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As the boys come stringing home at night from watching the palay fields, they come dancing, rhythmically beating a can, or two sticks, or their dinner basket, or beating time in the air as though they held a gangsa . The dance is in them, and they amuse themselves with it constantly. Both boys and girls are much in the river, where they swim and dive with great frolic.
This period is not a period of "no work" it has many and varied labors. The second period is La'-tub. It is that of the first harvests, and lasts some four weeks, ending about June 1. Cho'-ok is the third period. It is the time when the bulk of the palay is harvested. It occupies about four weeks, running over in 1903 two days in July. Li'-pas is the fourth period.
The work of threshing, hulling, and winnowing usually falls to the women and girls, but is sometimes performed by the men when their women are preoccupied. At one time when an American wished two or three bushels of palay threshed, as horse food for the trail, three Bontoc men performed the work in the classic treadmill manner.
Every night the laborer goes to the dwelling of his employer and receives the wage; the wages of unmarried children are paid to their parents. To all classes of laborers dinner and sometimes supper is supplied. For weeding and thinning the sementeras of young palay and for watching the fruiting palay to drive away the birds, the only wage is these two meals.
During the last few weeks of pregnancy the woman may leave off her skirt entirely, wearing simply her blanket over one shoulder and about her body. Women wear breechcloths during the three or four days of menstruation. During the period when the water-soaked soil of the sementera is turned for transplanting palay the women engaged in such labor generally lay aside their skirts.
He suggestively places a hen's egg, some rice, and some tapui in a dish before him while he addresses Lumawig, the one god, as follows: Thou, Lumawig! now these children desire to unite in marriage. They wish to be blessed with many children. When they possess pigs, may they grow large. When they cultivate their palay, may it have large fruitheads. May their chickens also grow large.
On February 10, 1903, the rice having been practically all transplanted in Bontoc, was begun the first of a five-day general ceremony for abundant and good fruitage of the season's palay. It was at the close of the period I-na-na'.
Apad, the principal man of Tinglayan, was confined six years in Spanish jails at Bontoc and Vigan because he repeatedly failed to compel his people to bring in the amount of palay assessed them. They say there were three small guardhouses on the outskirts of Bontoc pueblo, and armed Igorot from an outside town were not allowed to enter. They were disarmed, and came and went under guard.
No man may marry who has not first taken a head; and every year after they harvest their palay the men go away for heads, often going journeys requiring a month of time in order to strike a particular group of enemies. The Christians of Dupax claim that in 1899 the Ibilao took the heads of three Dupax women who were working in the rice sementeras close to the pueblo.
The bunch of runo is for a constant reminder to Lumawig to make the young rice stalks grow large. The pa-chi'-pad are to prevent Igorot from other pueblos entering the fawi and thus seeing the efficacious bundle of runo. During the ceremony of Lis-lis, at the close of the annual harvest of palay, both the cha-nug' and the pa-chi'-pad are destroyed by burning. Chaka
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