My dad, rest his soul, told me that he'd seen the hairy, web-footed carnivore from a distance during a hunting trip. He also claimed to have seen Jesus, Moses, and Mohammed, although not during the same drinking binge. Nonetheless, he was always sober while on the hunt, at least until he shot something.

During the early 1960s, when the local cannabis growers were still figuring out male and female plants, the massive Grizzly Frog was thought to be a pot-induced phantasm. Stoners would sit around their Coleman lanterns and relate tales of horror, all based around the frog and its insatiable need for fresh meat. In the beginning, it was small house pets - a gerbil whose cage had mysteriously opened in the middle of the night was found chewed into small pieces. A pet rabbit that had lived through four Easters without laying an egg was found dead, its lucky rear feet missing from the corpse.

As time marched forward, the size of the prey enlarged. One of my neighbors, a World War II veteran began losing stray cats that he fed. A brown and white tabby was the first one to go, leaving only a few inches of bloody tail behind. The following night his favorite calico was found headless just after midnight. Labor Day weekend 1971, a family told Park Rangers that a huge hairy frog had leapt from some scrub alongside the river and hopped off with their picnic basket and over twenty pounds of fried chicken.

Things got much worse after that. A pack of hunters approaching a deer one of their group had shot were attacked by the largest Grizzly Frog any of them had ever seen. Apparently, it had reached the dead animal first and was busy chewing on its hindquarters. Two of the men fired at the frog, hitting it in a leg and grazing its head. They followed the frog's blood trail to the river's edge and were standing there scanning the opposite bank when the frog jumped out of a tree and bit one of the hunters in the shoulder before vanishing in the murky water.

I was scheduled to graduate from Pleasantdale High School the following year and yet to see the beast for myself. However, frog fever had reached a new peak in the summer of '72, and everyone was on alert. For the first time since my birth, there were more people walking around town with a pistol than a transistor radio. If you went anywhere near the river, which was easy to do since it flowed right through the center of town, you made sure your weapon was loaded and your pets stayed by your side.

One sunny afternoon in late July, the Mayor was fishing a few yards into the river along with several deep-pocket donors. They'd not had much luck pulling fish from the water and were talking about heading over to the tavern when one of them, a female lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry, was bitten in the left buttocks. The gigantic Grizzly Frog surfaced a few yards away from the screaming woman with a large chunk of her yellow and mauve dress in its mouth. The Mayor swung at the frog with his fishing pole and missed. But he managed to hook the poor woman on her right butt cheek and tore off most of the remaining cloth of her dress.

On shore, the Mayor's driver and bodyguard both took aim at the Grizzly Frog but couldn't fire without hitting one of the people in the water. A nearby cannabis farmer who was tending his crop, heard the commotion and came charging through the trees with an Israeli Uzi in his hands. Not a fan of the Mayor or his political party, he was about to open fire until the bodyguard tackled him and pulled the weapon from his hands. The frog got away.

The following day, at an emergency meeting of the town council, the Mayor announced open season on Grizzly Frogs with a one-thousand dollar bounty on the big one's head. The council passed the ordinance without objection adding that no hunting was allowed within fifty yards of the school, the church, and especially the tavern. Sporting goods stores three counties away sold out of ammunition that afternoon.

Gunfire was sporadic during the day, but as the sun set, the war began. Over the next five days, sixteen small Grizzly Frogs were shot, all less than ten pounds. Quite a few of the veteran's stray cats never returned for dinner and a small squeaky dog named Poof that lived a mile away from the river was also killed. The last shooting turned out to be the result of a long-standing feud between neighbors, but with the frenzy in full bloom no charges were ever filed.

Several of my friends organized a frog hunting party and invited me to come along one evening. I took my dad's shotgun, his red felt hat with the NRA sticker, and two bottles of whisky, just for good measure. One of the guys had so many guns with him that he clanked as we snuck through the woods. Tall as he was, he nearly shot himself in the foot when he crashed into an oak tree in the dark. We hiked alongside the river from the interstate bridge down to the dam, drinking the whisky and telling lies. Other than several hunting parties moving in the opposite direction, we saw nothing else alive. Truth be told, no one saw the carnivorous hundred-pound Grizzly Frog that night.

News of a dead horse south of town brought the hunters out early the next morning. At first glance, the wild mare appeared to have been struck by a small car or a motorcycle. The town's veterinarian inspected the carcass and found grizzly fur around the wound. The frog had upped the ante. Upon hearing the results of the informal autopsy, the Mayor called the Governor and requested the National Guard and Civil Air Patrol. However, he canceled the latter when he was informed that none of their aircraft were armed.

The Governor, not believing in large carnivorous amphibians, refused to send the National Guard but did offer a team from the state psychiatric hospital. The Mayor's response was to place one of the town's four police cars on the ramp to and from the interstate. They'd find the beast and kill it, but only after sealing the one exit in and out of town so it couldn't escape. The officer who manned the post told arriving tourists and travelers that an epidemic was afoot in the town and it wasn't safe for anyone until they got it under control.

The second night found even more hunters in the forest and along the river. Again, several small Grizzly Frogs were killed, some as small as squirrels, but one that was nearly forty pounds threw the hunters into a tizzy. Word of the big one spread quickly and a large group of hunters converged near the dam where the forty-pounder had been taken. Beer cans were popped. Wine bottles were uncorked. And the bloodlust for cold, green, furry frogs was about to get out of hand.

I was home when one of my buddies called and said they'd killed the large Grizzly Frog and he was headed over to see it. The dam, only a few hundred yards from my house, was lit up brighter than a rock concert and I ran to it, shotgun in hand, wearing only a t-shirt, bathing suit and flip flops. Low hanging tree limbs grabbed at my shoulders as I ran through the woods. Dry twigs snapped under my feet. A nearly full moon lit the way. As I got closer to the river's edge, I shouted so that anyone with a gun would know I wasn't a killer frog coming out of the trees.

From off to my left came the sound of automatic weapons fire and I ducked instinctively. As I came low through some young trees, my foot and flip flop parted ways and I tumbled sideways into some bushes. Had I been standing, the Grizzly Frog would have landed on my back, its razor-sharp teeth having clear access to my neck. Instead, it missed me completely, careening off a large tree and rolling to a stop not more than ten feet in front of me.

Without hesitation, I pumped the shotgun and let loose the first of three twelve-gauge rounds in the frog's direction. The muzzle flashes, as bright as oncoming headlights, combined with the roar of the shotgun's blasts to bring shouts and flashlight beams from all directions. For a few moments though, I was blind and deaf, standing there with the shotgun shoved hard into my shoulder.

My eyes adjusted before my hearing returned and I scanned left and right, looking for what I hoped was my thousand-dollar prize dead on the ground nearby. But as the bellowing of the shotgun finally faded to night noise, I could hear something large plowing through the underbrush in front of me. Hoping it was the Grizzly Frog, I pumped and fired again and again until the last of the shells flew out and over my shoulder.

A group of hunters came out of the woods behind me yelling, "Did you get him? Is it dead?" They panned with their flashlights, landing them on a trail of crushed underbrush that led to the river's edge. There were greenish blood spots every few feet, but not enough to make me think it was seriously wounded. One of the hunters claimed it was the wrong color for Grizzly Frog blood and that it was probably some other animal. No one else agreed.

Nearly two hundred Grizzly Frogs were killed that summer, enough so that the population never managed to sustain itself. By the time I graduated from law school, the Grizzly Frogs were extinct. No one ever found the carcass or bones of the big one although pets stopped disappearing and no one else was ever attacked.

But here's the thing. If you search through old issues of Life Magazine from around that time you'll eventually find an article about carnivorous amphibians. They don't mention the Grizzly Frog by name, but there's a grainy photograph on the last page. It's a picture of something larger than a breadbox and as green as the forest that a fisherman off the South Jersey coast pulled from the depths of the Atlantic.

I remember looking at it dozens of times when our copy arrived in the mail decades ago. Sad to say, the actual magazine is long gone; lost after too many moves. But the image has been saved in my permanent mental storage as clearly as my dad's face. It was big and absolutely not a fish. Must have weighed close to a hundred pounds the way the two fisherman were straining to lift it. But the teeth looked too small in the photo and there was nothing that resembled fur, which I guess could have been wiped clean by the sea.