Nowhere was there visible any sign of fear or awe or wonder.  The women sitting about spun threads on their thighs for making skirts; they talked and laughed and sang at will.  Mothers nursed their babes in the dwelling and under its projecting roof.  Budding girls patted and loved and dimpled the cheeks of the squirming babes of more fortunate young women, and there was scarcely a child that passed in or out of the house, that did not have to steady itself by laying a hand on the lap of the corpse.  All seemed to understand death.  One, they say, does not die until the anito calls —­ and then one always goes into a goodly life which the old men often see and tell about.

In a well-organized and developed modern enterprise the death of a principal man causes little or no break.  This is equally true in Igorot life.  The former is so because of perfected organization —­ there are new men trained for all machines; and the latter is true because of absence of organization —­ there is almost no machinery to be left unattended by the falling of one person.

On the third day the numbers increased.  There were twenty-five or thirty men in the vicinity of the house, on the south side of which were half a dozen pots of basi,[21] from which men and boys drank at pleasure, though not half a dozen became intoxicated.  Late in the afternoon a double row of men, the sons and sons-in-law of the deceased, lined up on their haunches facing one another, and for half an hour talked and laughed, counted on their fingers and gesticulated, diagrammed on their palms, questioned, pointed with their lips and nodded, as they divided the goodly property of the dead man.  There was no anger, no sharp word, or apparent dissent; all seemed to know exactly what was each one’s right.  In about half an hour the property was disposed of beyond probable future dispute.

There were more women present the third day than on the second, and at all times about one-third more women than men; and there were usually as many children about as there were grown persons.  In all the group of, say, 140 people, nowhere could one detect a sign of the uncanny, or even the unusual.  The apparent everydayness of it all to them was what struck the observer most.  The young women brushing away the flies touched and turned the fast-blackening hands of the corpse to note the rapid changes.  Almost always there were small children standing in the doorway looking into that blackened, swollen face, and they turned away only to play or to loll about their mothers’ necks.  Always there were women bending over other women’s heads, carefully parting the hair and scanning it.  Women lay asleep stretched in the shade; they talked, and droned, and laughed, and spun.

During the second day men had succeeded in catching in the mountains one of the half-wild carabaos —­ property of the deceased —­ and this was killed.  Its head was placed in the house tied up by the horns above and facing Som-kad’, so the faces of the dead seemed looking at each other, while on the third day the flesh, bones, intestines, and hide were cooked for the crowd.  During the third and fourth days one carabao, one dog, eight hogs, and twenty chickens were killed, cooked, and eaten.