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Updated: June 5, 2025
When a load is made it is borne to the transportation baskets in some part of the harvested section of the sementera, where it is gently slid to the earth over the front of the head as the woman stoops forward. It is loaded into the basket at once unless there is a scarcity of binders in the field, in which case it awaits the completion of the harvest.
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.
Frequently, too, if the smoke was low, a piece of the pork was put on a stick punched into the soil of the sementera beside the fire and the smoke enwrapped the meat and passed on over the growing field.
The manure is gathered from the sties with the two hands and is dumped in the sementera in 10-pound piles about 5 feet apart after the soil has been turned and trod soft and even. It is said that in some sections of Igorot land dry vegetable matter is burned so that ash may be had for fertilizing purposes.
Without attempt at remonstrance the father gives a rice sementera to the child when it is 6 or 7 years old, for that is the price fixed by the group conscience for deserting a girl with a child. It is not usual for a married man to go to the o'-lag, though a young man may go if one of his late mates is still alone.
The Igorot says he believes the harvest will be blasted even while being gathered should one pass along a pathway skirting any side of the sementera. Several harvesters, from four to a dozen, labor together in each sementera. They begin at one side and pass across the plat, gathering all grain as they pass.
Ong-i-yud', of ato Fatayyan, is the priest for this occasion, and the ceremony occurs when the first fruit heads appear on the growing rice. They claim two good-sized hogs are killed on this day. Then Ong-i-yud' takes a ki'-lao, the bird-shaped bird scarer, from the pueblo and stealthily ducks along to the sementera where he suddenly erects the scarer. Then he says:
Most of the returning men and boys carry the empty topil, the small, square, covered basket in which rice for the noon meal is carried to the sementera; sometimes a boy carries a bunch of three or four, and he dangles them open from their strings as he dances along.
There are many rodents, rats and mice, which destroy the growing grain during the night unless great care is taken to cheek them. The Igorot makes a small dead fall which he places in the path surrounding the sementera. I have seen as many as five of these traps on a single side of a sementera not more than 30 feet square.
Mountain-side sementeras are frequently abandoned after a few years' service, as they are supposed to be exhausted, whereas fertilization would restore them. Seed planting Pad-cho-kan' is the name of the sementera used as a rice seed bed. The seed is planted in the beds after they have been thoroughly worked and softened, the soil usually being turned three times.
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