Behind Japanese Lines by Ray C. Hunt, Bernard Norling Page A

songs and love songs in Pampangano.
    I also learned something about Filipino psychology and customs. The favorite weapon of most Filipino men was the bolo, a long, curved knife carried in a bamboo scabbard and used for a variety of purposes. Most Filipinos were good-natured much of the time but, like people everywhere, they occasionally lost their tempers and got into fights. The aftermath of a fight waged with bolos could be devastating. I have seen survivors of bolo battles reconstructed with as many as four hundred stitches.
    Filipinos love to gamble, particularly on cockfights. The owners of fighting roosters often appeared to think as much of their feathered protégés as of their own children, and spent much time and effort training them. The training itself breathed the spirit of boot camp in the Japanese army. A favorite way of “conditioning” an unfortunate chicken was to tie its feet to a wire clothesline and then flick the wire to make it spring back and forth. The terrified rooster had to strain every fiber to stay upright, a process which gradually turned his leg muscles into something like steel wire.
    My Filipino mentors did not tutor me merely in their language and folklore. They also taught me various ways to augment my food supply. One such way was to make and set snares to catch wild chickens, which are smaller than American chickens. The roostersare brightly colored and crow their brains out all night long. In the 1940s they were plentiful all over the Philippines and though wild were not hard to catch in a simple noose trap that would snare one by the neck or one foot and hoist it into the air. I also learned to catch birds at night by throwing a fish seine over their roosting places in the tall cogon grass, and to catch fish from the river with the same nets. The Filipinos also taught me another way to catch fish that seemed implausible but was surprisingly effective. They would pile a lot of rocks in a streambed, leave them for a week or so, then cover them with a large net and weigh down its outer edges. Then they would slide their hands carefully under the net and remove the rocks one by one until only fish remained inside.
    Coping with Philippine livestock was more challenging than with local birds and fish. Most Philippine animals are midgets compared to their American counterparts. A notable exception is the water buffalo, or carabao. Wild carabao are fierce, and those in the Philippines once experienced the distinction of being hunted by Theodore Roosevelt; but domesticated carabao are huge, patient, docile beasts, so gentle that children can tend them. They pull the plows, wagons, and carts of the Philippines at a leisurely pace with seeming contentment as long as they are fed and get a couple of baths a day in a nearby river or mud wallow. Unlike the skin of a horse, that of a carabao is loose and rolls back and forth across the animal’s back when it walks. This, I discovered, makes riding one no mean feat. I had seen natives ride them many times, so one day I climbed aboard with a Filipino boy. The carabao either did not like me or rebelled at the idea of being ridden double. He promptly took off cross-country. The Filipino boy wisely jumped off, but I clung desperately to the critter, jerking on the rope that went to a ring in his nose and shouting at him in English, a language to which he remained obdurately indifferent. With each leap and each tug on the rope, I slipped farther forward on his rippling hide until I was astride his neck, just behind his massive, ominous looking curved horns. Here I had no leverage, so I could not jump; I could only
fall
off. I hit the ground hard and lay motionless. The Filipino boy rushed up to me and inquired solicitously if I was hurt. Fortunately, I was only dazed—and more wary of carabao.
    As I had just learned, carabao, despite their bulk, could run with surprising speed for short distances. Sometimes Filipinos would race them