Some little sugar cane is grown by the Igorot of the Bontoc area.  It is claimed to grow up each year from the roots left at the preceding harvest.  At times new patches of cane are started by transplanting shoots from the parent plants.  It is said that in January the stalks are cut and set in a rich mud, and that in the season of Baliling, from about July 15 until early in September, the rooted shoots are transplanted to the new beds.

Cultivating

The chief cultivation given to Igorot crops is bestowed on rice, though all cultivated lands are remarkably free from weeds.  The rice sementeras are carefully weeded, “suckers” are pulled out, and the beds are thinned generally, so that each plant will have all needful chance to develop fruit.  This weeding and thinning is the work of women and half-grown children.  Every day for nearly two months, or until the fruit heads appear, the cultivators are diligently at work in the sementeras.  No tools or agricultural implements other than bare hands are used in this work.

The men keep constant watch of the sementera walls and the irrigating canals, repairing all, thus indirectly assisting the women in their cultivation by directing water to the growing crop and by conserving it when it is obtained.

Protecting

The rice begins to fruit early in April, at which time systematic effort to protect the new grain from birds, rats, monkeys, and wild hogs commences.  This effort continues until the harvest is completed, practically for three months.  Much of this labor is performed by water power, much by wind power, and about all the children and old people in a pueblo are busied from early dawn until twilight in the sementera as independent guards.  Besides, throughout the long night men and women build fires among the sementeras and guard their crop from the wild hog.  It is a critical time with the Igorot.

The most natural, simplest, and undoubtedly the most successful protection of the grain is the presence of a person on the terrace walls of the sementera, whether by day or night.  Hundreds of fields are so guarded each day in Bontoc by old people and children, who frequently erect small screens of tall grass to shade and protect themselves from the sun.

The next simplest method is one followed by the boys.  They employ a hollow section of carabao horn, cut off at both ends and about 8 inches in length; it is called “kong-ok’.”  This the boys beat when birds are near, producing an open, resonant sound which may readily be heard a mile.

The wind tosses about over the growing grain various “scarecrows.”  The pa-chek’ is one of these.  It consists of a single large dry leaf, or a bunch of small dry leaves, suspended by a cord from a heavy, coarse grass 6 or 8 feet high; the leaf, the sa-gi-kak’, hangs 4 feet above the fruit heads.  It swings about slightly in the breeze, and probably is some protection against the birds.  I believe it the least effective of the various things devised by the Igorot to protect his rice from the multitudes of ti-lin’ —­ the small, brown ricebird[25] found broadly over the Archipelago.