Stories

I had a friend, Anita, in high school whose parents were always absent. In the three or four years we associated I never saw them once. Worse, to keep her out of trouble while they were away, they demanded that she stay home all the time by herself. She was the loneliest person I ever met.

The family would house-sit from time to time in some of the various capacious second-homes in the community, and Anita would find herself alone, in a large unfamiliar house day and night. A timid soul; she dreaded how frightened she could get after dark isolated in a strange neighborhood and a huge empty house.

One time when she was in one of these houses on Red Mountain, she was walking the dog after school, and the dog, after rustling in the bushes, came out with a human hand in it's mouth. Anita called me in tears, too scared to look for the rest of the body by herself and not sure what to do. Arriving at her house, I was appalled at the gruesome object. It had been cleanly severed at the wrist, and worse, the fingertips had all been neatly cut off as well. It was the size of an ordinary Man's hand, slightly larger than our own. The horror at what we imagined could only have been torture or blackmail at the systematic dismemberment struck us deep.

Together we looked for a corpse in the hillside woods and bushes but found nothing. Anita was beside herself at the thought of spending the night alone at the house with body parts lying somewhere in the area. We called her parents and they were disbelieving. We decided to call the police.

The police were disbelieving as well, but they showed up twenty minutes later. They too, were horrified at the object, and bagging it, took it away. We expected a search in the area, but nothing happened. We waited. Several hours later the police called us back to explain that the hand was actually a Bear paw. Apparently the paw had been buried for some time and the hair had all rotted off. The tips had been severed so that the hunter could keep the claws. This news didn't diminish for us, the cruelty that humans can have for other living things.