“I didn’t choose the rock star life. The rock star life chose me,” Rachel Borch said with a grin, sitting at her kitchen table Thursday afternoon at her home on Hatchet Mountain Road as her mom, Elizabeth Borch, fielded another call from another reporter.
Over the past 12 days, Rachel has repeatedly told the story of her terrifying encounter on June 3 with a rabid raccoon that began charging toward her on a wooded path while she was out for a jog.
Likening it to the Tasmanian devil, Borch said she defensively reached to grab the charging animal, but it sank its teeth into her thumb and wouldn’t let go, scratching her arms and legs wildly with its paws as she screamed.
Borch was unable to unhinge the critter’s jaw from her thumb and realized her phone had fallen and become submerged in a nearby puddle.
On her knees, she pushed the head of the biting raccoon, still scratching frantically at her hand and arms, into the water.
It drowned, belly-up, with Borch’s thumb still in its mouth.
After sprinting home and going with her mom straight to the hospital, her dad collected the dead beast in a Taste of the Wild dog food bag and handed it over to the Maine Warden Service. The carcass later was tested by the Maine Center for Disease Control, which confirmed the raccoon was rabid.
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