Today was a beautiful warm sunny day in Florence, South Carolina.   My husband and I went to his aunts house today to help celebrate her eighty third birthday.  That is not what my story is about.  We road to the farm and went to see the water level of the creek at the back of the property.  You can tell we don't have much to do on a sunny Sunday afternoon.   Often we see turkeys and other animals of the wild.  But today we were in for a treat.

The narrow road goes about a half mile to the back of the farm.  As we rounded the first bend in the narrow road we saw two nice size White Tail deer that darted into the edge of the woods.  They both weighed probably a hundred pounds each.  As we got to the next turn of the road much to our surprise we saw something we aren't sure what we saw.  Dewey and I both saw it so it wasn't a figment of one of our imaginations.  The wild animal was cold black and shiney and bigger than the size of a black labador.  The tail was not a dog tail it was almost as long as the body of the animal.   The way the animal ran it could only be some form of cat.  Just a couple of  seconds the black animal was back in the woods.  We finished our ride to the creek and there was another surprise but nothing like we had just seen.  A bigger White Tail deer probably a buck but at this time of year the buck would have already shed his antlers.   My husband said the deer would probably be hundred forty to hundred fifty or so pounds.

Back to my black haired wild animal.  A couple years back an older gentleman who lived in the area told us there were black panthers in the woods in the area.  He claimed he had seen them before while hunting the farm.  But you know hunters and fisherman can spin a tale when the occassion arises.  I didn't believe the story before but after 5:23 PM EDT in Florence S.C. that experience made a believer out of me.

On a lighter note, coming back from the creek looking at the opening in the woods where the black animal scampered into the woods something hit my side of the SUV.  My heart started racing but I looked and it was a large half dead limb that Dewey had ran over and it bounced up and hit the door on my side.  I thought something had me.  We did get a good laugh after the intial scare.

That's my story, you can form your own conclussion whether that black wild animal was a panther.  But the Beatles and I have something in common, "I'm a Believer".