Land Shark

For 20 years, the Blackwater River State Forest, north of Pensacola, Fla., has been known as a place where hunting dogs disappear. One of the most recent, Flojo, was a $5,000 Walker fox-hunting hound. Armed with a direction-finding device to detect a transmitter on the dog’s collar, Rufus Godwin found his dog. “When we walked up to this hole, just all of a sudden the [radio locator] boxes went to beeping out of sight,” Godwin said. During the fight to capture the 11-foot, 50-year-old alligator hiding in the hole, the monster spit up Flojo’s collar. Several other collars were found in the belly of the beast, including one from a dog that disappeared 14 years earlier. The walking handbag was near a popular swimming hole. “As long as we kept carrying him $5,000 dogs, he was eating good,” Godwin said, and thus didn’t need to snack on children swimming nearby. (AP) ...If hunters hadn’t been shooting nearby, those children could have been in real danger.