The Virtue of the Cocoanut

_Visayan_

One day a man took his blow-gun [163]and his dog and went to the

forest to hunt.  As he was making his way through the thick woods he

chanced upon a young cocoanut tree growing in the ground.

It was the first tree of this kind that he had ever seen, and it

seemed so peculiar to him that he stopped to look at it.

When he had gone some distance farther, his attention was attracted

by a noisy bird in a tree, and he shot it with his blow-gun. By and by

he took aim at a large monkey, which mocked him from another treetop,

and that, too, fell dead at his feet.

Then he heard his dog barking furiously in the distant bushes, and

hastening to it he found it biting a wild pig. After a hard struggle

he killed the pig, and then, feeling satisfied with his success,

he took the three animals on his back and returned to the little plant.

"I have decided to take you home with me, little plant," he said,

"for I like you and you may be of some use to me."

He dug up the plant very carefully and started home, but he had

not gone far when he noticed that the leaves had begun to wilt,

and he did not know what to do, since he had no water. Finally, in

despair, he cut the throat of the bird and sprinkled the blood on the

cocoanut. No sooner had he done this than the plant began to revive,

and he continued his journey.

Before he had gone far, however, the leaves again began to wilt, and

this time he revived it with the blood of the monkey. Then he hastened

on, but a third time the leaves wilted, and he was compelled to stop

and revive it with the blood of the pig. This was his last animal,

so he made all the haste possible to reach home before his plant

died. The cocoanut began to wilt again before he reached his house,

but when he planted it in the ground, it quickly revived, and grew

into a tall tree.

This hunter was the first man to take the liquor called tuba [164]

from the cocoanut tree, and he and his friends began to drink it. After

they had become very fond of it, the hunter said to his friends:

"The cocoanut tree is like the three animals whose blood gave it life

when it would have died. The man who drinks three or four cups of

tuba becomes like the noisy bird that I shot with my blow-gun. One

who drinks more than three or four cups becomes like the big monkey

that acts silly; and one who becomes drunk is like the pig that sleeps

even in a mud-hole."