Any of you fellows know what big cats we have in northern Mississippi?

I was hunting last week when I saw what I thought was coyote walking straight towards me. When I raised my scope to it, I discovered that it was a coyote-sized cat. My first thought was that I was fixing to kill the world's largest bobcat. It was colored up about the same as a bobcat, but when it turned, I saw that it had a tail that was about as long as the cat itself.

I missed my chance to shoot it by trying to figure out what it was. By the time I decided that it didn't matter what it was and that I could figure it out just as well and perhaps even better with it being dead, it had disappeared into the thicket.

I have never seen anything like it. Any ideas as to what it was?