- Joined
- Jun 7, 2003
- Messages
- 1,850
Its not a big deal , I seen a big black cat , wow , that it was so black it was silhouetted against a dark night sky ... and its eyes were kinda extremely yellow in reflection from my headlights ... and the eyes were easily 12 inches apart .. and it had just finished killing a cow ... it was a BIG black cat .
What makes it a bit odd is I am in NSW , Australia , we officially do not have big cats here .
I was driving up the back roads , from Split Rock Resivour to Uralla , a lot of the road is two overgrown wheel ruts , I mistook a farmers driveway to his home for the road , the driveway looked far more like road than the road did .. they are kinda rarely used back roads .
we had to go thru a couple mobs of cows ( it was 2 - 3 am aprox when we seen the cat ) the first mob was fast asleep and not interested in moving out of our way , the second mob about a km from the first was awake and seemed a bit jumpy , when we rounded a bend ( going slow , diff playing up , nearly out of fuel - thinking seriously about adding the spare cans of fuel to the tank , the starter had lost a bush so Id improvised with plastic irrigation line , the air was cold , my motor has no thermostat so it was cold and wanting to stall at low revs , and we were climbing a mountain , dragging a trailer , creeping thru a mob of restless cattle ...
we rounded a bend and saw at first a big black shape , I expected from its size that it was a bull , then we saw the eyes , they were easily as far apart as Id expect on a bull , but instead of the soft amber of a cow eye , they had the harsh bright reflection of forward facing eyes , and they were the yellow in the lights , as the lights swept over the thing , it looked to me to be a cat , as it raised its head to look at us it dropped the neck / head of the cow it had just killed ...it was big pussy
I had this voice in my head going nuts screaming "PREDATOR" , the hair went up on back of my neck , and my brain was jamming at seeing a cat that dam big here in Aus in the wild , thats not meant to happen , I estimated it was 20 - 25 meters from the car , Im not a newbie in the bush , I regularly hunt , camp out , done walkabout with my people regular enough as a teenager / young adult , I know my bush , and this dam thing didnt fit in , I mentally had lined up a shot but remembered I dont have my rifle , I was fishing for my camera but it had dead batteries ( hadnt bothered to change them since we were going home not expecting anything strange or worth taking pictures of ) a lot of stuff went thru my head in that few seconds .
One part of me said stop and find batteries and get pictures , the other part said I got 4 foster kids , my wife and my mother in the car , get them the hell out of any danger , besides the car is about dead , get as much distance between cat and you before it dies propper .. so I kept going , as we rounded the bend , my mother turned to me and we asked each other simultaniously "Did you see the size of that cat ? ... no-one is gunna believe us"
I pushed on till the car coughed from lack of fuel , ( about 50 km from where we saw the cat ) and got out to add the spare fuel , I got the girls to shine torches around ( yeah silly I know ) they laughed saying the cat was way back and no threat now , my worry wasnt about the one we saw , he was busy eating , but the rest of his family ...
when we got to a servo eventually , the cashier said I looked like I seen a ghost , I laughed and just said "nah , seen a giant cat ", she looked serious and told her own story about a cat as big as her car that she saw a good few year ago , and how she wont go up there again . That sucked , people are meat to laugh and accuse ya of doing drugs , driving too long seeing things etc not re-enforce the thing as reality ...
anyway , I been looking thru cat pictures trying to find something that dam big , but all I can put it as is a way way over grown panther .. possible maybe too , cain toads have evolved into super toads here , why wouldnt big cats with such easy feeding turn into super cats given time ?
so wild story aside , how do you guys in the US deal with big cats ?
What makes it a bit odd is I am in NSW , Australia , we officially do not have big cats here .
I was driving up the back roads , from Split Rock Resivour to Uralla , a lot of the road is two overgrown wheel ruts , I mistook a farmers driveway to his home for the road , the driveway looked far more like road than the road did .. they are kinda rarely used back roads .
we had to go thru a couple mobs of cows ( it was 2 - 3 am aprox when we seen the cat ) the first mob was fast asleep and not interested in moving out of our way , the second mob about a km from the first was awake and seemed a bit jumpy , when we rounded a bend ( going slow , diff playing up , nearly out of fuel - thinking seriously about adding the spare cans of fuel to the tank , the starter had lost a bush so Id improvised with plastic irrigation line , the air was cold , my motor has no thermostat so it was cold and wanting to stall at low revs , and we were climbing a mountain , dragging a trailer , creeping thru a mob of restless cattle ...
we rounded a bend and saw at first a big black shape , I expected from its size that it was a bull , then we saw the eyes , they were easily as far apart as Id expect on a bull , but instead of the soft amber of a cow eye , they had the harsh bright reflection of forward facing eyes , and they were the yellow in the lights , as the lights swept over the thing , it looked to me to be a cat , as it raised its head to look at us it dropped the neck / head of the cow it had just killed ...it was big pussy
I had this voice in my head going nuts screaming "PREDATOR" , the hair went up on back of my neck , and my brain was jamming at seeing a cat that dam big here in Aus in the wild , thats not meant to happen , I estimated it was 20 - 25 meters from the car , Im not a newbie in the bush , I regularly hunt , camp out , done walkabout with my people regular enough as a teenager / young adult , I know my bush , and this dam thing didnt fit in , I mentally had lined up a shot but remembered I dont have my rifle , I was fishing for my camera but it had dead batteries ( hadnt bothered to change them since we were going home not expecting anything strange or worth taking pictures of ) a lot of stuff went thru my head in that few seconds .
One part of me said stop and find batteries and get pictures , the other part said I got 4 foster kids , my wife and my mother in the car , get them the hell out of any danger , besides the car is about dead , get as much distance between cat and you before it dies propper .. so I kept going , as we rounded the bend , my mother turned to me and we asked each other simultaniously "Did you see the size of that cat ? ... no-one is gunna believe us"
I pushed on till the car coughed from lack of fuel , ( about 50 km from where we saw the cat ) and got out to add the spare fuel , I got the girls to shine torches around ( yeah silly I know ) they laughed saying the cat was way back and no threat now , my worry wasnt about the one we saw , he was busy eating , but the rest of his family ...
when we got to a servo eventually , the cashier said I looked like I seen a ghost , I laughed and just said "nah , seen a giant cat ", she looked serious and told her own story about a cat as big as her car that she saw a good few year ago , and how she wont go up there again . That sucked , people are meat to laugh and accuse ya of doing drugs , driving too long seeing things etc not re-enforce the thing as reality ...
anyway , I been looking thru cat pictures trying to find something that dam big , but all I can put it as is a way way over grown panther .. possible maybe too , cain toads have evolved into super toads here , why wouldnt big cats with such easy feeding turn into super cats given time ?
so wild story aside , how do you guys in the US deal with big cats ?
