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

against horses. The carabao held their own admirably in such matches, though they certainly weren’t graceful runners. One day I watched a man train a carabao for racing. He held the guide rope withone hand and the animal’s tail with the other. The very ground shook as the thundering beast thumpety-thumped across the landscape, his trainer’s feet hitting the ground every twenty feet or so behind him. I also observed what it would have been useful to me to have known earlier: that when the animal’s skin rolled one way the trick was for the rider to roll the other.
    In my many weeks in and around Tibuc-Tibuc, I became acquainted with the considerable array of foods eaten by ordinary Filipinos in that locale. Some were delicious; many more were wholesome and reasonably tasty; some I never learned to savor. Perhaps the best foods were the many varieties of fruit. Mangoes were absolutely delectable. Bananas came in a score of varieties, some of which could be fried in coconut oil. Coconuts could be prepared a dozen different ways—after one climbed a tree and laboriously wrestled the nuts out of the top of it. Breadfruit and guava were good, though, once more, procuring them could be arduous. My worst experience picking fruit came in a guava tree when I was attacked by a swarm of large, pugnacious red ants. They were all over me before I noticed them. It would have required a dozen hands to disperse them, and since I had to use one of my two to hold onto the tree I could only swat them ineffectually. By the time I got to the ground, I was painfully chewed up. Cashew nuts were abundant and tasty but had to be handled with care since the shells exuded a juice that produced an irritating swelling if it touched the skin. The best way to deal with them was to roast them slowly until the shell became virtual charcoal, and then remove the nut.
    Because few Filipinos had firearms before the war, carabao, deer, pigs and chickens were plentiful. Chicken and venison were, of course, good. Wild pig was tasty enough, though very fat. Occidental pork producers have carefully bred hogs to reduce their fat content. I was invariably impressed by how much fatter were the wild pigs I riddled with Thompson submachineguns (tommyguns) in the Philippines. (One thinks little about the sporting side of hunting when hunger drives him to stalk animals for their meat.) Carabao meat had an acceptable flavor but was so tough the Devil himself would have been hard put to chew it. Filipinos also esteemed large rats that lived in sugarcane fields, though I must add in their defense that they did not eat rats of the sort that infest garbage dumps. I don’t know whether I ever ate “sugar rat” or not. Sometimes one was served stews and soups that were best consumed without asking a lot of questions.
    Rice was the staple of the Philippine diet. Because of its starch one could easily gain weight on it, though the weight was as readilylost if one fell sick. Once I subsisted for eight days on rice and tomatoes alone. “Coffee” was made from rice and corn roasted together, then served with much sugar. Cassava, the root of a common tropical plant, was cut, fried, and made into something like potato chips. Small, transparent shrimp were somewhat disconcerting when they jumped around live in a coconut shell just before they were to be devoured, but they were palatable. Fish were sometimes dried and stored for later consumption, sometimes merely cooked as they had come from the water, without being cleaned. The diner ate as much as he chose and threw away the rest. Small fish called
bagong
were often mashed and left to ferment, a process that turned them into a sharp-flavored, smelly seasoning. Cattle intestines were carefully cleaned and much prized. One’s craving for sweets was satisfied most easily by chewing sugar cane, though the Filipinos did make a crude brown sugar by pouring boiled cane juice into coconut shells to