By Alex Acquisto , BDN Staff • June 14, 2017 2:30 pm 
 
 Updated: June 22, 2017 1:24 pm 
 
 HOPE, Maine — While jogging on a familiar, overgrown, wooded trail near her home on a recent warm afternoon, Rachel Borch thought to herself, “what a beautiful day.” 
 
 Little did she know she was about to be attacked by a rabid raccoon she would end up killing with her bare hands. Borch said she started dancing around the animal, frantically trying to figure out what to do. She immediately knew something was wrong with the animal by the way it was acting. In a matter of seconds, Borch, who could not unhinge the raccoon’s jaw to shake it off her hand, noticed that when she had dropped her phone, it had fallen into a puddle in the path and was fully submerged. “There was a few inches of really muddy water on the ground – it was a swampy area of the trail – so I just took all my strength and pushed it into the water.” 
 
 She said she pushed the raccoon’s head underwater and held it there for what seemed like a very long time as it clawed her arms and continued to bite down on her thumb. She said she was afraid to let go for fear it would continue attacking her. Borch said she held it there for what felt like an eternity until finally it stopped struggling and “its arms sort of of fell to the side, its chest still heaving really slowly.” 
 
 Hyperventilating and in hysterics, she pulled her thumb out of the raccoon’s mouth, “and then I just bolted as fast as I could through the underbrush,” she said. Kicking her shoes off because they were soaked, Borch ran the three-quarters of a mile home to her house. Hope animal control officer Heidi Blood said that if one animal tests positive for rabies, it’s “almost 100 percent” certain there are other animals in the area also infected. Blood said an animal doesn’t have to be aggressive to be infected; it can also act “delirious or drunklike.” 
 
 She said people and their pets should avoid such animals, even dead ones, because the rabies virus can live outside the body for 24 hours. “I’m still processing it, but that does not happen and that is not a normal thing.” 
 
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 Want the news vital to Maine? Borch is expected to receive the last of four rabies shots on Saturday, and has been taking antibiotics for the puncture wounds on her hands. He told her he thought it odd that the raccoon, normally a nocturnal animal, was out in the daytime. Rabies is caused by a virus, affects the brain and spinal cord and can cause death if left untreated, according to the Maine CDC.
– Rachel Borch was out for a jog in the woods near her home in Hope, Maine, when a "ferocious-looking" attacker with beady eyes and tiny teeth made a beeline for her, reports the Camden Herald. Borch, 21, knew immediately that something was wrong with the raccoon that was charging toward her. "Imagine the Tasmanian devil," she tells the Bangor Daily News of the "terrifying" June 3 incident. Yanking out her headphones, she began "dancing" around the animal on the narrow path, but she tells the Herald she knew that, one way or another, the animal was going to bite her. She figured her hands would be the best spot, so she offered them up. The raccoon chomped down on her thumb and stayed there, scratching at her legs and arms as she screamed. Now on her knees, she spotted her phone lying submerged in a mud puddle, and had an idea: drown it. "With my thumb in its mouth, I just pushed its head down into the muck," she tells the News. When the raccoon finally stopped moving, she yanked out her finger and raced the three-quarters of a mile home. Two days later, the state confirmed the animal was infected with rabies. Borch got rabies shots, and an animal control officer adds an unpleasant footnote: The infected raccoon may not be alone. "Not to scare people," Heidi Blood tells the News, but "when there’s one, there’s typically another." (Normally nocturnal like raccoons, a crazed beaver attacked a woman paddle-boarder.)