CANNIBALISM - Recently a distressing story circulated to the effect that a group of depressives from Minnesota, lost in the forest while rambling, resorted to cannibalism. The fact is that, being depressives, they panicked in a sudden flash storm and got lost. At the height of the panic, they tied Barry Gordon, the group leader, to a tree and threw sticks at him. It was Barry's bellowed pleas that they desist, in fact, overheard by passing hikers, that led to their rescue. The seasoned investigator, particularly one with experience of depressives, responds to this story with no more than a wry smile. Throughout history frightened people have attempted to appease nemesis with sacrifices. An apparently hysterical response serves the purpose of providing the group with a scapegoat and a distraction from its predicament. In Britain, health service employees suffer similar indignities at the hands of their charges on a daily basis. No more would have been said of this particular incident were it not for the enraged group leader's claim that he suffered various bite wounds in the course of the assault: this was substantiated by a brief examination. He further alleged that the previously cowed depressives underwent a startling transformation, gambolling around the tree to which he'd been bound and gleefully discussing the prospect of eating him. As the rescuers appeared, however, they immediately reverted to type, lowering their heads, mumbling and walking in a shuffling gait.

Cannibalism is, of course, an offence against nature. Even the many primitive tribes to whom the act is wrongly attributed consider it taboo. Throughout history, however, outsiders, enraged by their circumstances, have perpetrated cannibalistic outrages, not out of necessity (most reasonable people would die rather than eat their dead friends) so much as a form of protest. Sawney Bean and his incestuous brood of prototype hippies had access to any number of alternative food resources, in choosing to exist on a diet of travellers, they were effectively goading the very God they imagined responsible for their creation. Similar offences, incidentally, are still routinely committed against tourists throughout Scotland, particularly in Fife where walkers are regularly abducted from the coastal paths around Kirkcaldy.

 

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