THE STRANGER'S MAGIC BASKET
By Lin Acacio-Flores

The sun shone day after day. That meant famine
for the Ifugao. The rice plants had dried up on the
terraces that stretched up the mountains. On these
terraces, so the elders said, one could climb up, up
to the very doorstep of the the Kabuniyan, the
Skyworld.

"Maybe we did not sacrifice enough chickens and
wine to the gods when we planted the rice. The
almighty ones are displeased," the priestess said.

At night, the wind set the pine trees sighing.
In their windowless huts, under their red and black
blankets, the Ifugaos, muttering, wished that sleep
would come. Then they could forget their hunger, just
for the night.

There were some Ifugao who had inherited more
rice land than others did, and one of them was
Kimmayong of Pau. He worked hard on his long stretch
of terraces. The dryness had not spared his plants.

But his granary was still full with the harvest
of the previous season, gathered before the long
drought had come.

One morning, Kimmayong woke up and looked at the
sky. "Still no sign of rain," he told his wife as she
took the fragrant steamed rice from the pot and placed
it in a wooden bowl.

Kimmayong, his wife, and his two small sons
squatted around the bowl to take their breakfast.
Even the smaller boy took care not to spill a single
rice grain.

A man whom Kimmayong had never seen before appeared at
the doorway. The stranger carried a basket pack, a
pahiking, on his wide back, and in his strong hands
was a jar.

"Come eat with us," invited Kimmayong. His sons moved
so that the stranger could sit with them.

Kimmayong's wife thought it would be nice to have such
jar.

Kimmayong glanced at the stranger's backpack and saw
that it was not too big and that it would be easy to
fill. Kimmayong was not stingy, but he could not
afford to be over-generous. No one knew when the
famine would end.

Kimmayong looked at the stranger's face. He thought
he saw a good man, and so he said, "I will give you
rice to fill your pahiking, but first, do come and
share our meal."

So the stranger, without telling his name, put down
the jar and the pack, and sat with them.

And then then older boy, who was but five years old,
and who sat next to the stranger, noticed something
strange. In between handfuls of rice with which the
man fed himself, he would pass some rice stealthily
towards his back, and then the rice would disappear.

The boy looked at his parents but hey had not noticed
anything.

The smaller boy, the toddler who could talk as yet,
had stopped eating. He was staring, open-mouthed, at
the space just behind the stranger.

Then the older boy suddenly saw what his brother was
staring at. Like the mists floating around the
mountain on a cold morning, there was a wraith-like
figure behind the visitor, a tiny creature reaching up
with both hands for the rice that hastily thrust to
him. As soon as the rice was in his hands, it
vanished.

Soon the bowl of rice was empty, and the men rose to
the granary. The boys were naturally quiet boys, and
said nothing to their mother.

They watched her as she admired the jar, wiped it with
the end of her striped kain shirt and placed it in a
corner where no one would knock it down.

"I will weave a shallow basket, a stand for it," she
said.

The stranger walked after Kimmayong on the narrow
trail to the granary.

Kimmayong couldn't hear the stranger's footsteps since
he walked so lightly, so at a curve in the path,
Kimmayong glanced over his shoulder to make sure he
hadn't been left behind.

The stranger was waving his hand as if motioning to
someone trailing behind to follow them. But there was
no one else.

At the door of the granary was the bul-ol, the
god-image that Kimmayong had carved from hardened
fern-root. The bul-ol was the guardian of the rice.

Only the owner of the granary should enter it, no one
else, so the stranger stood just outside the door.
There was still plenty of grain, the piles reaching up
to the shoulders of Kimmayong. He saw that no one,
not even the mice, had stolen anything.

A few sheaves of palay and his pack will be full,
thought Kimmayong. He took a bundle from the top,
handed it to the stranger who thrust it into his pack.
Kimmayong gave him two, three... five, seven, ten
bundles, but the pack was still half-empty.

Kimmayong had given all the bundles of the top layer
of the granary, and still the pahiking was not full.

The sweat poured from Kimmayong's brow, and his heart
started to pound. What kind of man was this, and what
kind of bottomless basket did he have?

Did he, Kimmayong, dare to ask the stranger if he
could stop? Now Kimmayong was pulling out the last
bundles of the second layer of rice. At last, when
half of the contents of the granary had been handed
over the stranger, he said: "That is enough,
Kimmayong; you will be rewarded for your generosity."

Then the stranger slung his pack over his back,
slipping the rattan straps easily over his arms as if
the pack were light and empty.

He walked away, towards the terraces, his footsteps
making not a sound, not a footprint in the dust.

Kimmayong staggered back to his hut. He was tired.
His mind was like a whirlwind in his head. His sons
were under the hut, near the posts that held up the
hut, looking upward at the side of the mountain.

"Look! Father!" the older boy said.

The sheaves of rice, the bundles from Kimmayong's
granary, golden in the sun, were moving upright, up
and over the dikes of the terraces, single-file in a
long procession.

"Do you see them? The little men carrying the rice?"
the boy said, and the toddler nodded, yes, he could
see them.

But the father couldn't see anything, only the sheaves
waving and moving on. And they watched the sheaves
climb up the mountain and disappear into the
mysterious rock called Bugwong.

Kimmayong realized that the stranger must have been a
bibiyo, someone from the spirit world.

If one visits the land of the Ifugao, one might be
lucky enough to meet the great-great-granddaughter of
Kimmayong. If you are good and she likes your face,
she might show you the jar that came from the
stranger. She might tell you this story and how good
luck blessed Kimmayong's life and the lives of his
sons and their children.

(Retold with permission from "Heirloom Jars in
Philippine Rituals" by Artemio Barbosa, A Thousand
years of Stoneware Jars In the Philippines by Valdes,
Nguyen Long and Barbosa.)