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.  The trap has a closely woven, wooden dead fall, about 10 or 15 inches square; one end is set on the path and the other is supported in the air above it by a string.  One end of this string is fastened to a tall stick planted in the earth, the lower end is tied to a short stick —­ a part of the “spring” held rigid beneath the dead fall until the trigger is touched.  The dead fall drops when the rat, in touching the trigger, releases the lower end of the cord.  The animal springs the trigger either by nibbling a bait on it or by running against it, and is immediately killed, since the dead fall is weighted with stones.

Sementeras near some forested mountains in the Bontoc area are pestered with monkeys.  Day and night people remain on guard against them in lonely, dangerous places —­ just the kind of spot the head-hunter chooses wherein to surprise his enemy.

All border sementeras in every group of fields are subject to the night visits of wild hogs.  In some areas commanding piles of earth for outlooks are left standing when the sementeras are constructed.  In other places outlooks are erected for the purpose.  Permanent shelters, some of them commodious stone structures, are often erected on these outlooks where a person remains on guard night and day (Pl.  LXVIII), at night burning a fire to frighten the wild hogs away.

At this season of the year when practically all the people of the pueblo are in the sementeras. it is most interesting to watch the homecoming of the laborers at night.  At early dusk they may be seen coming in over the trails leading from the sementeras to the pueblo in long processions.  The boys and girls 5 or 6 years old or more, most of them entirely naked, come playing or dancing along —­ the boys often marking time by beating a tin can or two sticks —­ seemingly as full of life as when they started out in the morning.  The younger children are toddling by the side of their father or mother, a small, dirty hand smothered in a large, labor-cracked one; or else are carried on their father’s back or shoulder, or perhaps astride their mother’s hip.  The old men and women, almost always unsightly and ugly, who go to the sementera only to guard and not to toil, come slowly and feebly home, often picking their way with a staff.  There is much laughing and coquetting among the young people.  A boy dashes by with several girls in laughing pursuit, and it is not at all likely that he escapes them with all his belongings.  Many of the younger married women carry babies; some carry on their heads baskets filled with weeds used as food for the pigs, and all have their small rump baskets filled with “greens” or snails or fish.