by Lauren
One day Zeus was mad at Hera for no reason in particular. It seemed that she was always mad at him for being somewhere else, so he decided to reverse it. He got so mad, unfortunately, that he went to shoot some lightning bolts. He hadn't shot any lately, and was out of shape, so he missed his target of a mountain by a long way. He hit the ground about a hundred yards away from it in a desert-like area. All of a sudden, oil started spilling everywhere. Zeus was afraid of what might happen, so he tried to fix it. He could not accomplish it in time though, and he noticed this as a family of panthers walked toward the black goo. He tried to stop them, but it was too late. The bright yellow spots of the panthers soon disappeared.
The panthers walked out of the spill, sticky with oil. They walked toward the lake but the oil did not come off when they got in, it only sank in deeper. So now Zeus was even more frightened, he had ruined one of two beautiful families of panthers in all of Greece.
Hera came searching for Zeus then, wondering why she had seen lightning. But the first thing she noticed was the black sea covering the valley beneath them. She immediately cried out in horror, because she had also seen the now-and-will-be-forever-black panthers. Hera fainted.
Zeus called on Dionysus to give the panthers their spots again. He tried and tried, but he could not get the oil off the panthers.
The panthers lived on, and all the little panthers were born dark, even though the other family of panthers hadn't been blackened. The oil was washed away by a thunderstorm created by Zeus, and he brushed up on his lightning bolt throwing in another place.
