Locked Together in a Struggle
between Life and Death

It was "mowing day" on July 25, as the couple took the leisurely path out of their home town of Silsbee, Texas to the six-acre property that had been in their family for decades.

The rich soil, plentiful rainfall, and amenable climate of Texas's "Big Thicket" region where the property is located promotes rapid undergrowth, and Jones and her husband say they work hard to keep their homestead clean and well-tended.

Once at the land, as they usually did, Jones and her husband divided the acreage between them and set to work, he on his Kubota tractor, and she on hers. Remembering this day--and every other he has spent with his wife during their 45 years together--Wendell Jones's voice turns almost reverential.

"I have never in my life known a woman as strong as Peggy is," he says, with no little admiration.

"I mean, she'll go out and work with me and do everything I do--and then some--and come home and do everything at the house, all the women's work--if you want to call it that--and never blink an eye," he adds, with a good-natured laugh. "She just blows and goes! So sometimes I have to get her slowed down." Clearly, Wendell Jones is a happy man.

"I admit when I was younger, I had some growing up to do," he declares, "like we all do. But after that, we became a great team." Now, he says neither leaves the other's side.

"People always ask us, how can you be together, literally, all the time? And we just laugh. We're like a perfect partnership."

And so began a new day of pruning, and cleaning, and cutting back many acres' worth of growth in the triple-digit summer heat of Texas.

Wendell went to his portion and began to mow. And Peggy climbed on her own Kubota, pressed the ignition, and as she always had before, started working her side: Cut a clean, even swath all the way to the other side of the field, make a u-turn, then cut another swath back to the other side. And on it goes, until it's done.

But as it turns out, this perfectly ordinary summer day wasn't going to be ordinary. Not ordinary at all.

"I was cutting out a new path when SPLAT! A snake fell on me out of the sky"

"I was just going up a cutting path and started a turnaround, when, SPLAT! in a split second, a huge black snake fell from the sky, struck my head, and started twisting and flipping around, and then coiled itself around my right arm," Jones says. The snake was four feet long. "I mean, it was so sudden and unexpected, I just lost it. I was not really in my normal mind, and I went into Bible mode--I started crying, 'Jesus, help me! Help me!'"

Now acting instinctively, Jones began flailing her arm from side to side, desperately trying to sling the snake off her arm as it repeatedly struck at her face.

"The snake was striking at my glasses," says Jones, "and the glasses protected me." But the snake hung on to Jones's arm, and coiled even tighter.

"The harder I tried to sling the snake off, the tighter it coiled around my arm," Jones recounts, "and the more desperate I became. I was snake-bit once before, and I started to think I was going to die out there from a venomous attack."

As she continued trying to tear the striking reptile from her arm, Jones unconsciously released her hold on her tractor's steering wheel, allowing the machine to move forward on its own, meandering and turning this way and that, with Jones still on the driver's seat, fighting the snake.

But Jones could not then have known her life-altering ordeal had only just begun.

At a height equal to a ten-story building above Jones on the ground, a hawk now hovered menacingly and peered down through crystal-clear vision to see Jones and the snake locked in combat.

With its targets acutely in sight, the hovering raptor forcefully beat its wings a few times and then folded them in tightly against its streamlined body before plunging straight downward at an astonishing 120 miles an hour.

The bird of prey struck Jones first, battering her face and torso with its sharp, powerful wings, and relentlessly pummeling, cutting, and puncturing her bare arms with its talons. In all, the hawk struck Jones four times, each foray more aggressive than the last.

"The last time it flew in," she says, "the hawk grabbed the snake so hard that it jerked my arm up, like it was going to take my arm with it." Still the snake clung to Jones's arm, engaged in its own attack on her, and primitively aware that letting go would allow the hawk to seize and kill it.

It was a horrible, if natural battle on the part of each of earth's creatures--human, bird, and reptile--to escape death.

Now in dire mental straights, Jones had been screaming for her husband, who hadn't heard her from the distance over the roar of his tractor. Finally, he did.

Running toward her side of the property, Wendell Jones saw his wife, now off her tractor, screaming and waving her arms round and round. The snake had finally come off and was grasped by hawk, which instantly flew off with its catch and disappeared into the hot afternoon sky.

"I was in such a state that my husband couldn't make sense of what I was saying"

"It took me a good bunch of time to figure out what was wrong," her husband says. "She wasn't making a lot of sense." But one look at her bloodied arms and battered face told him she'd been through a perilous scrape.

After asking a few more questions and calming his wife, Wendell led her to the car and quickly drove to the nearest Emergency Room. Peggy Jones remembers a lighter moment after they arrived.

"It sounds strange, I guess, but if there was anything funny about that day," she says, "it was what the main ER doctor said when I told him what had happened.

"When he heard the story," she recalls, laughing, "he asked me if I had 'taken anything.' And I told him 'No, I didn't 'take anything,' and it all really happened."

With appropriate treatment at the clinic for bruises left by the snake's grip and the puncture wounds from the hawk's attack, doctors told Jones she hadn't been bitten by the snake, which probably wasn't venomous.

Back at home, the couple nevertheless forced themselves to stay awake that night, to watch for any swelling that might be a sign of a bite. But the real damage, Jones says, was mental, and remains stubbornly with her.

"I'm still having nightmares about it"

"I'm still having nightmares about it," Jones says, "and have trouble sleeping. So I stay up real late, and sleep in late next morning--it helps being asleep during daylight hours."

By now Jones has begun to come to terms with what actually happened to her.

"I had seen hawks before flying with snakes in their claws, and dropping them from a great height, to kill them easily," Jones recounts, "and then seen them fly down and grab the dead snake and fly off with it. So it was obvious that's what happened to me that day, in spite of it being so terrifying."

One unanswered question remained about the "brown and white" hawk that attacked Jones and flew off with its prey: which of the region's native hawks was it? And at least for this query, there is now a good answer.

"That's the only kind of hawk that would challenge a human like that"

"Without a doubt, given the region, the behavior, the size, the reptile involved, this was a Red-Tailed Hawk, and undeniably a female," says Master Falconer Jerry Ostwinkle of Arizona's storied Raptor Center. "And it was probably a juvenile. That's the only bird that would challenge a human like that."

Not only are Red-Tailed females larger than the males, Ostwinkle declares, they can be far more aggressive. With a wingspan of up to four feet, and visual acuity eight times that of mere humans, these birds are formidable as successful hunters.

A life-long advocate for the protection and rehabilitation of all raptors, Oswinkle is a nationally respected eagle specialist and one of the few Master Falconers in the country. But he knows the birds well enough to give them wide berth when dealing closely with them.

"Raptors can indeed be dangerous," he says, "and a large raptor like an eagle can kill a man in an instant: their talons can assert upwards of 3,000 pounds of pressure." Smaller birds of prey don't present that kind of risk, though, Oswinkle counsels.

"Raptors aren't malicious--it's just Nature"

"Raptors' behavior isn't malicious or anything like that," he asserts. "It's just Nature--it's who they are. Most hawks like the one the Texas woman encountered are hungry. And they'll kill until they eat and aren't hungry anymore. Then they stop."

Peggy Jones and her tractor at her family property near Silsbee, Texas

Talk to Peggy Jones long enough, and you come to feel the essential rightness of the old adage famously attributed to Texas women: "Lead, follow, or get out of the way." (She embodies the former.)

And in surviving her recent trials with implacable strength, she joins the many others across her state who have exemplified what writer Mimi Swartz once called the "fearlessness" of Texas women--from every walk of life--from the well-heeled to the unsung.

So inspiring was the mettle she displayed during her ordeal--and her resilience in its aftermath--that no less a public figure as her region's congressman, U.S. 36th Congressional District Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas), visited her from Washington to present her with a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition memorializing her personal display of character. It reads:

"In recognition of your courage and presence of mind in the face of danger and adversity. May your recovery be swift, and your days be blessed."