ESPN Hunting

VENICE, La. — An alligator bit a 12-year-old girl while she played with cousins in a forbidden pond near her home in Plaquemines Parish, her family says.

Ashley Brown of Venice is "up and walking around," recuperating from surgery on her hand, said her mother, Loretta Brown.

She lost the tip of one middle finger, bitten off as she tried to push the alligator away from the thigh where it bit her, and doctors grafted skin from the side of her hand to the injured finger, Brown said from her daughter's hospital room at West Jefferson Medical Center in Marrero.

Brown said the children had "snuck off" to play in a 4-foot-deep pond behind her uncle's house Wednesday evening, and Ashley thought at first that the underwater attack was just one of her cousins playing.

"She felt like a grip on top of her leg. She tried to get it off with her hands," Brown said.

When Ashley got out of the water, the alligator still had hold of her, Brown said.

"One of my nephews hit it with a 2-by-4 to get it away," she said.

Ashley's grandmother, Aline Perez, said the children ran into her house.

"They were all screaming. Finally, my little granddaughter held up her hand and said, 'Look, Maw Maw, an alligator bit my finger off, '" Perez said.

Perez said she washed the wounds and wrapped Ashley's hand in a towel while an ambulance was called.

Plaquemines Parish Sheriff's Office spokesman Col. Charles Guey said he had little information about the attack, other than a report that an ambulance was called.

Perez said her son and several others later found and shot the alligator, which she described as 7 or 8 feet long. A 7-foot alligator can bite down with a force of 1,500 to 2,000 pounds per square inch, according to a study published in 2003 by scientists at Florida State University.

Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press