And you will pass a golf course, and see four hackers out there dressed for ice fishing, moving slowly, knocking a fluorescent orange ball across a fairway thick with snow.

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Confessing to Koenig's killing, Keyes used a Google map to point to a spot on a lake where he'd disposed of her dismembered body and gone ice fishing at the same time.

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New this year, Northern Lights Golf, with rounds played (fingers crossed) under the Aurora Borealis's glow, joins an activities roster bristling with rugged pursuits like snowmobiling, ice fishing, snowshoeing and dog sledding.

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Mr. Van Eperen, the volunteer guard, speared a sturgeon the first time he went out for the ice-fishing season in 1995.

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On a recent Friday, he walked over to the Ice Hole from his own fishing shack, to fish and have a few drinks with a friend.

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By the grim standards of Europe's farrowing sheds, millions of seals enjoy a blissful life fishing and breeding on the Canadian ice.

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His friends would ask him about "the game with the fishing net" and he would explain it was like ice hockey - fast and hazardous.

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The 68-mile route to the fishing town of Ullapool is a relatively recent addition to a landscape forged in the Ice Age, when melting glaciers gouged its long, deep valleys and seawater-filled lochs and fjords.

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