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108 june/july 2026 Peggy was now snake- and hawk- free, but she was still not mollified. Looking at her bloodied forearm, all she could think was This is not good. Her flesh had been brutally torn, bruised and punctured. She stopped the tractor, reeling with adrenaline. Wendell, who had just finished out front, was there beside her now, having heard her screams, and was begging to know what was wrong. She tried to tell him but was so upset that her words were unintelligible. Wendell loaded his injured wife into their truck and raced toward the hospi- tal. During the drive, he got her calmed enough that he could begin to under- stand what she was saying. It sounded like she said that “a snake fell out of the air …” “A snake?” he said. “A snake did all that to your arm?” “No,” she answered, frustrated. “The hawk did that to me.” She managed to convey the broadest outlines of what happened. But then a new realization hit her: She was having trouble seeing out of her right eye. “OK,” Wendell said. “We’re almost there. We’re almost there.” At the emergency room entrance, he helped her out of the vehicle. “Oh,” he said. “There’s something on your glasses. That’s why you can’t see.” He removed the glasses and the cloudiness that had blocked her vision vanished. The ER workers cleaned her wounds and carefully inspected her skin for snakebites, miraculously finding none, and wiped from the right lens of her eyeglasses a milky, yellowish fluid. “There was venom on my glasses,” Peggy says. “And there was a little chip in them. They weren’t chipped before this.” With no sign of having been bit- ten, she was bandaged, put on a course of antibiotics and released. Three quesTions remain: Was that really venom on her glasses? What kind of snake was it? And what kind of hawk? Definitive answers to these three are impossible to come by. The fluid from the lens was never tested. At the hospital, all those assem- bled assumed it was venom because a snake had been involved. Vincent Cobb acknowledges that venom is yellowy and viscous, as described, but for this to have been venom and for Peggy not to have been bitten would be so freak- ishly unlikely that his gut tells him it was some other substance, perhaps mouth secretions from the snake. “Then again,” he concedes, “it could have been venom.” After all, what other parts of this story aren’t freakishly unlikely? Regarding the snake’s ID, all Peggy “THERE WAS VENOM ON MY GLASSES. AND THERE WAS A LITTLE CHIP IN THEM.” readersdigest.co.nz 109 Jones can tell you is that the creature was dark in color and long. (She and Wendell figured out it measured between 31/2 feet and 4 feet by wrapping a tape measure twice around her fore- arm and extending it back to her face.) On that scant information, Cobb says, the specimen of interest could be any of six to eight species, including the pine, speckled king, prairie king, Texas rat, coachwhip and southern black racer. If the snake was indeed venom- ous, adds Cobb, that probably narrows it to the timber rattlesnake or perhaps the cottonmouth. McGowan is closer to confident about the species of hawk. “Sometimes we say ‘It’s a red-tailed until proven otherwise,’” he says, noting that red- tailed hawks are the most often observed species, hunt- ing in the open and perching on poles and fences. But it could also have been a red- shouldered hawk. Far less likely, yet possible, McGowan says, would be a Swainson’s hawk. it’s taken longer for Peggy’s psyche to heal than her arm. The encounter still haunts her. For months after the incident, she scarcely slept. Every time she closed her eyes, she would relive the terrify- ing ordeal—fangs, feathers, talons. But too tough to be defeated by night- mares, she has returned to working outdoors. She’s made but one change in response to the nasty tricks Mother Nature played on her that day. In August, she and Wendell went out and bought her a spanking new zero-turn lawn mower. “It has a canopy that covers the whole entire thing,” Peggy says. “We shopped canopy first and mower sec- ond. I got the biggest top that there is.” The canopy is built of aluminum tread plate. Peggy made a sign for it, visible from above: a red circle with a line through it crossing out a wriggling reptile, and featuring two simple words: NO SNAKES.