Black Cat in the Oxbow Swamp

We live along the edge of a smaller oxbow swamp near the Atchafayala Basin, which is the largest wetland and swamp in the United States. You wouldn't know the swamp that borders the Prairie des Femmes was an oxbow just from hunting or walking in it, but I've looked at it from the Google satellite map, and since it's a wild green swamp, shaped like the big curve of an oxbow, and considering that the Mississippi River himself ran down this way when he was the Teche a few thousand years ago, I figure that it's possible that the old oxbow stayed low and swamped up. It was along the backbone of this oxbow swamp one morning that I saw a big black cat.

I was going to school early that morning when the fields were still full of grey fog and the sun wasn't up yet. I was on the long dirt Prairie des Femmes road, with swamp and woods on one side, and open prairie and cow pastures on the other. I came up to a dip in the road, across from a wide cut that follows a crude barbed-wire fence all the way back  into the swamp. There is a little coulee and a ditch and a few palmettos that flank the road there. As I approached through the mist, I saw to the right the silhouettes of LaGrange's sleepy cows gathered close near the fence, and at the very corner, crouched in the weeds next to the fence post, was a very large black cat. It was low to the ground, stalking the cows. When the cat realized that I was coming, my headlights were on him, he turned from the cows and crossed the dirt road in front of me, as fast as a bullet. It ran with long strides, and sleeked right through the barded-wire fence. It ran straight back though the palmettos and to the cut part that led into the swamp, where it got lost in the shadows. It was a big cat, I would estimate it was as big as a black lab or bigger, and though my first instinct was "black panther!", because it had sharply pointed ears and I can't remember seeing a long tail, I think it was a black bob cat. I continued to school, my heart racing. I told my first hour students about what had happened, and asked them if they thought it was possible for it to be a panther. They said they'd seen  panthers and all kinds of big stuff back there. One of the boys, a neighbor who I know hunts way back in the oxbow swamp says, "Mais, Madame, you know dey got moose back dere, yeah!"