Yes, they cough them to death. Marmots are benign, pot-bellied members of the squirrel family. They are about the size of a cat and squeak loudly when alarmed. Less appealingly, the bobac variety, found on the Mongolian steppe, is particularly susceptible to a lung infection caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, commonly known as bubonic plague. They spread it around by coughing on their neighbours, infecting fleas, rats and, ultimately, humans. All the great plagues that swept through Eastern Asia to Europe came from marmots in Mongolia. The estimated death-toll is over a billion, making the marmot second only to the malarial mosquito as a killer of humans. When marmots and humans succumb to plague, the lymph glands under the armpits and in the groin become black and swollen (these sores are called ‘buboes’, from Greek boubon, ‘groin’, hence ‘bubonic’). Mongolians will never eat a marmot’s armpits because ‘they contain the soul of a dead hunter’. The other parts of the marmot are a
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