Colorado officials searching for coyote after grisly Thanksgiving attack 🐺

Here’s to hoping everyone had a restful weekend and did so in the company of good people, food and drink.

With the weekend now in the rearview, let’s focus solely on coffee for today and get December’s first Monday edition of your favorite outdoors newsletter out the door.

Here's what's worth reading about today:

• Mistaken identity - Young girl attacked on Thanksgiving 🐺

• ‘tis the season - Gun season opens in Ohio 🦌

• Cash on the dash - Maine is paying for answers in dog killing 💰

• New license, who dis? - Kansas is thinking of changing things up 🪪

• Changing the game - A Cuban exile and fly fishing history 🎣

KEEP YOUR DISTANCE
COLORADO OFFICIALS HUNTING DOWN COYOTE THAT ATTACKED A 4-YEAR-OLD-GIRL ON THANKSGIVING

Officials from Colorado’s Park and Wildlife are “aggressively pursuing” a coyote wanted for attacking a 4-year-old girl in Colorado Springs on Thanksgiving.

According to reports, the attack took place on Thursday afternoon when the little girl and her friend approached what they believed to be a dog. As the pair approached the wild animal, the coyote lunged at the 4-year-old girl and clamped its jaws down on the back of her head.

"This could have been much worse – a tragedy – if not for the quick action of the child’s father to stop the attack, rescue his daughter and scare the coyote off," said Tim Kroening, CPW’s Area Wildlife Manager for the Pikes Peak region…

Deer gun-hunting season begins in Ohio: Ohio’s weeklong deer gun hunting season starts today. It runs through Sunday, plus there will be two additional hunting dates the weekend before Christmas. Read the full story.

Two Iowa men rescued after hunting incident:  Just after 6:30 Saturday morning a 17-year-old man and an 18-year-old man were preparing to go duck hunting by Sandy Beach boat ramp.  Read the full story.

Maine wardens offer $2,000 reward for info on illegal dog shooting: The Maine Warden Service is offering a two-thousand-dollar reward in their investigation of what they call an illegal shooting of a domestic dog on Friday. Read the full story.

NY Man Arrested, Teen Injured Following Hunting Accident: A Camden man is facing charges and a teen was injured after an accident while hunting in the Mad River State Forest Saturday Morning. Read the full story.

New Kansas hunting, fishing licenses proposed after lifetime license cut for older adults: Kansas wildlife officials are considering the addition of new hunting license options for older adults after it suddenly halted the sale of some licenses for this age bracket. Read the full story.

😮 The Closest Calls of David E. Petzal’s Hunting Career: I had a protracted one of my own in October 1978, when I accepted a free trip to Rhodesia to hunt. One reason the hunt was free was because October in Africa is summer, and that’s not something you want to experience. The other reason was the Rhodesian Bush War, or Zimbabwean War of Independence, which began in 1964 and ended in 1979. It involved, on one side, white settlers, and on the other, the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army, or ZIPRA.

On September 3, 1978, ZIPRA shot down an Air Rhodesia Viscount, Flight 825, which was en route to Salisbury, the capital. ZIPRA used a Russian Strela-2 missile. The plane crash-landed in the bush, killing 38 passengers and crew. The wreck was found by a ZIPRA patrol, which rounded up 10 survivors and machine-gunned them. Eight passengers who hid lived.

So, there I was on an Air Rhodesia Viscount, flying into Salisbury, just weeks after this happened. Our plane was completely blacked out, but this would not have helped because the Strela-2 is a heat-seeking missile that homes in on engines. Read the full story.

🥶 Winter Caribou:  Cold air stung my face as I stood up on the snowmobile. Cresting the low ridge, I could see for miles. Our trail, the only mark in the snow, led directly north, with spruce and rocks sporadically breaking the white world before me.

This was Labrador, only a century ago still uncharted, one of the last places on earth to be mapped. Not far to the east was Disappointment Lake and the region where American adventurer Leonidas Hubbard met death on his ill-fated 1903 journey into terra incognita. To the west, the dominant lake of Hubbard’s time has been enlarged by damming to become the freshwater sea now called Smallwood Reservoir, a body of water that nature would have needed an ice age to produce.

The feel of unknown Labrador was all around me, a landscape still rugged and wild. I thought of French explorer Jacques Cartier’s comment after viewing the Labrador coast in 1534, calling it “the land God gave to Cain.” Read the full story.

🎣 How a Cuban Exile Changed the Trajectory of Fly Fishing:  Chico Fernández’s favorite everglades bird is the green heron.

“You know how he is always perched on the downward slope of a mangrove branch?” Fernández asks, as if everyone knows where green herons prefer to perch. That’s what he loves about the bird, he says. It stands with its head down and bill cocked toward the water, hunched over and at the ready, always prepared to thrust its beak toward an unsuspecting fish. Always ready, one might say, to make a cast.

Fernández stands on the casting deck of a flats skiff when he asks the question, firing it over his right shoulder to a big guy poling the boat forty yards off the Indian River Lagoon shore. Fernández holds a fly rod in his right hand and a fly in his left. He wears blue jeans and a Tilley hat. At eighty-four, he is spry and fit, and thanks to consistent tai chi and a decent diet, he can, say, still fish for giant peacock bass in remote Amazon rivers for hour after hour, seven days in a row. But age has bent him ever so slightly, so he stands ever so slightly stooped, as if he, too, is perpetually ready to cast.

Which he is, and has been for nearly all of his life. Read the full story.

Oh, and one more thing…