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Updated: May 7, 2025
After the child is about 2 years of age it is not customary for it to sleep longer at the home of the parents; the girl goes nightly to the olag, and the boy to the pabafunan or the fawi. However, this is not a hard-and-fast rule, and the age at which the child goes to the olag or fawi depends much on circumstances.
It is safe to say that after the ages of 6 or 7 all children are found nightly in the olag, pabafunan, or fawi. I have seen a group of little girls from 4 to 10 years old, immediately after supper and while some families were still eating, sitting around a small blaze of fire just outside the door of their olag. The Igorot child as a rule knows its parents' home only as a place to eat.
Much of the time when they are in the fawi or pabafunan, gossiping and smoking, they are busied making the ordinary and necessary utensils of the field and dwelling. The basket work is all crude, with the possible exception of some of the hats worn by the men.
As the watering of fil-lang' is through the special dispensation of Lu-ma'-wig, so the taro left by him in his garden school received from him a peculiar lease of life it is perpetual. The people claim that all other taro beds must be planted annually. Lu-ma'-wig showed the people how to build the fawi and pabafunan, and with his help those of Lowingan and Sipaat were constructed.
There is a peculiar ceremony, called "chang'-tu," performed now and then when i'-chu, the small omen bird, visits the pueblo. This ceremony is held before each dwelling and each pabafunan in the pueblo. A chicken is killed, and usually both pork and chicken are eaten.
On March 19, 1903, wise, rich Som-kad', of ato Luwakan, and the oldest man of Bontoc, heard an anito saying, "Come, Som-kad'; it is much better in the mountains; come." The sick old man laboriously walked from the pabafunan to the house of his oldest son, where he had for nearly twenty years taken his food, and there among his children and friends he died on the night of March 21.
Unlike the fawi and pabafunan, the o'-lag has no adjoining court, and no shady surroundings. It is built to house the occupants only at night. The o'-lag is not so distinctly an ato institution as the pabafunan and fawi. Ato Ungkan never had an o'-lag. The demand is not so urgent as that of some ato, since there are only thirteen families in Ungkan. The girls occupy o'-lag of neighboring ato.
They searched for blood in the bushes and grass, but they found nothing no blood, no enemies' tracks. "They carried the strange corpse down the mountain trail to their home in Bontoc. Then they hastened to the pabafunan, and there they told the men what had befallen their father.
In it Lumawig, their god, taught them how to discover which pueblo had taken the head of one of their members. They repeat this story as a ceremony in the pabafunan after every head lost, though almost always they know what pueblo took it. It is as follows: "A very great time ago a man and woman had two sons. Far up in the mountains they owned some garden patches.
During the first two days few men were about the house, but they gathered in small groups in the vicinity of the fawi and pabafunan, which were only three or four rods distant.
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