42 HUNTING AND FISHING IN FLORIDA. 
when it can catch them. They hunt as a rule at night; but on cool 
and cloudy days or after a rain they often move about in the day- 
time. Ifa panther kills a deer he returns to it the second night, but 
rarely the third night, and much of the animal is often left uneaten. 
In the old days it was by no means uncommon to find a dead deer 
in the woods with the evidence about it of having been killed and 
partly eaten by a panther. 
The track made by a panther somewhat resembles that of a hound, 
but it is larger, and the ball of the foot is relatively much larger; the 
toe marks are in front and do not show any mark of a claw unless 
the animal is jumping. 
We found the fresh trails of seven panthers in one week within 
thirty miles of Lake Worth. The soft foot of this great cat leaves 
very little trail except in mud or soft sand. In traveling over a piece 
of sandy soil the tracks are almost invisible where those of a dog 
can be plainly seen. 
It was our usual custom to start out at daylight and allow the 
hounds to run about as they pleased as we rode slowly through the 
woods. Every few minutes a hound would start off on a fresh trail 
of some animal, and we would have to call in the other dogs and 
‘* slow trail” it until we came to a place where the ground was clear 
and soft enough for us to see the tracks and learn what it was they 
were after. Oftentimes it would be a deer or cat, and we could 
sometimes tell what it was by watching the actions of the dog. If 
the trail was very winding and wandered in and out through a piece 
of scrub, turning this way and that, we were pretty certain it was 
not a panther, for they usually follow a straight course, turning but 
little from right to left. 
In crossing a piece of open land, a panther walks directly across, 
while a deer would make a more or less irregular trail. Then again, 
if a hound following a trail smells along the top of an old log, we 
know very well that it is not a deer that has walked along the log, 
but either a wildcat or a panther. 
Of course if we found it was not a panther which the dogs were 
trailing we called them off and again continued our search. About 
