Global Myths No: 17

Another story from the travellers' grapevine

A YOUNG couple arranged a home-swap holiday with a family in a town in Kentucky. They were slightly wary of the fact that they were required to look after the American family's pet doberman but were assured, however, that it was a fairly old mutt and didn't tend to cause any real trouble. Its only quirk was that it would insist on catching the occasional squirrel or racoon, which it would leave in the kitchen.

In the end, it turned out that their next-door neighbours were the only unnerving thing. The husband had a habit of prowling around the back garden late at night with a hunting rifle. They hardly saw the wife. The only thing that showed a spark of humanity was a large black-and-white rabbit bouncing around a hutch in the garden.

To their horror, in the middle of the second week, the dog bounced into the kitchen one morning after a romp in the garden with a dead but familiar- looking black and white rabbit in its mouth. They ran outside and saw that, yes, the hutch was open and the rabbit gone. Back inside they examined the creature. There were no obvious broken bones or external wounds and decided to put it back in the hutch in the hope that the neighbours would assume it had died of a stroke or something.

To their relief they heard no more about it. However, on the morning they were due to leave, as they were packing the last of their belongings into the taxi, they bumped into the husband in the driveway. They were sorry, they said, to hear that the rabbit had passed away. "And that's not the half of it," grunted the man. "The day after we buried it, some weirdo crept into the yard, dug it out of the ground and put it back in its cage."

Send in the stories you've picked up on your journeys to `Global Myths' at the address above.