A 64-year-old Texas woman experienced a nightmarish animal attack on July 25. While mowing her lawn, Peggy Jones was simultaneously attacked by a snake and a hawk. Jones has since recovered from the terrifying incident but says she still thinks about it most nights.
“I’ve never had a problem sleeping,” Jones told CBS News on Aug. 8. “But [after] this, I’ve probably gotten seven or eight hours in the last two weeks.”
It was just another hot day in July when Jones and her husband started doing yard work outside their home in Silsbee, which lies just north of Beaumont near the Louisiana state line. Jones was mowing the lawn and, as she put it, “minding her own business” when a snake literally fell out of the clear blue sky and landed on her right arm. She was nowhere near a tree at the time.
The snake immediately wrapped itself around her arm. Jones tried flinging it away, but before she realized what was happening, a hawk swooped down and joined the melee.
“I was slinging and slinging, [the snake] was striking and striking, and he just kept hanging on,” Jones said. “Then the hawk appeared just as fast as the snake appeared.”
As the snake and the hawk fought one another, Jones was on the receiving end of both animals’ blows. The bird repeatedly drove its talons into her forearm while the snake kept striking and coiled itself tightly around the same arm.
“The hawk grabbed the snake that was wrapped around my arm and pulled it up like he was going to carry it away,” she recalled. “And when he did, it flung my arm up. The hawk was carrying my arm and the snake with it.”
Finally, on its fourth attempt, the bird grabbed ahold of the snake and carried it away. Covered in blood and crying hysterically, Jones ran to her husband, who drove her to the emergency room at Altus Hospital. She had puncture wounds, bruises, cuts, and abrasions all over her right arm, but doctor’s determined that the snake’s fangs didn’t break the skin. And while it’s unclear what species of bird and serpent were involved, there is only one reasonable explanation for their combined attack on Jones.
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The hawk must have caught the snake and was flying over Jones’ yard when the serpent wriggled out of its talons and fell directly on Jones’ arm. The raptor then flew down to angrily reclaim its meal, thinking Jones was trying to steal it. The snake fought for its life and the hawk for its meal while a bloodied and terrified Jones was caught in the middle.
“I think I went into some kind of survival mode,” Jones said. “I think the adrenaline took over, and there was one point before the hawk came that I thought, ‘I can’t get rid of this…I’m going to die right here.”
