Frontiersman Dafal met Tasaday while setting traps and cultivated their friendship, photos 1972, left, and 2005.

`   In the mid-1900s, a frontiersman named Mindal and his son Dafal, two of the rare outsiders who dared venture into the mysterious forest, were setting animals traps when they chanced upon some foraging Tasaday men. The Tasaday ran, but Dafal caught up with them and began to make friends. After that, Dafal would go to a certain place in the forest and call out and eventually the Tasaday would come. After more visits, he brought them some pieces of cloth and metal--bits of knives , an awl, and earrings. He also taught them to watch his animal traps and to cut down certain palm trees, pound loose the pith and press it into edible cakes.

   

About this time, the Tasaday unexplainably lost contact with the Tasafeng and Sanduka, could no longer find them in the forest. The Tasaday looked and looked, but they found nobody for their young men and women to marry. As time passed, the Tasaday felt alone in the forest and with nobody to marry they could eventually die out. They became deeply concerned about what would happen to them.

    Then one day in 1971 Dafal came and asked them to accompany him to a far place and meet a great man who would help them.  The Tasaday pondered and debated this proposal--it would take them north, where the ancestors had warned they would get sick. But the journey promised hope, and that triumphed over fear. The Tasaday had an ancestral legend that someday a great man would come to them. Perhaps this was the man. They decided to go with Dafal to “see with all of our eyes and hear with all of our ears”  if this was the good man of their ancestor’s legend.

    The entire group went with Dafal, traveling farther northward than these Tasaday had ever gone. They hiked through unknown territory until they reached the edge of the forest. They were frightened by the cleared flatland beyond the trees,  called it “the place where the eye sees too far,” and ran back into the cover of the forest.

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Mahayag roasts deer taught by Dafal; Belayem plays bamboo mouth harp brought by Dafal; men pound pith from a palm as shown by Dafal. all 1972. Dafal first met the Tasaday at an undetermined time, perhaps l950s. while setting traps in the foerst.

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