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"It's unbelievable. I'm a grasscutter not a caddie," said MacIntyre senior.

Nearby, grasscutter rodents are skinned.

Quartey has helpfully added a glossary, where we learn, for example, that a “grasscutter,” mentioned in passing in the narrative, is a “bush rat, the meat of which is used in soups and stews.”

Its ingredients are the leaf of the cocoyam plant; dried mudfish, tilapia or other river fish; mushrooms; snails; onions; ginger; garlic; and sometimes grasscutter, the cane rat, which my mother says “adds gamy flavor for those who like it.”

The academics are now trying to sequence the grasscutter’s genome, in the hope of breeding more docile animals.