naked.
The animals were managed by a man who drove them and turned them at will, using only his voice and a long switch. It is impossible to get carabaos to many irrigated sementeras because of the high terrace walls, but this herd is used annually in the Bontoc river bottom. After each rice harvest the soil of the irrigated sementera is turned for planting camotes, but this time it is turned dry.
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