A Texas woman is grateful to God after surviving a harrowing animal attack — an extraordinary coincidence of not one but two predators randomly dropping on her in the middle of a field.
Peggy Jones of Silsbee, a small town northeast of Houston, was on a riding mower last month when a snake fell from the sky and wrapped itself around her arm so fiercely that it left a bruise.
“I was mowing on our [investment] property and just out of the sky, out of the clear blue, a snake fell onto my arm,” Jones told local news outlet KPRC.
Yet her predicament soon became even more perilous, as a hawk that presumably had been carrying the snake overhead also attacked her, trying to grab the meal it just dropped.
“The snake was squeezing so hard, and I was waving my arms in the air. And then, this hawk was swooping down clawing at my arm over and over,” she recalled. “I just kept saying, ‘Help me, Jesus, Help me, Jesus.’’
At the same time, the snake was striking at her eyes, but her glasses protected her from its fangs. “He just kept on and kept on and I just couldn’t get rid of the snake,” Jones told WFAA.
According to the wife and grandmother, the hawk came down for multiple strikes before finally wrestling the snake off her arm.
“About the fourth time, the hawk got the snake and carried it away, and I looked down and I was covered in blood,” she recounted to 12NewsNow.
Wendell Jones, Peggy’s husband of 45 years, heard her screams and came running. She feared she had been bitten by the snake, and they rushed her to a hospital, where she says doctors had trouble believing what had happened to her.
“I think they kinda thought I might have been on drugs, because they asked my daughter and my husband what type of drugs I was taking, but it was definitely no drug,” she told KPRC.
Jones told CNN she survived a poisonous snake bite several years ago, so she and Wendell stayed up all night to watch for any familiar signs of poison affecting her wounds.
“I feel like the luckiest person alive to have survived this!” she told KPRC. “I think [the hawk] was God’s way of letting me live, because I couldn’t figure out a way — the snake was not letting go of my arm.”