We eat a lot of prawns. We usually cook for one house. We have our own rice from the padi fields, and we eat monitor lizard (biawak). We capture it using a fishing line. We leave the trap in the river water, and 3, 4 hours later you’ll find a captured biawak there.
Don’t eat crocodiles, or else it will eat you or your relatives, children or family. It’s a traditional Iban belief. Here we don’t disturb the crocodile, or eat it, and we’ve seen it several times. They come here once in awhile but they don’t disturb us. We don’t disturb them, they don’t disturb us. It’s not like the ones in the other rivers where they are violent.
We prefer to eat prawns, vegetables, fruits, chicken, kancil, anything else, but not crocodile. There has been a story at Sri Aman, deeper in the jungle where several men died. Perhaps their ancestors had eaten one of the crocodile’s back then. So we never disturb or eat them. We respect them, they respect us.
Another time one guy caught a crocodile’s baby, and had a dream that night of someone telling him to return back the baby crocodile. He ignored it and didn’t care, and his son got eaten by the crocodile. They managed to catch the crocodile later on, split open his stomach, and found the boy’s body in it. Even if people give us to eat it, we refuse. There’s around one death a year.
(They then brought a monitor lizard that was freshly cooked. The person next to me offered the ‘tail’ section…apparently, it was the tastiest part. I have to admit that yes, I tried it – with eyes closed. It tasted like meat but fishy and scaly with bones. It tastes like fishy chicken).
