A nine-year-old girl is lucky to be alive after she was attacked by a cougar while camping in Washington state. The girl was with two friends when they wandered off a trail near their campsite in Fruitland.
The young girl got too close to a male cougar, which pounced on her. She tried to fight off the giant cat as her friends ran to get help. When the adults found the girl, she was covered in blood and clinging to life.
"It's going to be in my mind and my heart forever," Ivan Zhuk told KXLY. "When I got there, she was under the tree. I thought she was dead because she is hauling blood and everything, just covered in blood basically."
The girl was rushed to the hospital, where she remains in stable condition. Her family told the news station that she is "doing great" and that she woke up on Monday (May 30) for the first time since the attack.
Other people at the campsite tracked down the cougar and killed it. Officials said they would test the animal for rabies to try to understand why it attacked the girl.
"In this instance, this little girl did nothing wrong," Washington Fish and Wildlife spokeswoman Staci Lehman said. "It happened so quickly, and there's nothing she could have done to prevent it."
Cougar attacks are extremely rare. According to the Seattle Times, there have been just 20 attacks over the past 100 years, with just two of them resulting in fatalities.