Easter Dab Hunt

Happy Easter... at least that's the day it was when I was writing this.  Due to my current lack of internet connection, it is hard to keep up to date and current.  What did you guys do for Easter?  Maybe an Easter egg hunt, Church service if you are religious, the usual.  Well, they don't celebrate Easter in Morocco, what with it being a Christian holiday celebrating the divinity of Christ, and the fact that they are almost all Muslims.  So for our Easter we went on a Dab hunt.  The Dab is basically a large lizard similar to a bearded dragon (although some of you herpetologists out there may disagree).  I would estimate them at about 1 ft in length, with a fat-ish spiked tail.  They vary in coloration from a rather drab green to fairly vivid reddish orange.  Another trainee at my site has a family who loves to hunt these guys.  Today our CBT group and I went out with a couple of our family members, equipped with sticks, a bag, and the equivalent of a pickaxe as well as another tool which was a mix between a hoe and a shovel.  We ventured out into the desert looking for their holes, and when we came upon one Abduraheem would poke one of the sticks inside to see the direction in which to dig.  Some of these holes we dug wound up being 2-3 ft deep, 1 ft wide, and up to 4 feet long.  Once he got near the end of the tunnel and the Dab, he would call one of us in to drag it out and capture it.   

 The best part was yet to come... after searching and digging for the next couple hours we had 8 of these dabs... all that would fit in the sack.  We then proceeded to go down to the creek that ran through the middle of the desert.  This creek created an Oasis of sorts.  Rushes grew everywhere the soil was a bit damp, tadpoles swam for cover as we passed by, and their parents could be heard in the distance, singing their songs.  Steven's host brother crouched down by the water and took a few dabs out of the sack.  He stretched one out in front of him, and  with a knife that was undoubtedly a bit too dull, he slit the first lizard's neck.  Although I was fine with the prospect of killing and eating the lizard, there is something about watching the life literally seep from another living creature that makes me sad inside.  To think about all the energy and time that went into getting it to this point, only to have it die for a snack...  I do love meat though, so I won't be dwelling on it too long, but it's something to think about nonetheless.  So to continue with the story, Steven's host brother killed 3 of the dabs and gutted them.  He made a small fire using sagebrush and basically put them right in the fire, perhaps slightly elevated by some sticks. They were cooked scale side down to reduce the charring, but never the less this resulted in a bit of an ashy-burnt taste.  Below that exterior was an interesting flavor between chicken and lobster, but I'm not completely sure.  The tail was probably the best cut, but to be honest there was surprisingly little meat on the thing.  But hey, for lizard, it wasn't half bad.