I exited the study. “Babae o lalaki?” I mouthed at Beng. Woman or man? Tito Iñigo was sitting there, head cocked and ears up, awaiting the response. I had been avoiding Chet’s calls for over a week.

Beng gave me a bewildered look and shrugged.

I took the phone from her.

“Ting?” came the voice. It was Bibo.

Bibo wanted to get together and so the following day, I got a GrabCar and headed to Tondo. To occupy myself during the two-hour ride, I brought a book on Truman Hunt, a medical doctor who had gone over to the Philippines in 1898 and, in the way of colonial occupiers, become the completely unqualified lieutenant governor of the Bontoc province. I’d checked the book out of the Santa Tomas library, hoping that it would mention Schneidewind, but even if it didn’t, I would learn more about the Bontocs’ relationship with the United States, which was necessary to undergird whatever narrative would one day need undergirding. I slid into the back of the car, a tiny Toyota with itchy fabric upholstery, and started reading.

Timicheg and his tribe were not the first group of Igorots to make it to the United States. In 1904, a trial outing was funded by the US government to the tune of 1.5 million dollars and brought thirteen hundred Igorots to be displayed at the Saint Louis Exposition. It was a huge success. One and a half million sounds like a lot of money, but when one considered what was at stake, this was chicken feed. The annexation of the Philippines had not won universal approval and it was in the best interests of those who supported the venture to demonstrate the Filipinos’ inability to govern themselves.

When, after a stint in Saint Louis, Hunt returned to Bontoc in 1905, he brought an enticing offer: he would pay any willing Bontoc fifteen dollars a month in wages to travel to the United States and perform their most barbaric selves for a hungry American public. Though of course that could not have been how he sold the venture to them. Maybe he proposed that they would perform their dances, play their music, and present their culture to those lost in the ignorance of American isolation, with the hope that the Americans would thrill to see the practices of the Bontoc, as they had never seen anything like it. Maybe in the conjuring of their drums and graceful, frightening dance, they could transport the American public to the vine-choked gullies and miraculous rice terraces, to the softly chilled mountain air, to the sun striking rays over the ridge of mountains at dawn, to the rustle of a doe in the long grass and the shink of an arrow that brought her to her knees, and to the gory red of sunset that threw the warriors in silhouette as they came marching back from a successful outing against their foes.