The Bontoc Igorot Part 33

"Good-bye, mother; good-bye, mother; you would not give me mo'-ting!"

Origin of kaag, the monkey

The palay was in the milk and maturing rapidly. Many kinds of birds that knew how delicious juicy palay is were on hand to get their share, so the boys were sent to stay all day in the s.e.m.e.nteras to frighten these little robbers away.

Every day a father sent out his two boys to watch his palay in a narrow gash in the mountain; and every day they carried their small basket full of cooked rice, white and delicious, but their mother put no meat in the basket.

Finally one of the boys said:

"It is bad not to have meat to eat; every day we have only rice."

"Yes, it is bad," said his brother. "We can not keep fat without meat; we are getting poor and thin, and pretty soon we shall die."

"That is true," answered the other boy; "pretty soon we shall die. I believe I shall be ka'-ag."

And during the day thick hair came on this boy's arms; and then he became hairy all over; and then it was so -- he was ka'-ag, and he vanished in the mountains.

Then soon the other boy was ka'-ag, too. At night he went home and told the father:

"Your boy is ka'-ag; he is in the mountains."

The boy ran out of the house quickly. The father went to the mountains to get his boy, but ka'-ag ran up a tall tree; at the foot of the tree was a pile of bones. The father called his son, and ka'-ag came down the tree, and, as the father went toward him, ka'-ag stood up clawing and striking at the man with his hands, and breathing a rough throat cry like this:

"Haa! haa! haa!"

Then the man ran home crying, and he never got his boys.

Pretty soon there was a-sa'-wan nan ka'-ag[38] with a babe. Then there were many little children; and then, pretty soon, the mountains were full of monkeys.

Origin of gayyang, the crow, and fanias, the large lizard

There were two young men who were the very greatest of friends.

One tattooed the other beautifully. He tattooed his arms and his legs, his breast and his belly, and also his back and face. He marked him beautifully all over, and he rubbed soot from the bottom of an olla into the marks, and he was then very beautiful.

When the tattooer finished his work he turned to his friend, and said: "Now you tattoo me beautifully, too."

So the young men sc.r.a.ped together a great pile of black, greasy soot from pitch-pine wood; and before the other knew what the tattooed one was doing he rubbed soot over him from finger tip to finger tip. Then the black one asked:

"Why do you tattoo me so badly?"

Without waiting for an answer they began a terrible combat. When, suddenly, the tattooed one was a large lizard, fa-ni'-as,[39] and he ran away and hid in the tall gra.s.s; and the sooty black one was gay-yang, the crow,[40] and he flew away and up over Bontoc, because he was ashamed to enter the pueblo after quarreling with his old friend.

Owug, the snake

The old men say that a man of Mayinit came to live in Bontoc, as he had married a Bontoc woman and she wished to live in her own town.

After a while the man died. His friends came to the funeral, and a snake, o-wug', also came. When the people wept, o-wug' cried also. When they put the dead man in the grave, and when they stood there looking, o-wug' came to the grave and looked upon the man, and then went away.

Later, when the friends observed the death ceremony, o-wug' also came.

"O-wug' thus showed himself to be a friend and companion of the Igorot. Sometime in the past he was an Igorot, but we have not heard,"

the old men say, "when or how he was o-wug'."

"We never kill o-wug'; he is our friend. If he crosses our path on a journey, we stop and talk. If he crosses our path three or four times, we return home, because, if we continue our journey then, some of us will die. O-wug' thus comes to tell us not to proceed; he knows the bad anito on every trail."

Who took my father's head?

The Bontoc people have another folk tale regarding head taking. In it Lumawig, their G.o.d, 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. One day they told the boys to go and see whether the stone wall about the garden needed repair; but the boys said they did not wish to go, so the father went alone. As he did not return at nightfall, his sons started into the mountains to find him. They bound together two small bunches of runo for torches to light up the steep, rough, twisting trail. One torch was burning when they went out, and they carried the other to light them home again. Nowhere along the trail did they find their father; he had not been injured in the path, nor could they find where he had fallen over a cliff. So they pa.s.sed on to the garden; there they found their father's headless body. They searched for blood in the bushes and gra.s.s, 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. The old men counseled together, and at last one of them said: 'Lumawig told the old men of the past, so the old men last dead told me, that should any son find his father beheaded, he should do this: He should ask, "Who took my father's head? Did Tukukan take it? Did Sakasakan take it?" ' and Lumawig said, 'He shall know who took his father's head.'

"So the boys took a basket, the fangao, to represent Lumawig, and stuck it full of chicken feathers. Before the fangao they placed a small cup of basi. Then squatting in front with the cup at their feet they put a small piece of pork on a stick and held it over the cup. 'Who took my father's head? -- did Tukukan?' they asked. But the pork and the cup and the basket all remained still. 'Did Sakasakan?' asked the boys all was as before. They went over a list of towns at enmity with Bontoc, but there was no answer given them. At last they asked, 'Did the Moon?' -- but still there was no answer. 'Did the Sun?' the boys asked, and suddenly the piece of pork slid from the stick into the basi. And this was the way Lumawig had said a person should know who took his father's head.

"The Sun, then, was the guilty person. The two boys took some dogs and hastened to the mountains where their father was killed. There the dogs took up the scent of the enemy, and followed it in a straight line to a very large spring where the water boiled up, as at Mayinit where the salt springs are. The scent pa.s.sed into this bubbling, tumbling water, but the dogs could not get down. When the dogs returned to land the elder brother tried to enter, but he failed also. Then the younger brother tried to get down; he succeeded in going beneath the water, and there he saw the head of his father, and young men in a circle were dancing around it -- they were the children of the Sun. The brother struck off the head of one of these young men, caught up his father's head, and, with the two heads, escaped. When he reached his elder brother the two hastened home to their pueblo."

PART 10

Language

Introduction

The language of the Bontoc Igorot is sufficiently distinct from all others to be cla.s.sed as a separate dialect. However, it is originally from a parent stock which to-day survives more or less noticeably over probably a much larger part of the surface of the earth than the tongue of any other primitive people.

The language of every group of primitive people in the Philippine Archipelago, except the Negrito, is from that same old tongue. Mr. Homer B. Hulbert[41] has recorded vocabularies of ten groups of people in Formosa; and those vocabularies show that the people belong to the same great linguistic family as the Bontoc Igorot. Mr. Hulbert believes that the language of Korea is originally of the same stock as that of Formosa. In concluding his article he says:

We find therefore that out of a vocabulary of fifty words there are fifteen in which a distinct similarity [between Korean and Formosan]

can be traced, and in not a few of the fifteen the similarity amounts to practical ident.i.ty.

The Malay language of Malay Peninsula, Java, and Sumatra is from the same stock language. So are many, perhaps all, the languages of Borneo, Celebes, and New Zealand. This same primitive tongue is spread across the Pacific and shows unmistakably in Fiji, New Hebrides, Samoa, and Hawaii. It is also found in Madagascar.

Alphabet

The Bontoc man has not begun even the simplest form of permanent mechanical record in the line of a written language, and no vocabulary of the language has before been published.

The following alphabet was used in writing Bontoc words in this study: