'Never eat the soul of a dead hunter'

The marmot. Marmota. Big Squirrel.

Before this trip none of us had heard of these little chaps; thinking they were some kind of misspelled sandwich spread, we soon unearthed the marmot to be the genus of the squirrel; a great, oversized, cuddly mountain mouse that runs across all of Mongolia, lives in burrows and knows how to look great in front of a camera. 

They're so cute! We could adopt one as a pet on the way! Or so we thought, until someone mentioned the plague. These giant relatives of the chipmunk are the great rally divider; other than being the pin-ups of the steppes, through history they have been known as the harbourer of death in the form of the bubonic plague. And they still carry the disease today. Marco Polo rather cannily called them the Pharaoh Rat. Ah.

Bubonic is from the Greek 'Bubo' - meaning swollen gland. The Bubonic plague interferes with the lymph glands (those vulnerable glands again) and swells up to a painful landmass under the armpits and groin. Without treatment, the bubonic plague kills about two out of three infected humans within 4 days. 

For centuries, marmots have worn the mantle of responsibility for all great swaths of plague to hurtle from the East through Europe since before silk found a route to our shores. Yet since these bubonic times, marmots have been eaten for supper in Mongolia. There's even a costume for the ritual of capture. Avoiding army camo, the marmot hunter dresses all in white, wears a white hat with long rabbit-like ears and a 'daluur' - a tassel made from a horse or yak's tail. The shaking of the daluur creates a replying cry in a marmot - a good indicator that it's safe to eat as infected marmots run silent. Once caught, the head and insides are removed, then the meat is stuffed back inside along with red-hot stones, sealed up again and left to cook from the inside out for two hours. This dish is known as 'Bodok'. What do they taste like? Some say beefy, others liken it to wild duck - but the general consensus is 'tastes of rodent'. They are seen as a delicacy, but the Mongolians will never eat the armpit of the animal because it 'contains the soul of a dead hunter'.

We'd like to not offer up the other armpit as being embedded with the 'soul of a dead Rallier'...So we're buying ourselves a daluur.

Alas, therefore, we may just stay away from the marmot and look at them from inside our ambulance, and hope that they stay the right side of shy with us. 

For Faraz Shibli - about to cross the Gobi desert on foot for Endurelief.  

http://www.shibliadventure.com/

We still can't convince him to give marmots a wide birth, so we suggest he looks out for these instead: the Jeroba - much safer.