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 scraped 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 grass; 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.